Record as I Am

HOWTO: Use VirtualBox to setup an Internet Explorer testing machine

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 05:16:00 GMT

There are a lot of cases where having one computer just isn't enough. If you're a web developer or webmaster, you'll want to view your website in more than one browser. If you're a PHP programmer, you may be itching to check out the new 5.3 release and test your web applications on it. Using virtualization, you can set up self-contained instances of any Operating System configured to your heart's content on your computer.

There are a lot of virtualization environments out there.

Stephen Colbert: Is it time to care about soccer?

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:14:00 GMT

The USA's run in the Confederations Cup got the beautiful game some coverage on the Colbert Report. He asks if its time to care about soccer.

Useful SVN one-liner

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 03:10:00 GMT

Add it to your aliases, this one liner adds all unrecognized files in the current directory (preceded by ? in svn status) to a svn project.

svn st | grep '^?' | cut -d ' ' -f 7 | xargs svn add

Improving HTML Forms accessibility

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:29:19 GMT

The single easiest improvements you can make to the usability of HTML Forms is to correctly use LABELs. And it helps all users, not just a subset. Its also a nice application of Fitt's Law

s Use the label element to make your HTML forms accessible | 456 Berea Street

When checkboxes and radio buttons have properly associated labels, the label text will also be clickable, thus making the target area much larger and easier to hit.

An example of using anonymous functions with PHP

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 04:53:00 GMT

If you're not familiar with them, anonymous functions seem to be a term of art that very advanced programmers throw around to make others feel dumb. Until now, my closest experience has been in using them with jQuery and javascript, but tonight I found a use for them in PHP.

Back to the Futurama

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:47:22 GMT

I had to go with the wholly unoriginal headline, but this news (thanks to JL) makes my day. I'm glad they are reviving Futurama, hopefully it'll replace the crap that is Drawn Together

The 'Futurama' is Now: Comedy Central Revives Series (TVWeek)

Five years after Fox canceled the animated comedy, 20th Century Fox TV has officially struck a deal with Comedy Central to produce 26 original episodes of the Matt Groening series.

Actual data helps improve interface design

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:37:52 GMT

We're guilty of using guesses/gut feelings when putting a site together. Nielsen reminds us that even a few data points can help make better design decisions.

Guesses vs. Data as Basis for Design Recommendations (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

The general guideline is to use relative font sizes that let users resize (if they know how), but to display big and legible text as the default. This conclusion is based on numerous observations that show that many older users don't have the skills to resize fonts.

Packed schedule of World Cup Qualifiers

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 04:25:00 GMT

With the World Cup barely a year away, there's a packed slate of results I'll be watching this week. Will the US continue its relatively straightforward qualification to another appearance? Can Bolivia maintain the slimmest hopes of qualifying alive?

Costa Rica vs USA - Wednesday, June 3rd. The Americans have never won, a tie would be more than acceptable.
Bolivia vs Venezuela - Saturday, June 6th. Bolivia needs all 3 points from this home match in La Paz, but Venezuela has long ceased being guaranteed easy points.

Thank you, dd for saving and restoring my MBR

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 04:10:00 GMT

I finally got around to upgrading my dual-boot desktop PC to running Windows XP. It was just about time, the version of windows I was running was no longer supported and more and more software requires Windows XP nowadays. I also wanted to start using my Windows partition for more than World of Warcraft and occasional IE6 Testing. Mini-rant: One might think that, by now, Windows would play nicely if you are installing it on an existing dual-boot setup and not do rude things like naively overwrite your Master Boot Record.

Lessons from wresting with Drupal's theme preprocessing functions.

Mon, 18 May 2009 20:50:00 GMT

Drupal provides a lot of hooks that you can leverage to make it work exactly how you want. I just finished tracing how some theme preprocessing functions were being executed, and realized that there are some subtle assumptions which I hadn't understood earlier. These are my notes about two specific preprocessing hooks and when they are executed, which is a valuable lesson learned after spending a day figuring out why some functions were being called twice, and why some variables where being overwritten or lost.

No more car warranty calls?

Fri, 15 May 2009 20:42:08 GMT

The only other annoyance was how long it took for them to crack down on this practice. FTC nukes "extended warranty" robocallers from orbit - Ars Technica

If you live in the US, you probably got a call—even 911 dispatchers did. That's because the telemarketers, based in Chicago and Florida, used robodialing systems to call through every phone number in an area code, repeatedly.

Please don't get medical advice from Jenny McCarthy.

Fri, 08 May 2009 18:42:32 GMT

There are serious scientific studies that refute the whole Vaccines cause Autism myth, so slate asks: Why is Oprah Winfrey promoting vaccine skeptic Jenny McCarthy? - By Arthur Allen - Slate Magazine

For some reason, Oprah and the rest of the entertainment world treat McCarthy as if she were Mother Theresa kissing lepers or Nelson Mandela denouncing apartheid. She's been proven wrong about vaccines, yet she persists in claiming that they are so dangerous that it's better to get vaccine-preventable diseases than get the shots.

Tip: Disable Drupal performance settings

Tue, 05 May 2009 18:19:00 GMT

On development, testing, and staging site you normally don't want Drupal's caching, and javascript/css aggregation features enabled. Drop the following into your sites settings.php file to override these settings.

// disable performance caching
$conf['cache'] = 0;
$conf['block_cache'] = 0;
$conf['preprocess_css'] = 0;
$conf['preprocess_js'] = 0;

Taming Drupal environments and migrations.

Mon, 04 May 2009 03:03:00 GMT

Development Enviroment for Drupal is an article I wish I'd found a year ago when it was originaly posted. Its an extensive description of how to use svn and other tools to maintain various Drupal environments synchronized. I'm pleased that it confirms my own decisions about how to use subversion to manage core and site-specific modules. I to use a symbolic link to point the /sites folder in my webroot to an external directory with my site-specific files.

Babies brains more complex than once thought.

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 05:12:12 GMT

You don't need to convince me that babies are more aware/intelligent than we give them credit for. They have to synthesize and absorb a lot of information to make sense of their world. And then, one morning, they surprise you by spontaneously saying "water" when you're refilling the dog's dish. Inside the baby mind - The Boston Globe

Now, however, scientists have begun to dramatically revise their concept of a baby's mind.