This is book number two for Coda. NOM is currently working on a project built with Kohana, a framework originally based on CodeIgniter.

Their marketing copy reads something like this:

Kohana is a PHP 5 FRAMEWORK that uses the MODEL VIEW CONTROLLER architectural pattern. It aims to be SECURE, LIGHTWEIGHT, and EASY to use.

This book cover is much simpler than the one i produced for Subversion here. I quickly came to realize that there’s no point at all in spending the time to make such a complicated image.

Book Title: Kohana
URL: http://docs.kohanaphp.com/
Simple cover: KohanaBook.png
Use for Mode: PHP-HTML
Search URL: http://docs.kohanaphp.com/?do=search&id=*

I was just reading through Adding more Coda Books, and thought that if you were going to add Subversion’s documentation to Coda, it deserved an okay looking cover. I also thought that linking to the nightly documentation wouldn’t be a bad idea either.

For SVN 1.6 nightlies

Book Title: Subversion 1.6
URL: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/svn-book.html
Simple cover: http://www.naterkane.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/SubversionBook.png
Use for Mode: None
Search URL: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:svnbook.red-bean.com%20*%20

For SVN 1.5

Book Title: Subversion 1.5
URL: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.5/svn-book.html
Simple cover: http://www.naterkane.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/SubversionBook-1.5.png
Use for Mode: None
Search URL: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:svnbook.red-bean.com%20*%20

So I posted a message on twitter to see if there’s anyone who follows me who might be able to suggest a solution.

Then just a short 2 minutes later, Ryan Barr (@ryanbarr) came through and pointed me in the right direction.

cputhrottle is a small OS X command-line utility designed to limit the CPU usage of a process to which it attaches.

I found that even though I have a utility installed to increase the fan speed when CPU temperature increases, sometimes I would run jobs that maxed out the CPU for long periods — and this caused my MacBook to get extremely hot. Within the space of a couple minutes, the temperature displayed had jumped by over 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

The utility takes a process ID (pid) and a percentage amount to limit. For example:

sudo ./cputhrottle 328 25

Running this command would limit process 328 to a maximum of 25% CPU usage.

Note that cputhrottle needs to be run with root privileges to be able to attach to the process to control. I recommend doing this via the sudo command.

Source code is below, as well as a pre-compiled binary (OS X 10.5.1, Intel). If there is any interest in a PPC version I would be willing to cross-compile one. The program requires that Boost 1.33.1 be installed to compile. Run make all to build cputhrottle and a test program.

The source hopefully will be interesting to those looking into how to manipulate processes in Mac OS via mach system calls. The code is a subset of code I was working on to create a simple debugger as an alternative to gdb. Obviously, this project was much simpler and ultimately more useful.

cputhrottle makes use of the task_info, task_suspend, and task_resume calls. task_info and task_threads are used to collect CPU usage statistics on the process, and the program then suspends/resumes the attached process appropriately until the CPU usage has stabilized. Any errors occurring are assumed to be a result of the attached process exiting, and result in cputhrottle also exiting. Control-C is intercepted, and the attached process allowed to resume gracefully before cputhrottle exits.

Source: cputhrottle.tar.gz

Binary: cputhrottle.gz

Note: Thanks to Nikolaj Schumacher for pointing out a race condition whereby a thread being sampled could have ceased to exist after having been enumerated as existing within the process. Specifically, he noticed this while throttling Handbrake, which creates/kills threads in rapid succession. I have applied his patch and the new sources and binary reflect his changes. I tested the fix and cputhrottle behaved as before (for my test case).

Contact email: nolanw, followed by an underbar and then the word “commerce” at willnolan dot com

http://www.willnolan.com/cputhrottle/cputhrottle.html.

I've been a fan of Aptana for quite awhile, through all of it's ups and down as it's development I've generally still managed to prefer it over other more common 'bare-bones' editors like TextMate. Admittedly, a lot of this has to do with Aptana's ease of install and support for Subclipse.

Public/stable builds of Aptana have been running on Eclipse 3.2 for what seems like forever, and one feature that I've always had want for, is bugtracking integration. Mylyn is a great Eclipse plugin that does just that, well, sort of. The versions of Mylyn that run on Eclipse 3.2 haven't seen an update in ages, and support little more than Mantis, Jira and Trak. When I had a decent number of projects that were using Trak or Mantis, I was in heaven; NOM's migration to relying on 3rd party SaaS tools has made administration of our ticketing software and repositories a snap, but I haven't had any way to integrate our preferred ticketing software (Lighthouse) into my personal workflow until now.

Since last november (at least) Lighthouse has now been able to be integrated with Eclipse with the Mylyn's Web Templates connector. The only catch... it's still requires at least Eclipse 3.3+. Fortunately, the next version of Aptana, currently called Apana Andretti Alpha is built on Eclipse 3.4, and though it seems to have some memory consumption issues (it is an alpha remember!), I was able to find a copy of it here and get everything sorted and working together nicely. And let me just say, my life has became a little bit easier.

Simen Brekekn was generous enough to post about his setup over on Lighthouse's support site here. Below is his info, with some added/updated information.

1. Make sure you're running Eclipse 3.4 or above (or grab a copy of Aptana's Andretti Alpha #3 here http://www.aptana.com/node/577Aptana 1.5 here)\
2. In Eclipse/Aptana install Mylyn from the Mylyn update site
   http://download.eclipse.org/tools/mylyn/update/e3.4 (Eclipse 3.4, 3.5, Galileo Packages)
   http://download.eclipse.org/tools/mylyn/update/e3.4 (Eclipse 3.3)
3. In Eclipse/Aptana install the "Mylyn Connector: Web Templates" form the Mylyn incubation update site ( http://download.eclipse.org/tools/mylyn/update/incubator )

Then add a new Task Repository and enter the following information:

Please note that the query pattern in this screenshot is incorrect.

• Enter the full url of your project, ie. http://foo.lighthouseapp.com/projects/123
• Give the task repository a Label
• Enter your authentication info (if it's a private project)

Then add the following settings under "Advanced Configuration":

• Task URL: ${serverUrl}/tickets/
• New Task URL: ${serverUrl}/tickets/new
• Query Request URL: ${serverUrl}/tickets.xml?q=${query}
• Query Pattern (make sure you enter it in one line):

Next enable HTTP Authentication, enter your login (again), click Finish and you're all set!

unserializing an unserializable string

The easiest, and most popular way to check if a string is serialized is simple.

Quite a few very popular frameworks and apps do it this way, try to just simply pass the string to the unserialize method, make sure it isn't the boolean false, and prepend the method with an @ to suppress notice-level error output. Don't get me wrong, it works. But if you're logging your notice-level errors, then any time you're trying to check if a string is serialized in this way, it logs the notice that's generated. Storing data as a serialized hash in a key-value database (Tokyo Cabinet — which we've chosen to use for Nomcat, BerkeleyDB, CouchDB, Redis, etc.) magnifies the scenario and takes this wee-little_old Notice, and makes your logs fill up really fast. Since error logs are for tracking issues that a developer should really concern themselves with, logging all of these notices just wouldn't do, it's simply a waste of space and processing time to handle them over and over and over again.

As we've been building Nomcat over at NOM, we're often faced with dozens of reads from the data storage layer with each view that's generated, and recently while testing, we've run into log files that look something like this.

just set_error_handler to an empty method

Initially I tried a few different options to work around this annoying little problem.

1. Prepending the unserialize method with @ to suppress output, but it doesn't prevent logging.
2. Wrapping in a try-catch block doesn't do the trick
3. Wrapping it with error_reporting(0) and error_reporting(2) doesn't do the trick either
4. But creating an method to handle the error, have it to nothing, and wrapping the unserialize line with set_error_handler and restore_error_handler does the trick!

This is what I came up with.

If you noticed that I'm passing an array like this: set_error_handler(array('App_Model','unserialize_handler'));, you've got a good eye. This is how you can specify in which class to find the method you want to use as a callback, neither $this->methodname or Classname::methodname will work. However if you aren't writing object oriented code, you can simply pass the name of the method you want to use to handle the error as a string like this: set_error_handler('unserialize_handler');.

Let me know how it works for you.

Instead, here's a few things I think might be good advice for surviving this upcoming year if you "work in tech". It's a living list, so if you feel that I've overlooked something that might touch you, let me know and I'll add to it.

1. If you start a new company, don't make ad revenue it's core business model. If you're an adult, you should know better.
2. Don't take a word and add "TW" to the beginning of it, it's not cute and instead you'll be an annoying and uncreative schmuck. This is an updated rule from last year's "if the word ends in 'ER', don't leave out the 'E'".
3. Don't think for a second that people want to pay for content, they will however, pay for services. Now someone just needs to come up with better services.
4. If you build something, make sure it's ACTUALLY useful, and not just cool and trite.
5. If you work at an agency and enjoyed reading "Getting Real", please forget everything you read, those ideas work if you're on the product side, and not client services... that book is no good for you, get a refund.
6. There's no such thing as a social media expert. People can be experts in platforms and tactics and skills, but not in "social media". I however am an expert is calling people out on misusing and abusing ambiguous terms and buzzwords. Like most buzzwords, it's something most people don't understand... when talking about it, I use the term 'unmanaged (brand) communications' because it actually describes what's happening; people are talking about all sorts of stuff, sometimes it might be about you, and it sometimes happens on the internet.
7. SEO experts are a joke, you'll never need one if you have a good information architect, a copywriter and someone who knows how to write good, semantic markup.
8. If you "follow" more than a few hundred people on 'you-know-what', you're a dick and need to cut that crap out right now. It's actually impossible to track more than 1000 people whether online or in the physical world. Quit fronting like you pay attention.
9. If you're a strategist of some sort and don't have any actual or physical deliverables as part of your work, reevaluate how you actually are a benefit your clients or get a new career. I don't want to have to hunt you down and burn you at the stake, we don't need more people selling snake oil and practicing brand voodoo.
10. No individual person is worth more than $150 per hour tops, if you disagree then you must be greedy, fleecing your clients, fleecing our industry, or all three.
11. Don't waste your time getting excited about the new hot mobile device. They all suck, really. If you do need one, please recycle your old one and just buy the one that is the least painful for you to use.

It's one thing to manage, educate and cultivate relationships with existing clients; how important is it to educate a potential client, who you have already decided not to work with, as to why you aren't interested in working with them? (NOT why you aren't able, if you're simply unable)

So...

I have recently been working on starting a website called Democratus that will be a sort of "customer service platform for government" and provide a place for ideas for change to come directly from the people and be delivered directly to our representatives and press. We hope to be able to get this website off the ground by early next year, but in order to do that we're looking for some funding. Recently we applied for a grant from the Knight Foundation, who sponsor a contest for ideas like this, and we're very hopeful that this will provide the funding we need to launch the site, but we need your help to get the grant.

All you need to do is visit the website of the Knight Foundation and our page there, and register and vote on our idea. It should only take a minute or two and it would really help. If you want to read our application it is there on the website, and if you want to leave a comment on the proposal after reading it (something about how innovative and important this would be in your life, for instance) that would be even better.

Feel free to forward this post to other people that you think are interested in encouraging political participation and efforts to make our democracy more direct.

1) Register with the Knight Foundation: http://is.gd/6cTK

2) Vist our site: http://is.gd/6cU3

3) Vote and comment on our proposal (clicking on 5 stars won't hurt)

4) And then if you'd like, tell us what you think by sending us an email to Nate.Heasley@gmail.com or nater@naterkane.com

The best plugin that I could find that was already out there was Tero Piirainen's jquery.scrollable.js. If you check it out you'll quickly see that the markup that's used to generate the scrolling items could be improved upon. Nothing in my version of jquery.scrollable.js removes functionality from what Tero put together, and the improvements are basic.

1. make those items scrollable horizotally or vertically
2. decide how many items are visible at once
3. scroll elements with mouse, arrow keys and mousewheel (requires mousewheel.js)
4. make navigational buttons without programming
5. have programmatic actions: next, prev, nextPage, prevPage, seekTo, begin, end
6. need to know when list is scrolled with custom event listener
7. You can now start with semantic markup
8. I want this all in single js file that weights only 3.9 4.1 Kb minified!

First we start with simple & semantic markup

There's nothing fancy going on here at all, just a wrapping element, an anchor and an unordered list. Unfortunately due to the design requirements of this particular implementation, an additional <div> had to be added. If it wasn't for the creative constraint, and the lack of support for vertical-align: middle across many browsers, this extra <div> would have not been included.

Presentation

Now we add styling that makes it match the look & feel of the main site.

The css required to make this bit work for you will be different for every project, so take a look at the included styles and tweak as necessary.

And now for the behavior

If the user's browser allows javascript to run, we add some additional unobtrusive behavior (including mousewheel support)

This is the generated source we end up with... There's one thing you might notice, and that's the div class="__scrollable", though I initially placed that element outside of it's parent ol it did not work. It has something to do with how the xhtml 1.0 strict doctype is handled by the browsers. Though this may work in HTML 4.0 or various browser quirks modes, I haven't specifically tested all possible cases.

This build is currently in a non-public svn repository, but I will be moving it to google code or github shortly (depending on whether or not I feel like learning how to use Git)

Standalone Demo:

http://www.naterkane.com/sandbox/scrollable/

Download:

First you'll of course need jQuery v.1.2.6

jquery.scrollable.js (7.5k)

jquery.scrollable.min.js (4.1k)

scrolling-list.css – the stylesheet used for the example

You can also grab a copy of jquery.mousewheel.js here

it was time to update the very bogus & bad mark that we've been using for Nater Kane & Friends. comments are of course welcome.

This rules. Thanks for helping the web move forward guys!

Daniel Klima’s comment caught my eye, so I thought I might respond here in addition to writing a comment over here. At the time of this post, my comment hasn't yet been approved by moderators of theregister.co.uk

And it is needed as hell,since soem [sic] servers will send IE7 CSS to IE8,which causes IE8 to render page incorrectly.Daniel Klima

9 times out of 10 i have no need in my projects for IE conditional comments. Outside of the additional HTTP request loading an additional file brings, why add ANY browser specific code to a document? If you're using IE CSS filters, then sure, use conditional comments and don't break your validation, but unless you're forced in some way to use some old proprietary-to-IE scripting or styles, there's no point.

A star shines less brightly

That star (*) that we've relied to heavily upon to override ones own css with additional rules aimed at forcing weak and non-standards-compliant browsers to render content in a way that satisfies the ego's of creative directors everywhere isn't totally burnt out, but it's on it's way to becoming history.

I put together a little test to see what rules IE8b2 renders and ignores using selectors that won't invalidate you CSS. You can view the remarkably simple test here: ie8csstest

What this means

• If you are currently targeting IE6 with the * html hack, it won't break your site if you run it in IE8.
• If you are currently targeting IE7 with the *:first-child+html hack, it won't break a site in IE8 either.

Neither rule break css validation, IE8b2 in standards mode ignores both rules (but renders IE7's rule in compatibility mode), everyone is happy, and "servers don't send the wrong CSS to the browser".

So what's up with this broken looking button/icon?

Compatibility and Standards modes can be toggled with a small button that appears to the right of the location bar. If you are viewing a file locally using file:// the button is missing, so I have no idea what mode local files are rendered with. For local testing, a locally running server is required such as xampp or something similar.

Standards mode is default

Off

Compatibility mode

On

The additional standards and CSS support are of course noteworthy

CSS Expressions is no longer supported in Internet Explorer 8 Standards mode

CSS Expressions is a proprietary extension to CSS that has a high performance cost. (CSS Expressions is also known as "Dynamic Properties.") Starting with Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, CSS Expressions is no longer supported in Internet Explorer 8 Standards mode. CSS Expressions is still supported in Internet Explorer 7 Strict mode and Quirks mode for backward compatibility.

Alternative style sheets

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 now supports alternative style sheets as specified by HTML4 and by CSS2.1. You can access the alternative styles that are defined by the Web page author by using the Style menu under the Page menu or under the View menu. You can use the No Style option on either menu to disable all author styling.
Windows Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Release Notes

That's the end of the good news, here's (some of) the rest...

That's all well and good, but it turns out, that there are a ton of other issues, that despite this release being a beta, I still feel are a bit rediculous...

JScript errors may occur when you upgrade from Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP or on Windows Server 2003

Do not upgrade from Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 on a system that is running Windows XP or Windows Server 2003. A rare installation issue may occur in which Internet Explorer may exhibit false JScript errors and an inability to add Favorites or Web Slices.

To work around this issue, uninstall Window Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, install Internet Explorer 7, and then upgrade to Window Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2.

Windows Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Release Notes

Being required to install an interim version (IE7) to upgrade from IE6 (which so many folks are of course still unfortunately running) to avoid erroneous reports of JScript errors (which will of course halt the execution of pretty much any JavaScript/JScript app from running is absurd.

And this one is just downright unacceptable.

You are prompted to continue installing Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 if you previously installed Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1

On a computer that is running Windows XP, you install Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 and then install Windows XP Server Pack 3. Then, you try to install Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2. When you do this, you receive the following message:

Install Internet Explorer 8

Are you sure you want to continue installing Internet Explorer 8?

Setup has detected that you’ve installed a new service pack for your operating system since installing a previous version of Internet Explorer 8. After completing this installation, you will not be able to uninstall Internet Explorer 8.

You can click the ‘OK’ button to continue installing Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, but you will not be able to uninstall it later.

To work around this issue, and to be able to uninstall Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 later, click the ‘Cancel’ button and do the following before installing Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2:
• Uninstall Windows XP Service Pack 3
• Uninstall Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1
• Install Windows XP Service Pack 3
• Install Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2

Windows Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Release Notes

I was never able to actually install SP3 on my last XP laptop. My first attempt threw an error at the very end of the installation process, after over one hour, and then it took another 45 minutes to "undo" the installation attempt. Being optimistic, I tried it twice, totally over 3 hours of time wasted. So theoretically, if someone had installed SP3 after installing IE8b1, it could be a multi hour process just to make sure that a web browser could at some point be uninstalled in the future. It takes less time to install the full Adobe Creative Suite than a service pack. C'mon now, this is just dumb people.

How is it possible to measure a few positivities for developers when the new issues regarding security, usability, and system stability for a general user are so great? I can't. Though some folks are jumping up and down, the low adoption rate of IE7 has shown us that the additional support for standards in this new version is theoretically exciting, but the fantasy of being free of IE6 and onto a standards based world in the next few short years is exactly that, a fantasy.

Read the full release notes here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949787

I tend to run beta's of everything... but for this one, I'm not going to let it run anywhere other than in it's own instance of XP in VMWare.

Acrobat has a neat little feature called Stamps. They are simply other small PDF files that are added to a document to add the same sort of information that a rubber stamp might add to a paper document.

More often than not, I receive invoices and bills in non-paper format. Whether it's an html email, a Word document, a PDF, etc... Instead of printing these bills and invoices out, marking them paid, and filing them in a traditional paper filing cabinet, I decided I want to keep my filing as paper-free as possible.

After wasting over an hour looking though worthless tutorials on how to write javascript for Acrobat Forms, I came up with paidstamp1.pdf. Feel free to use it for yourself.

If anyone has anything along these lines that's better than my lazy attempt, please send it to me.

Last.fm has recently decided that they needed a slightly looser looking masthead, and i just noticed it. Me likes.

It comes in black too.

I often forget that sometimes a nothing more than a subtle update to a familiar interface or brand can help to keep things feeling fresh, even if there actually isn't anything else substantial that's going on.

Walmart recently revamped their logo, and I caught it in a broadcast ad. It gives me a smiley face to know that I will no longer have to look at theirs.

We did a little bit of front end dev work for a rather large client of Continuity's, have a fun microsite that we're helping KTG Buzz (Kaplan Thaler Group's interactive division) build over the next few months, and we're doing some e-commerce work for Complete Technique that's been a blast to dig into.

There are other exciting things in the works, but until they're ready to be introduced into the world, it's mums the word.

So hooray! The Summit International Awards gave the site a Bronze SCA award. And although I don't know what 'SCA' is an acronym for, it still is nice when other people feel that stuff you did was good.

It's not much of a listing, but here's where it's listed.

And here's what the site looks like:

I even put it in my portfolio last fall (though those screenshots are crappy)