ruzee.com - Steffen Rusitschka blogs

The Impossible: ShadedBorder Updated

Steffen — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 18:29:24 +0000

Well, actually I thought ShadedBorder is kind of discontinued (in favor of LiquidCanvas)... But I proofed myself wrong and here it is: The first update for ShadedBorder since 1.5 years!

It fixes the IE8 1px overlap bug reported by Tony and comes with a performance optimization for every browser supported: The ShadedBorder nodes will only be cloned on demand.

Grab version 0.6.2 now at the ShadedBorder project page.

Liquid Canvas Positioned

Steffen — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 08:50:53 +0000

I really love user comments like this one from Kaz van Wel:

I'd like to say I really like your Liquid Canvas script, you really made an invention by putting some scripts together and a wrapper around it to make a cross browser solution to round borders and a lot more possibilities :D. I really think this can change the web like Ajax did around 2006, once people know it exists.

Well Kaz, I think so, too: Let's spread the word! :-)

Kaz also brought my attention to a bug in Liquid Canvas: It was basically impossible to put a "liquid-canvased" element into a container with absolute or relative positioning.

IE8 Support for Liquid Canvas

Steffen — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 20:27:42 +0000

A new version of excanvas has been released yesterday: It now supports IE8. Well, haven't we - ahhm... Liquid Canvas - been waiting for this ;-)

So this is what I did an hour ago: I copied the new version into my Liquid Canvas project and ... surprise it didn't work. After a short debugging session I spotted the problem. It seems that excanvas no longer likes dynamically generated DOM elements with the tag name "canvas" - replacing it with "div" did the trick.

Pimp my Ubuntu - Top 10 PPAs

Steffen — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 13:01:05 +0000

I've used loads of Linux distributions in the past. Each of them had its advantages and disadvantages - there's simply no "perfect" OS...

Gentoo and Debian basically don't have any "releases" - updates come in frequently. When you wake up, turn on your computer, it tells you that there are updates, you install them and want to start working - and bang, one of theses updates breaks your apache/ssh/ruby/you-name-it. Pretty bad for your productivity.

Fedora, Ubuntu, and SUSE do have time-based releases. Updates come in once or twice a year and you know that in between only security fixes will be deployed to your machine. That's nice since the probability of an update breaking your installation is minimal.

I'm on Ubuntu right now and it gives me a stable system. But sometimes it feels "out-of-date" and I'd like to have a more recent version of an application, escpecially if it's non-critical for work.

Ubuntu has a very neat feature for this: Specialized repositories for different programs hosted on launchpad.net called PPAs (Personal Package Archives). You enable a PPA by appending the sources.list contents shown on the PPA page to the file /etc/apt/sources.list.

So, here's the list of my top 10 PPAs:

A Theory Of Everthing - Especially Life

Steffen — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 23:03:03 +0000

There's been a lot of buzz about Garrett Lisi in the last two years. He didn't like String Theory so ten year's ago he decided to leave the science community behind and do his own research in the most beautiful places on earth. Kinda cool ;-)

Then he came up with a possible grand unification theory based on a very charming mathematical construct (E8) - which does some predictions (about the existence of some new physical particles) that are not yet proven to be wrong - and might be right. LHC may give some answers... Check out his presentation on TED.

Asking why I'm blogging about him? And now? Right when the hype is over and everything came back to normal? Well, he wrote a pretty inspiring blog post about the future of mankind and life itself that's definitely worth reading. And you don't need any knowledge in theoretical physics in order to get the point - I promise :-)

Guess I've got to try kitesurfing...

Apache Virtual Hosts: A Clean Setup for (PHP-)Developers

Steffen — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 13:05:51 +0000

If you work on multiple Apache-based Web projects in parallel you probably know this problem: You have to set up a virtual host configuration for every single project on your development machine. It would be very nice to reduce the steps required for this to a minimum. My favorite solution:
Have a directory in your home directory containing symbolic links to your projects - where the names of the links are your local host names.

The following instructions assume you're on Debian/Ubuntu - but "translating" them to other distros or even Windows shouldn't be that hard.

Merry Christmas

Steffen — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 12:38:52 +0000

I wish you a merry Christmas! I hope you already got all those presents for your beloved ones. And I hope you have nice decorations at home or wherever you are. If you're still looking for something special have a look here.

Ruby's "each" for JavaScript

Steffen — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 17:32:24 +0000

Wow! 30 new subscribers due to my last blog posting about JavaScript inheritance: Welcome dear new readers :-) Due to this fact I've decided to try out something new. No fancy new technologies for showing-off but a tutorial-like introduction to some neat and often unknown JavaScript functions that can make your life easier.

Sine I really love Ruby, I thought: Why not take a use-case from the oh-so-beautiful Ruby world and transfer it to JavaScript. Well, here it is. Nothing new but still pretty cool: Ruby's "each" for JavaScript.

So, this is an experiment I'll really appreciate your feedback - is it too trivial or do you like it? Anyway, let's just start ...

JavaScript Inheritance via Prototypes and Closures

Steffen — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 17:26:14 +0000

JavaScript as a prototypical language offers loads of solutions to implement classes and class inheritance. When coming from an Object Oriented language such as Java or Ruby, these solutions aren't obvious at the first glance.

I started coding JavaScript years ago and always found a solution for my specific case. But things felt messy and I always thought "Is this really the right way of doing it?". Well, after all those years, experience took away this feeling and now I want to share some stuff that finally meant a break-through of understanding for me.

There are two different concepts of doing inheritance in JavaScript. One is using the prototype property of a function as a mean to create something similar to a "class". The other concept is using the constructor function itself to create a class dynamically during runtime.

For both concepts I'll show you their basic idea and compact helpers for creating inheritance in an elegant way.

Let's start with the prototype-based concept.

Using rsnapshot for File and Database Backups

Steffen — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 11:39:28 +0000

rsnapshot is my favorite tool for doing automated distributed backups on Linux machines. It saves you a lot of headaches - and it finally replaced all those hundreds of hand-made backup scripts I previously used.

rsnapshot itself is easy to use. But setting up the infrastructure for it - namely password-less ssh logins and database dumps - always requires some work. Here's how I do it.