What I want for christmas: http://eburl.net/crystal-pepsi
Now if only I could find myself some Mr. Pibb.
Archive for September, 2008
Proof that Crystal Pepsi Still Exists!
September 24th, 2008Facelift Downloaded 6,000 Times in the Last Month
September 22nd, 2008Facelift has been downloaded over 6,000 times in the last four weeks. I never thought that it would become so popular so fast. I am actually pretty amazed and just happy that everyone is finding it useful!
Version 1.2 has just been released out of beta and as always, I urge anyone who finds any bugs to report them in the forums.
Look forward to many new plugins as well as documentation on how to make your own — finally!
Simpson’s Did It!
September 20th, 2008I swear. Every time I get an idea for something, I am a Google search away from finding out that someone has (1) already done it, (2) done it right, and (3) just finished doing it.
My latest idea was an image search engine that would allow you to upload an image and find other versions of the image. It would be useful if you had a piece of an image and wanted to find the whole thing or had a small thumbnail but wanted to find a full quality image.
Facelift v1.2 is finally here!
September 20th, 2008With much delay Facelift v1.2 is here. If you are still using v1.1.1 you are crazy, especially now that v1.2 is out of beta. Download Now!
FLIR v1.2 includes so many new features over v1.1.1 that I’m not even going to list them all here. Not much has changed since v1.2 beta 4 except some bug fixes.
The one thing worth mentioning is the inclusion of a FLIR Javascript plugin entitled RefreshImages. You can read more about it, as well as keep up with some of the more advanced features of Facelift at the new detailed facelift examples page.
» Read more: Facelift v1.2 is finally here!
Quickly Determine Local or Remote Copy of Your Website (with PHP)
September 15th, 2008
I do a lot of web development locally on my computer and I am always switching between local and remote servers using entries in the hosts file. Because of this, it is hard to know if I’m actually looking at the correct version of my site. Opera and Firefox both cache DNS to various degrees which makes it difficult to know if that change to the hosts file really did take effect. I know you can disable the cache in Firefox — and probably Opera too — but I think this method is still useful.
» Read more: Quickly Determine Local or Remote Copy of Your Website (with PHP)
Bug in Safari with v1.2b4 – Background Transparency Problem
September 12th, 2008UPDATE 9/13: I’ve fixed the bug and will be releasing the fixed version sometime tomorrow.
There is a bug in Facelift that is causing all images to be generated with a white background. The temporary fix is to disable GIF/JPG support until I can release a fixed version. You only have to modify one line of code to fix and FLIR will behave as it did before with transparent PNG images.
You can read more about the problem and get the fix here.
HP Refusing to Service Dead, Defective Notebook with NVIDIA GeForce
September 11th, 2008UPDATE: The law firm of Shepherd, Finkelman, Miller & Shah, LLP has begun an investigation into HP Pavilion notebooks. Submit the form for the HP Notebook class action lawsuit to make yourself heard! Hopefully we’ll be able to at least get some of our money back!
UPDATE 2: Another class action lawsuit against HP in the works… this one seems to be a little more geared towards the actual problems with the GPU and includes Dell, HP, and NVidia in the complaint.
If you’ve been reading my posts you would have noticed that I recently had an HP notebook die. I thought I was just unlucky enough to have the hardware fail on my 14 month old notebook — but I was wrong.
» Skip right to the forum thread with angry HP owners discussing their dead HP/NVIDIA GPU notebooks.
(Warning: HP HEAVILY censors and deletes posts in that thread. Visit HPLies.com for an uncensored forum devoted to this HP, NVidia problems.)
The other day I happened to be reading an article on arstechnica about how NVIDIA is being sued about faulty GPUs. “That’s funny”, I thought, “My notebook had a GeForce.” I read further and indeed HP was named in the article as a company scrambling. A few more articles worth of reading later and I found out my NVIDIA was indeed the cause of my notebook’s untimely death — and HP refuses to service it!
» Read more: HP Refusing to Service Dead, Defective Notebook with NVIDIA GeForce
eBurliffic. Shorten eBay URLs
September 10th, 2008
Take a look at eburl. It allows you to shorten the nasty, god-awful URL that EBay gives you when you sell an item to a nice simple and short one, that you can post in messages and forums. You can even customize what the URL says.
The recent eBurls are reason enough to take a look. They can be appreciated for their randomness and “who the hell would buy that” quality. Take a look at these recent eburls:
SITEC GBT15/40 Oxygen Gas Booster
diy red plaid hot pants shorts punk rock emo gothic M
Baker’s Edge Nonstick Edge Brownie Pan Baking NEW
Facelift Font Collections
September 10th, 2008Facelift v1.2 beta 4 introduces a new feature called the Font Collection. A Font Collection is just that, a collection of similarly faced fonts in various styles. This means that you no longer have to create a separate entry for Your Font and Your Font Italic. By combining the Font Collection with the CSS values set in your web page, FLIR can intelligently detect which font variant to use.
» Read more: Facelift Font Collections
Facelift v1.2 beta 4 has been Released
September 10th, 2008I was all set to release the final v1.2 but instead I went crazy and added a bunch of new functionality. So, I am releasing v1.2 beta 4.
- Font Collections
- Basic Callback Functions
- Better error handling
- Bug in generateURL causing HTML not to be sanitized
- Added functionality/bug fixes for “wrap” mode. Better line-height support.
- Rewrote element replacement algorithm. You no longer need to encapsulate plain text in span elements to have it replaced. The new algo is recursive so it can replace any number of child elements. You could even run it on document.body if you wanted to!
- Added flir-image and flir-span classnames to the elements flir creates
- Javascript Plugin support!
- Moved DetectImageState code from facelift.js into a Javascript plugin
- querySelectorAll support for the browsers that support it (Safari, FF3.1 alpha)
- Font size modifier for cSize in FLIRStyle. You can now specify a font size calculation to be applied against the CSS font size. For example, if you want the generated image to have a font size that is 140% the one you specified in your CSS you could do cSize:’*1.4′. All font sizes will then be multipled by 1.4.
- FLIRStyle.buildURL no longer requires an HTML object to be passed
- Hover caching problems fixed. Better hover style support.
- JPG and GIF support! Set the “output” option in FLIRStyle. The default output option is auto. Auto will cause the generated image to be a transparent png if the element doesn’t have a background color set. Otherwise it will use GIF.
- Hover now only works with <A> elements.
I am Temporarily Unavailble
September 2nd, 2008My notebook died and I had to buy a replacement. I should be back online by tomorrow.
Hardware Failures Everywhere I Look
September 2nd, 2008Sometime last week I noticed my Western Digital MyBook external hard drive starting to give CRC errors. I scanned the drives (2 in the RAID) for problems and sure enough, drive #2 was starting to fail.
I contacted WD who quickly shipped out a replacement drive and started the horrible process of moving almost 1TB of data from one drive to another. Luckily, I have a copy of Second Copy installed on my machine for backing up my data, so I just setup a quick job to transfer the files. Quick to setup, not to run. After about 24 hours the job was done and my data was safely duplicated on the replacement drive, and then another 18 hours to run Eraser on the drive.
» Read more: Hardware Failures Everywhere I Look
