Blogging like it’s 1999

Posted on by lhl

I’ve finally got around to making some genuine progress with the blog. After the new-fangled ‘permalink’ technology, I’ve begun to work on other such 90’s technologies as “archives” (almost complete, 3900+ old entries in the system), and “search“. Who knows what’s next, a calendar? (craaaazy).

On a more serious note, I don’t have to worry about packaging my rtedit anymore since it looks like in-place editing has independently arisen (I never got ranging working w/ text-mogrification to my satisfaction), so doing something useful w/ my tagging system and versioning is probably next on the list.

legacy.randomfoo.net

Posted on by lhl

I finally got around to moving the new site to the primary randomfoo.net domain. Old stuff is still accessible at: legacy.randomfoo.net.

Here’s the very simple code I put in my errorhandler to prevent linkrot:


if($_SERVER['REDIRECT_STATUS'] == '404') {
  require_once "HTTP.php";
  $url = 'http://legacy.randomfoo.net' . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
  $result = HTTP::head($url);
  if($result['response_code'] == 200) {
    header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
    header("Location: $url");
    header("Connection: close");
  }
}

Notice any problems? Let me know.

SXSW 2005: Recap

Posted on by lhl

Well crap, no wonder I never put SXSW notes up before. Even just writing short summaries and related thoughts took forever. Plus I probably come off as an ass. Anyway, here they are. I considered trying to gather some more stuff on panels I missed, but honestly, as anyone’s who’s been can attest that you can’t take the panels too seriously. It’s always a tossup, and there’s just too much anwyay. I think I’ve already gone above and beyond the call of duty as far as work is concerned.

The best thing about this SXSW was getting me out of my recent funk (that Portal project was pretty soul-crushing). I had a lot of fun this year (better than last year?) and had a really good mix of hanging w/ old friends and meeting lots of new people (although I’ve been discovering that there were a whole buncha people there that I didn’t get a chance to say hi to. I’ll have to keep a better eye out next year… Also, I’ll try pacing myself better so I’m not as walking dead-like [waking up before 10AM is one of the double-edged things])

I’m going to disattach myself from the screen now.

Auto-image Resizing

Posted on by lhl

I’ve been using a variation of Clagnut-style liquid image-sizing in my blog, which works fine in IE and Firefox, but breaks because of Safari’s crappy image resizing.

Safari further confounds things by not allowing reliable post-hoc style removal via JS (sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t), and not appearing to support anything like image.naturalWidth to show the original sizes. So, here’s a fully JS solution (IE has problems with returning the parentNode.clientWidth so I just slap the old width/height styles on in that case):


function fit_blog_img() {
  if(!document.getElementById) return;
  if(!document.getElementsByTagName) return;

  var blog = document.getElementById("blog");
  var imgs = blog.getElementsByTagName("img");

  for(var i=0; i 1) {
      img.style.width = maxw + 'px';
      img.style.height = Math.floor(h/r) + 'px';
    }
  }
}

I’ll be doing some more bloggy hi-jinx in the near future. Looks I should get moving on releasing my rtedit modules…

ETECH05 Summarizing

Posted on by lhl

I was only ultra-briefly passing through, so I’m depending on the intarweb to try to sift through the enormous amount of good stuff.

Notes:

Direct (notes, slides):

Active Timer and Productivity Metrics

Posted on by lhl

This morning, I found a small utility for OS X called Active Timer. It’s very basic, but will track the focused program on your computer in 5-second increments. I think there’s a lot of potential for ‘good habit training’ in tools like this (I can see a whole lot of metrics, visualization that might be generated from a smarter version of this. The important part of it is the automatic collection of this data. The next step is the integration with workflow…

pie chart of computer usage morning of 2005-03-19

Quicksilver Clipboard Fun

Posted on by lhl

It’s been on my todo list to get more out of Quicksilver for a while. One of the things that I’d never gotten to work to my satisfaction was the Clipboard functionality. I love having a clipboard history, but accessing the history through the primary interface was a pain, and when launching directly, it just ended up hanging there, which was uber-annoying.

Well, duh, there’s a Clipboard preference checkbox that will “Hide after pasting” which completely solves my problem. From the out, pasting from the last 10 items into an application is as simple as:

CMD-Space, CMD-L, [#]

Where # is a digit between 0 and 9. Groovy.