story

Dec 6

Creating calendar icons in Drupal

Recently I was looking for a way to add small calendar icons to the posts on my Drupal site. There are a number of solutions out there for drupal, but the ones I found all used icons, which was an approach I was trying to avoid.  Here is a good example for drupal using icons.

Finally, I found some examples for wordpress that were pure html+css without any images. I have taken that example and drupal-fied it. When done, you will have nice calendar icons that show the current date of the post, and a flexible way of including the icons anywhere you would like.

The end result:

Dec 1

 

Read on for the instructions.


Dec 1

Drupal + WYSIWYG + tinyMCE + syntaxhighlighter REDUX

The most popular post on my site currently is an article on how to setup the tinyMCE editor in Drupal to use a syntax highlighting plugin.

Since that article, the Drupal world has moved along and my tutorial has become outdated.

Things are actually a bit easier now, however, so read on for a new version of the tutorial.


Nov 29

Setting Scroll positions in Flex

I recently struggled mightily with what I thought should be an easy problem.  I had an image in flex and wanted to be able to pan around it and zoom in and out.  

It turns out that a lot of people have a problem with this task, because how the scrollbars in flex keep track of where they are, and how flex handles the origin of a zoom operation.  Read on for details.


Jul 29

Making an Ubuntu flash image from an ISO

Although Ubuntu is now distributing some flash images in the form of its netbook remix distribution, it is sometimes convenient to be able to take a regular ISO version and create a flash disk image from it.

This article shows the process required to create a flash image from an ISO.


Jun 16

QCubed and JSON

As I wrote here, QCubed is a full featured and productive PHP framework that I use often. I'd like to share with you a customization that I did to allow the easy conversion of QCubed objects into serialized JSON representations.


Jun 16

Introduction to Qcubed

For several years, Qcubed has been my php framework of choice. I'll be writing about Qcubed frequently so I wanted to first give an overview of its features. Read on for my overview.


Apr 30

Processing.js Mindmap Example

I want to share some code that I wrote as a technology demonstration about a year ago.  It's a simple mind map program that runs in a web browser and written in javascript using a library called processing.js

The demo is quite simple, and not usable as a full application, but was useful for me to test out a few concepts.  I have since moved on and ported this code to other platforms and will be releasing the results of that shortly.  Read on for a quick background of processing.js and the source code and link to my demo mind map.


Apr 29

Mac iTerm hint

Here's a quick tip for using iTerm to connect to Linux servers. 

To get proper arrow key support in programs like vi, along with some other benefits, set the terminal type to 'linux'.  The easiest way to do this is to create a new profile and use that profile for bookmarks that represent Linux servers you connect to.


Apr 28

Drupal + WYSIWYG + tinyMCE + syntaxhighlighter

UPDATE: I've written a new version of this article that should be followed instead of this slightly-dated version.  

I've recently taken another look at tinyMCE integration in Drupal. I used to use tinyMCE on all my sites, but have migrated most of my editing to the desktop. This is a short article on how to get Drupal, the wysiwyg module, the tinyMCE editor, and the javascript SyntaxHighlighter library all integrated together.

There are several online guides on how to get these components to work together, but none of them were complete or up to date with the latest versions of all the components.

I will assume you have drupal installed already. These instructions were done on version 6.10, but should work on any recent 6.x version.


Apr 28

Productivity Tips

I've spent a fair amount of time trying to overcome procrastination. By this point, I've developed a few tools and tricks that help me. I hope you will find them useful. I don't always practice each tip, or use each tool, but I keep them all on the shelf. I've found that I quickly can develop an 'immune response' to some of these, so it pays to be able to rotate your strategies for maintaining a high level of productivity.

This article is Mac-centric in terms of software, because that is what I use. Where an application is mentioned, you can usually find a Windows alternative.