Archive for February, 2010
eSATA
Posted by thinsoldier in Uncategorized on February 24, 2010
In windows XP I tried converting my external e-sata disk to be “Dynamic”, supposedly making any disk Dynamic makes it hot-swappable. I’m not totally convinced of that.
In XP I was able to plug in the drive and fudge around in the Disk Management window to get the disk to show up after many clicks. The same to un-plug it. So it was “plug-and-play” but definitely not convenient, quick, or user friendly to do.
Then when I tried to connect my dynamic disk to my cousin’s Vista laptop via USB (his laptop has no esata port) it was impossible to get it to show up. It wasn’t auto-detected and I couldn’t find a way to do it through the disk management window. Had the same problem plugging it back into my XP system via USB instead of esata.
Based on my experience I say for maximum compatibility do not make your external esata disk a Dynamic Disk.
When you know you need maximum speed, accept that you will need to shut-down, then plug in the esata, then start up again.
When you need to run around from one computer to the next with you drive (friends, neighbours, work, home, grandma, win98, win2k, winxp, vista, 7, os-x, ubuntu, linux, etc) then you will be so glad that you external drive also has the USB option even though it’s slow.
Supposedly if your motherboard/eSATA PCI card fully supports the hot-swap part of the esata standard and you install the proper drivers then you will be able to hot-swap like you can with USB.
That’s the way I see it. If you know better please enlighten me.
CSS Box Shadow Improvements
Posted by thinsoldier in Uncategorized on February 20, 2010
I’ve been thinking about how we could achieve shadows like the one to the right of this wordpress layout [screenshot] using just css. The problem is that the shadow tapers off as it gets to the bottom of the menu element. Currently there’s no way to simulate this with css3’s box-shadow.
IF it were possible to specify the box-shadow values long-form instead being forced to use the shorthand style then maybe would could have separate values for spread-radius (top, right, bottom, left) allowing us to simulate skew or perspective.
[photoshop screenshot showing a shadow tweaked in all four directions in top row, in bottom row show that same shadow behind non-distorted design elements. It should look right.]
I think it might also be useful to have a box-shadow-rotation.
[screenshot]
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS/-moz-box-shadow
And I still say that with so many attributes the shorthand syntax will be annoying to work with (for me at least). And when it comes to wanting multiple shadows (or backgrounds) having the grouping of the values be in comma lists intead of grouped together is much less user friendly than using an array-like syntax.
[ example code comparing the 2 ]
*screensots & code coming soon
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Posted by thinsoldier in Uncategorized on February 19, 2010
I installed XP so many times that this thing I stuck in my head. It’s probably in the same brain cell where I keep my ICQ number. Two long-ass numbers that I have absolutely no use for but can’t get rid of.
photoshop tab tool tips are a pain
Posted by thinsoldier in Uncategorized on February 19, 2010
Every time I want to adjust text my mouse has to pass over the tab area. And every time, no matter how fast i move my mouse, it results in a tool tip. I have to wait until it goes away before I can do anything. Very annoying.
Eye HDR – Gaze-adapting system for displaying HDR images.
Posted by thinsoldier in Uncategorized on February 8, 2010
Netbeans Bugs
Posted by thinsoldier in Note-to-self on February 5, 2010
Feb 3 2010
Netbeans bugs
Toggle comment menu command on a line of html gives two slashes instead of html comments [ // foo vs ] even though netbeans is obviously smart enough to realize when I’m working in a block of html vs a block of php.
Editing CSS – does not auto-complete pseudo elements like :hover
I just pasted this code:
// a comment here
if (isset($_SESSION['level'])) {
header(‘Location: index.php’);
exit;
}
If I place the cursor in front of “if” and press return I get this code:
// a comment here
if (isset($_SESSION['level'])) {
} // <– NOTICE THE ADDITION OF THIS BRACKET! BREAKS EVERYTHING!
header(‘Location: index.php’);
exit;
}
Posted by thinsoldier in Web Development on February 5, 2010
This is a comment I had about an article on the Decorator pattern
I think some people may overlook the importance/usefulness of the decorator pattern since all you’re doing in the examples could be accomplished by just concatenating P and /P around the getData() wherever it is you were going to display it.
I find the decorator pattern is best for when you have a lot of parts to the data that need a lot of manipulation of their values and a lot of html but not so much html that it warrants a full page/template/view.
For example Read the rest of this entry »