Dr Quincy's Blog

 

I've been writing some short stories recently and decided to make a site to publish them online; it's just for fun, not a money-making venture. I'm still editing the site but I've published it now so the search engines can start indexing it. the site includes a blog, a newsletter and some writing tools.

Read online short stories at www.ficticity.com.

This bit of code will let you change the opacity of an image using JavaScript; unlike most scripts it works on Safari and Opera as well as IE and Firefox. Simple send the id of the image and a value between 0 and 100 to change the opacity (0 being invisible and 100 fully visible).

function changeopacity( imageobject, opacity ) {

    
var object = imageobject.style;
    object.opacity = ( opacity / 100 );
    object.MozOpacity = ( opacity / 100 );
    object.KhtmlOpacity = ( opacity / 100 );
    object.filter = "alpha(opacity=" + opacity + ")";

}

I've launched a new site through my web design company called A Site A Day; the site does exactly that! It gives web designers a nice-looking website every single day of the year. It should help cure the dreaded designer's block.

Web Design Inspiration - asiteaday.org

Stay up-to-date by subscribing to the RSS feed.

Enjoy!

Most RSS readers for Mac will cost you; there's a free RSS reader in Thunderbird but I use Apple's Mail so I'd rather run an application that's just for RSS.

I managed to find (it was suprisingly hard) a free RSS reader for OS X. It's called Vienna and you can download it from here:

Download Vienna

It's a great little application. It has a simple interface, Atom support and folder groups and smart folders make it easy to manage all your feeds.

I always think the best web page development environment is one that strikes a medium between being a basic text editor and a fully functional IDE. A text editor is too basic for me whereas a WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver is just overpriced and irritating. What I want is a text editor with syntax highlighting, the ability to edit files via FTP and some good search functionailty.

Enter Bluefish.

Bluefish is a free text editor for Linux that does just that. You can download it from here: http://www.icewalkers.com/Linux/Software/56950/BlueFish.htm or you can get it through the package manager on Debian-based Linux distros:

sudo apt-get install bluefish

On my various websites I get hundreds of Spam messages every day; it gets very annoying! I've tried several methods and in this post I will outline three. Soemtimes they works, sometimes they don't. Some are more effective than others.

1. Captchas. Captchas are a random strings of text and numbers that a user must enter to be classed as non-spam. The letters and numbers are displayed as an image and usually over a pattern and are distorted to prevent bots from easily reading them.

Pros: Skewed text against noisy background can be hard for Spam bots to read
Cons: Can be difficult for humans to read, spam bots are getting better at recognising them

2. Hidden text fields. Create a text field in your form and hide it via your CSS (using display: none). When processing the form if the field has been filled out it is Spam.

Pros: Filters out around 75% of spam bots
Cons: Some bots check your CSS, those with CSS disabled still see the text field

3. Ask a question. Ask a question that doesn't have the answer in the question. A popular one could be a maths question (e.g. what is 1 + 5). Even more effective would be What colour is the sky?

Pros: Filters out 99% of spam
Cons: Some foriegn users or those who struggle with spelling may get the answer wrong

There are lots of fixes and hacks out there to stop the famous IE three pixel padding bug; what happens is when you have a floated div IE adds extra padding to the div next to it. It's very annoying when you're trying to get a layout spot on.

I've tried many fixes ranging from setting the float div to display: inline; (which didn't work) and trying to browser sniff to serving a different style sheet to IE browser (which I resent doing).

I found this trick that worked perfectly however. If you use a child selector you can serve a style that IE will use and another all the others will use. Let say you have divs, left and right, and the right div should have a 500px left margin; your CSS might look like this:

    div#right {

        margin-left: 497px;
        width: 475px;

    }

    div#container > div#right {

        margin-left: 500px;

    }

Here the width is set at 3 pixels less then overriden to the correct value via the child selector. It all renders correctly though as IE ignores the child selector.

If you want to brain storm ideas on your Mac then mind-maps are a great idea.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map. I use them to put ideas for stories together; like with many things nowadays it's better to do it on a computer. I found this free piece of software that let's you create mind maps on your Mac.

Download FreeMind for free here

If you're running Kubuntu and decide you want to change to Ubuntu (i.e. use the Gnome desktop rather than KDE (which is better in my opinion)) all you need to do is to go to the shell and enter:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

You will now have to wait some time for all the Gnome apps to download and them some time for Kubuntu to get everything set up. Once that's done though all you need to do is log out and then log in and choose Gnome as the session type.

You'll now have Gnome and KDE installed which means you'll have two lots of applications for many areas (e.g. you'll have two text editors, Kate and gEdit). This is fine and won't cause you any problems. However, you may wish to remove some of these applications through the package manager if you don't want them.

If you want to get rid of KDE enter the following in the shell:

sudo apt-get remove kubuntu-desktop

If you do remove kubuntu-desktop and then find you have trouble using themes in Gnome go to the shell and enter:

switch2

Then choose your style from the dropdown; gneom-theme-manager should work fine from thereon.

If you want to write novels and short stories on your Mac I suggest you purchase a copy of CopyWrite for OS X.

I'd always been frustrated at how poorly designed these writing tools typically are; CopyWrite is different though.

CopyWrite doesn't bother offering you loads of useless formatting tools. Rather, it gives you what you need to manage a writing project properly. It's so easy-to-use and well designed that after a new minutes you feel like you know the software inside out. All saving is done automatically: simply fire up one of your current projects and carry on writing!

CopyWrite really helps a writer's work flow by giving you a file browser that can contain as many text documents as you like - easily allowing you to manage your research, character profiles, plot outlines, etc.

In my opinion CopyWrite is a must for any writer using OS X and you can have it for the bargain price of $24.99.

What are you waiting for? Download your free trial now!

Even if you tweak the font settings in Ubuntu some text still looks a little jaggy compared to OS X. You can make your fonts smoother though like this:

Go to your home directory and open up the file .fonts.conf (it's a hidden file; if you can't see it choose View < Show Hidden Files in Nautilus). Replace the current contents with:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
    <match target="font">
        <edit name="autohint" mode="assign">
            <bool>true</bool>
        </edit>
    </match>
</fontconfig>

Save the file; the fonts will change once you restart the X server, log out and back in again or restart.

Have you ever wanted to run Verdana, Trebuchet MS, etc on Linux - you can and it's very easy to do. Simple enter the following into a shell window:

sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts

Log out and back in again or restart and the fonts will be installed.

The following fonts are installed:

• Andale Mono
• Arial Black
• Arial (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Comic Sans MS (Bold)
• Courier New (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Georgia (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Impact
• Times New Roman (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Trebuchet (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Verdana (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Webdings

Synergy is a program that lets you share your mouse and keyboard over a network. So, if you have two or more monitors and more than one computer you only need one mouse and keyboard. Here's how I got Synergy running with Ubuntu and OS X.

Note: Synergy is also available for Windows - this how to does not cover Windows although Synergy works pretty much the same (in fact, it's easier on Windows as there is a GUI to it)

Firstly, download Synergy for Linux - you can do this with the command sudo apt-get install synergy in the shell. For Mac download Synergy 1.3.1 for OS X here.

You need one machine to run as a server and then you can have a number of clients. In this example I will make OS X the server and Linux a client.

First off, find out the hostname of your Ubuntu machine by typing hostname in the shell. We'll assume it's called myclient in this example. Do the same in OS X and we'll assume the Mac is called myserver.local.

The next thing we need to do is to set a configuration file for the server - this tells Synergy what to do with each machine when it connects.

Extract your downloaded Synergy folder in OS X and create a file in the folder called mysynergy.conf.

Enter this into your file and save:

section: screens
    myserver.local:
    myclient:
end

section: links
    myserver.local:
        right = myclient

    myclient:
        left = myserver.local
end

Note: your OS X hostname will end in .local - include this in the .conf file.

All you're doing here is defining your host and your clients and how they relate to each other.

Your server is ready to roll. Open up the shell in OS X and navigate to where your .conf file is stored; execute this command ./synergys -f --config mysynergy.conf

Open up a new shell and type ifconfig and make a note of the IP address that appears after inet - it will most likely start with 192.168. - let's say it's 192.168.0.5

Now open up your shell in Ubuntu and execute /usr/bin/./synergyc -f 192.168.0.5 (use your Mac's IP address though).

All being well your Ubuntu machine should connect to your Mac and you can use your Mac's mouse and keyboard on your Linux machine.

One limitation is that the Mac Synergy server will only accept an IP address rather than a host name so it's a pain if your Mac's IP address keeps changing.

Add a new host record on OS X is not quote a straight forward as it is on Windows and Linux (though it is still very easy). You need to do this:

• Open up Finder
• Click on Applications
• Go to Utilities
• Open the Netinfo Manager application
• Choose Machines
• Click localhost (or any other host record)
• Click the padlock and enter your admin password
• Click duplicate and click the Duplicate button
• Double click the IP address in the right column and enter your new host IP
• Double click the name in the right column and enter your new host name
• If there is a serves row there make both columns blank
• Click the lock to save the changes and close the application down
• If you are prompted to save any changes do so

Have you ever used the Save for Web option in Photoshop and found your image looks much lighter on the export than on the canvas? It happened to me when I switched from CS on XP to CS 2 on OS X.

The problem is that your canvas is using one colour profile (sRGB is best for web by the way) and exporting using another. If you're working on web here's how you fix it:

Choose File > Save for Web and then click the arrow located to the top right of the canvas. Choose Use Document Color Profile - this will ensure the canvas and the exported image match.