<style>
.copy, .reg {font-size:xx-small;vertical-align:text-top;}
</style>

<script>
$(function(){
var copy = new RegExp(‘\u00a9′,’g');
var reg = new RegExp(‘\u00ae’,'g’);
var newBody = $(‘body’).html().replace(copy, ‘<span class=”copy”>&copy;</span>’).replace(reg, ‘<span class=”reg”>&reg;</span>’);
$(‘body’).html(newBody);
});
</script>

I have been working lately… and have proof. Besides the indentation in my office chair [insert Steelcase shout-out here], I have some ‘artifacts’ worth sharing. Here are a few of the websites I’ve worked on that have recently gone live.

Whats Your Art?

View Site

Sebago

View Site

Bates Footwear

View Site

Don’t do it! (yet)

With getting a new Google Wave account, I wanted to forward my Gmail emails to my Google Wave account. I saw that my Google Wave account was [username]@googlewave.com so I figured I could do it. I went into Gmail. Followed Settings > Forward and set up Gmail to pass all of my emails on to google wave.

I left it on for a day or so, and maybe that was my big mistake. I have been getting emails every 20-30 minutes that have been telling me they cannot send my emails to Google Wave, and that they will retry for the next 2 days. They have a subject line of ‘Delivery Status Notification (Failure)’. Obviously I turned off my forwarding, however now, 3 days later, they are still coming in every 20-30 minutes telling me that the email failed.

So moral of the story. Don’t automatically forward your emails to Google Wave (yet!) and also, don’t leave that forward on any longer than you have to. Google Wave is not ready for it yet and it will get REALLY annoying.

1) Turn on Column Browser: View > Show Column Browser
2) Show Albums as well as artists: View > Column Browser > Albums
3) Show Genres as well as albums and artists: View > Column Browser > Genres
4) Setup Column Browser to show up above your song lists: View > Column Browser > On Top

1. A normal form field watermark that empties on focus and refills on blur.
2. A value that is set by the server trumps anything that the plugin does. (Note: this way, if a user has to fill out the form again because one of the fields didn’t validate, the server can send values so that the user doesn’t have to refill the whole form)
3. There may be a time when you want to ignore the plugin and keep your label visible. Just add a ‘ignore’ class to your label and the plugin doesn’t touch it.
4. This is an extra couple of lines written so that validation works correctly. What it does is it empties the fields that have not been touched by the user on submit. That way, we can run our validation against those fields, and we don’t submit our label.

This solution focuses on accessibility as it does not remove the label, just moves it off the viewport. This way, if a user does not have Javascript, CSS, or uses a screen reader, they will still get normal labels.

View a demo
Download plugin (link to jQuery plugins)

Please let me know what you think about it, or if there is anything I should do to improve.

I know that there are a lot of dependencies that go along with installing RMagick from source on Leopard.  For this reason, I was very interested in the idea of packing all of the commands into a script and just letting it run.  If you are like me, your past with scripts has been grey at best; i.e. there always seems to be some sort of problem that kills your script. Then you have to search through it to find where it broke and you spend a lot of time aligning yourself with something that might not even work.

The reason most of these scripts will fail is that references are now broken or code deprecated. If it fails, I then have to make sure that http://whatever.com still exists and is hosting the file and version that I need. I got to thinking… so often I would like (at least) the option of using something that is a bit older, but can be run smoothly.

The ‘Dependencies’/Libraries

This script uses Ruby to install ImageMagick and RMagick, with the necessary dependencies for gif, jpg, png, freetype, tiff, libwmf (?), littlecms (?), and ghostscript (?).  It rely’s on these libraries:

JPEG:
ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz

PNG:
http://superb-west.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/libpng/libpng-1.2.22.tar.bz2

Freetype:
http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/freetype-2.3.5.tar.gz

TIFF:
ftp://ftp.remotesensing.org/libtiff/tiff-3.8.2.tar.gz

http://jaist.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/wvware/libwmf-0.2.8.4.tar.gz

LittleCMS:
http://www.littlecms.com/lcms-1.17.tar.gz

Ghostscript:
ftp://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/gs860/ghostscript-8.60.tar.gz

Ghostscript Fonts:
ftp://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/current/ghostscript-fonts-std-8.11.tar.gz

ImageMagick:
ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/ImageMagick-6.3.8-11.tar.gz

When I found this script these URLs were built in so that if one of the URLs didn’t work, it would break. That is fine, but it is not built to find the newest and greatest, or make sure that the newest still works with everything else. So why not just package all of those url’s libraries together and make that downloadable here. I may be breaking a law or something… (if I am let me know) but I think these are all open-source.

The Instructions

So here is how it is done.

– Download the zip (39.5 MB)
– Unpack it
– Open Terminal.app

cd /to/inside/the/unzipped/dir
ruby setup.rb

Now just let it run. (You may have to put in your password every once in a while because of the ‘sudo’s).

I should also note that I had X11 (Applications > Utilities > X11) and Xcode 3.0 (Macintosh HD > Developer > Applications > Xcode) installed when I ran this script.  I am not sure how much this helped/effected the script running, but I do have these installed and runnable.

The Original

Again, a special thanks to Solomon White who originally posted this script at his blog.

Here are some other references for this technique.

John Ford:
http://www.aldenta.com/2007/11/26/installing-imagemagickrmagick-on-leopard/

Ben Reubenstein:
http://www.benr75.com/articles/2008/03/16/install-rmagick-on-mac-os-x-leopard-from-source

Here is what I found at Solomon’s website.

#!/bin/sh
curl -O http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/freetype-2.3.5.tar.gz
tar xzvf freetype-2.3.5.tar.gz
cd freetype-2.3.5
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O http://superb-west.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/libpng/libpng-1.2.22.tar.bz2
tar jxvf libpng-1.2.22.tar.bz2
cd libpng-1.2.22
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz
tar xzvf jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz
cd jpeg-6b
ln -s `which glibtool` ./libtool
export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.5
./configure --enable-shared --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O ftp://ftp.remotesensing.org/libtiff/tiff-3.8.2.tar.gz
tar xzvf tiff-3.8.2.tar.gz
cd tiff-3.8.2
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O http://jaist.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/wvware/libwmf-0.2.8.4.tar.gz
tar xzvf libwmf-0.2.8.4.tar.gz
cd libwmf-0.2.8.4
make clean
./configure
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O http://www.littlecms.com/lcms-1.17.tar.gz
tar xzvf lcms-1.17.tar.gz
cd lcms-1.17
make clean
./configure
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O ftp://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/gs860/ghostscript-8.60.tar.gz
tar zxvf ghostscript-8.60.tar.gz
cd ghostscript-8.60/
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O ftp://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/current/ghostscript-fonts-std-8.11.tar.gz
tar zxvf ghostscript-fonts-std-8.11.tar.gz
sudo mv fonts /usr/local/share/ghostscript

curl -O ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/ImageMagick-6.3.8-11.tar.gz
tar -xzvf ImageMagick-6.3.8-11.tar.gz
cd ImageMagick-6.3.8
export CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include
export LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/lib
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --disable-static --with-modules --without-perl --without-magick-plus-plus --with-quantum-depth=8 --with-gs-font-dir=/usr/local/share/ghostscript/fonts
make
sudo make install
cd ..

sudo gem install rmagick


Deprec automatically creates the deploy group as part of it’s recipes.  I was stunned.  Upon looking for an hour or two I came across a ‘grep’ that deprec runs.  It runs “sudo -p ‘sudo password: ‘ grep ‘deploy:’ /etc/group || sudo /usr/sbin/groupadd deploy”.  This grep checks the /etc/group file for any occurances of ‘deploy’. My deploy user was named pd_deploy.  Users live in the /etc/group file under their group following the following convention:

group: user1,user2,user3

My /etc/group file contained the following:

admin:root,pd_deploy

Deprec found ‘deploy’ in my user, pd_’deploy’, and thought that the group already existed.  It therefore failed to create a new one and blew up when it was trying to change a group that did not exist.

To save yourself a lot of hassle, don’t have ‘deploy’ anywhere in your /etc/group file, meaning, don’t have a user with ‘deploy’ anywhere in the name.  So no ‘deployuser’ or ‘user_deploy’.

First step:

1. In the Virtual PC Console click ‘Settings’.
2. Click ‘Network’.
3. Change the ‘Adapter’ to the way you wish to connect to the internet, be it Wireless card or Ethernet card.

Second step:

1. Open Internet Explorer from the VPC Console.
2. Follow ‘Tools’ > ‘Internet Options…’ > ‘Connections’ > ‘Setup’
3. Follow ‘Next’ > ‘Connect to the Internet’ > ‘Set up my connection manually’ > ‘Connect using a broadband connection that is always on’ > ‘Finish’
4. Back in the ‘Connections’ tab select ‘LAN Settings’ and turn off the ‘Proxy server’ if it is ticked.

Thats it.

In Terminal.app:
cd /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS
./firefox-bin -ProfileManager

Sadly, instead of fixing the issue I assumed it was something with NetBean’s setup for webrick and decided to try “Instant Rails” which uses Mongrel instead of Webrick. This change was successful and now Upload Column works perfectly fine. If you know how to do this, go for it. I will paste my steps below.

1. Download Instant Rails at http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=904
   (note where you will run instant rails from… I just put mine in ‘C:/’)
2. Inside of NetBeans follow: TOOLS > OPTIONS > MISCELLANEOUS > RUBY
3. Change the ruby interpreter to you your Instant Rails folder… Mine looks like ‘C:\InstantRails\ruby\bin\ruby.exe’
4. Might have to download sync-stdio.rb and put it in your NetBeans Ruby IDE folder. Mine is ‘…/nbrubyide/ruby1/sync-stdio.rb’
5. Then Run Instant Rails
6. Install the appropriate gems in the ‘Ruby Console Window’ (Right click on the big ‘I’ in the system tray RAILS APPLICATIONS > OPEN RUBY CONSOLE WINDOW)
7. Update your database using phpMyAdmin (also via Instant Rails’ system tray)
8. In NetBeans Ruby IDE start your app

That should fix the “Not Found” error. Or at least it did for me. Let me know if I need to clarify anything else a little better. Thanks…