Alex Jones: Web Technologist, Barbecue Acolyte, Information Junkie, Austinite

Nihilism is best done by professionals.

“Nihilism is best done by professionals.”
Iggy Pop

Posted in Quotes & Toasts

Server Resurrection

The server hosting my various domains, including this one has had major issues over the last few weeks, often losing its electronic consciousness for long periods at a time. Hopefully those days are past, as the entire machine has been replaced except for the hard drive, which is only a few weeks old. So, if you have sent me something and I haven’t responded, please write me back. If you have had problems with an account I set up for you on one of my domains, you should be good to go.

I should start posting to the site more frequently, now that the problem has been resolved. Hopefully I can distract you from the work you should be doing every so often.

Posted in General

Some Days…

This is one of those days that I almost wish I had hair, just so I could pull it out in frustration.

No, my beard doesn’t count.

Posted in General

Rest in Peace Francis Crick

As reported by CNN Francis Crick, who co-discovered the structure of DNA died today. “British-born Crick won the Nobel Prize for his work on DNA’s structure, which he studied in 1953 along with Watson at Cambridge University.” The BBC provides a write-up as well: Man who helped unlock DNA dies.

His work with partner James Watson is directly responsible for a vast array of advances in science and medicine. All too often, people like professor Crick are forgotten, if ever even recognized by the public, who spend far too much time adoring actors, musicians and athletes.

Posted in General

Reply Header in Thunderbird

Sarah Sweeney posted a tip to the eVolt list which I have found very helpful. One of the few annoyances I have had with Mozilla Thunderbird, my e-mail client of choice, is the fact that it doesn’t include the date of the original message when replying. So, when I replied to people, it would place the text “John Doe wrote:” before their message instead of “John Doe wrote on July 28, 2004:”. Sarah’s tip describes how to easily modify that reply header to list whatever you so desire, all you need to do is add the following code to your user.js:

// Change the reply header
// 0 - No Reply-Text
// 1 - "[Author] wrote:"
// 2 - "On [date] [author] wrote:"
// 3 - User-defined reply header. Use the prefs below in conjuction
// with this:
user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_type", 3);

// If you set 3 for the pref above then you may set the following
// prefs.
user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_authorwrote", "%s wrote");
user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_separator", " ");
user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_ondate", "on %s");
user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_colon", ":");
// The end result will be [authorwrote][separator][ondate][colon]

Make sure that you are not running Thunderbird while making these changes. One note, if you don’t have a user.js file in your profile folder, create one as a blank text file and place this code in it.

Posted in Technology

Group Warns DVRs Endangered

Wired has a good story covering the fight against the FCC’s broadcast flag mandate [PDF] which would limit future video technology and put the rights of the television watcher (us) thoroughly in the control of the media industry: Group Warns DVRs Endangered. Read my previous post for more information about the DTV Liberation Front.

Posted in Law & Government & Tagged: dvr, fcc, law, television

Fixed Positioning

Anne van Kesteren provides a great CSS positioning resource on his (yes, his) site, simply titled Fixed positioning. If you are a Web designer/developer working with, or learning CSS, I highly recommend you look at his examples, as they may open your eyes to some layout possibilities that you may not be aware of.

Posted in CSS

OS X Broken Drag and Drop

Sarah’s Mac recently decided that it wasn’t going to allow her to drag icons around her desktop or use the cursor to move objects within Adobe Illustrator. After a good bit of searching via Google, and browsing through Mac OS X Hints, I determined that the problem was due to the fact that coreservicesd, the process responsible for dragging and dropping, wasn’t starting when the computer booted up. So, after I tried a ton of different possible solutions, none of which worked, I finally came across the article OS X Odyssey 431 - More Nickling And Diming From Apple and Checking Out XDock Dock Utility which provided these instructions from MacFixIt reader Kevin Grant that actually solved the problem:

I have discovered the cause in my case: ‘coreservicesd’ never starts, and this might happen if the file /var/run/StartupItems/coreserviced.run already exists. This is an empty placeholder file, which apparently (if coreservicesd crashes) never gets removed.

After deleting the placeholder file, we rebooted the Mac and were pleased to find that drag and drop works again. An easy solution that was hard to find.

Posted in OS X

A great part of the information I have…

“I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way.”
Franklin P. Adams

Posted in Quotes & Toasts

It’s in the Error Log Stupid

When getting frustrated by code that should work, remember to look at the error log, it may help you avoid losing an hour and a half (or more) of your life to a simple problem.

Trust me on this.

Posted in Web Development