I was getting no sound on my headphones or external speakers on my MacBook 2-1 until I found this post:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/201957
Follow these steps by Polera:
1. Right click on volume control.
2. Click ‘Open Volume Control’
3. Go to Edit –> Preferences
4. Check off ‘Surround Sound’
5. Close Preferences
6. Un-mute ‘Surround Sound’
7. Plug in headphones
For whatever reason, sometimes the transparent parts of PNGs appear darker in Safari than in other browsers. You can fix it by removing all the color correction metadata from the images with pngcrush:
pngcrush -rem gAMA -rem cHRM -rem iCCP -rem sRGB InputFile.png OutputFile.png
pngcrush is a command line tool that optimizes (read: makes smaller) PNG images. You can find out more about it on Wikipedia. I use it on OSX via MacPorts.
For normal PNG optimization, I actually prefer to use OptiPNG because it can optimize a whole directory of images with a simple command:
optipng ./*.png
OptiPNG overwrites the existing files with the new smaller files without any loss in quality. Good deal! Fast, easy, awesome. To bad it can’t remove that stupid color correction data though.
I’m working mostly in Ubuntu now a days, and its been a joy since I discovered (read: desperately scoured the earth for) these fantastic applications that give me all the workflow magic I take for granted in OSX.
A very fast and extensible launcher that does all the stuff I use Quicksilver for in OSX. If you’re not using a launcher, you are wasting time.
Gedit is an understated program with unlimited potential. In that way, its the Preview of Ubuntu (even though its nothing like Preview). Actually, its the TextMate of Ubuntu if you turn on Snippets in the preferences.
Not strictly Ubuntu, but I use it constantly. Even though I haven’t been building websites recently, I often use it to quickly reformat webpages on the fly so they work better in the size of window I want to view them in.
This is enough to make me question my allegiance to OSX altogether. Sticky windows, in fact all the X window behavior is truly excellent. I can easily set up my desktop using every inch of available space and I don’t have to look for anything hidden behind some window because it’s all right there. In comparison, when I’m in OSX my desktop is a mess. What is with only allowing window resizing on one corner!? That’s just foolish.
Spaces in OSX is unusable, because in Macland you open a program once and all other instances of that program are just windows of that original program. Try using Gimp in Spaces, I dare you. In Ubuntu, each window is its own independent program, so virtual desktops can be completely separate from each other. This is the only way to go. I can have Gimp spread out over one desktop, Inkscape on another; terminal, gedit, and Firefox open on a third and I’ve got everything I ever need for design and development at my fingertips. Its ideal. Its clean. I love it.
I have been working in Ubuntu a lot lately and really loving it. OSX may be prettier, but as far as workflow, nothing beats Ubuntu. I upgraded to the newest distro, 9.04 and had a few issues that I just got ironed out.
After I finished the upgrade and installed 9.04, things were a bit wonky. The mouse was slow and choppy. Eventually I found this post on the VMware forums:
http://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2009/04/ubuntu-904-on-vmware-fusion-2.html#comments
Check out the third from last comment by 11. Here’s the gist:
In the terminal, type:
sudo apt-get remove xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse
and then
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse
That’s it!
Before the upgrade, I had a folder in /mnt/hgfs/Public that is shared with my Public folder in OSX. After the upgrade, it was gone. So I found this guy’s post:
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/208507
I read the instructions carefully, installed his patch script and viola! I’m back in business.
Thank you so very much helpful people for posting your knowledge online for the rest of us. You make free software usable.
Hard to admit because they’re so cheesey, but emoticons are useful. Ever want to say something pithy in an email without sounding curt? Emoticon smiley to the rescue!
See, its really easy to mistake someone’s tone in an email, particularly a short one. So save a couple of exclamations points 
(I feel dirty for some reason)
There are examples of flexible layouts that work, but they do not have flexible columns of text, they have static width columns that move when the window is resized. So when the window is wide, the content fills in that space, when the window is narrow, the page gets long and narrow. These sites are great because they take advantage of screen real estate without compromising usability. I’ve seen some great examples that I’ll post as soon as I find them again.
There is only a narrow range at which text is nice to read. I use a max of about 80 characters and a minimum of about 25 characters. Any bigger or smaller and the text doesn’t flow right or is hard to track with you’re eye. So if your text is flexible, you will always have to set a min-width and the max-width. IE6 has trouble with both of these, and besides why go to all the extra trouble of making a flexible layout when it can’t really be all that flexible?
I’ve been learning Python recently and for whatever reason Python web designers love flexible layouts. So I’ve got a browser window with the tutorial taking up 1/3 of my monitor, my text editor in the middle 1/3 and a terminal window and browser window for testing open in the last 1/3. This is a great setup for most things on my widescreen monitor, but because the python tutorial uses a flexible text column that is sandwiched between the navigation sidebar on the left and an add on the right, I’m only getting about 100px of text even though the window 800px wide. I think the aim of flexible layouts is to give the user a choice in how the content is viewed, but this forces me to always view the navigation and the add, while squishing the content down to almost nothing.
My final beef with flexible text columns is when I have to resize my browser window the part that I was reading gets pushed off the viewable part of the page. Now I have to go find my place again. This bugs me.
As a nerd, I’m drawn to difficult technical problems. Flexible layouts are hard, so every time I start a new website I ask myself should I make this a flexible layout? Well, no, I shouldn’t. Good to have that one figured out.
I do not want to hear your music. Not on your ringtone, not on your voicemail message, not on your website and especially not in place of your ringer when I call you. It does not make me think you’re clever, I am not impressed buy your taste. It doesn’t even matter if I like the song, if its playing when I didn’t choose to hear its just annoying. And rude.
If I am lucky this “replace everything that makes noise with a pop song” is just a phase, like hammer pants. Soon it will go out of fashion and we’ll all hide the photographs of us doing it. Just because something can be done does not mean it should be done.
Snippets are extremely useful feature of Gedit that make it usable for TextMate fiends like myself. They work exactly the same as in TM: in Gedit go to Edit -> Preferences -> Plugins and put a check next to “Snippets”. Now open, say, an html file, type body and press TAB. Gedit will automatically fill in the whole body tag complete with closing tag and your cursor conveniently resting in the id argument ready to fill in a value.
Here’s a list of all the Snippets for html files. They are listed by tag names, with the TAB trigger in paratheses. These will only work in html files, other files have different snippets.
I just completed adding all of my posts from my previous blog at http://likesalmon.wordpress.com to this blog. I haven’t even read all of my original posts but I can tell you that there are some factual errors and naivete that I am not taking responsibility for. Use at your own risk, there is some stupid shit in there.
My design/development education has taken me in some directions that I didn’t count on. For instance, that Flash phase? Never went anywhere. Seems to work for some people, but I lost interest like immediately. Do I regret that? Not really. Flash is useful in some instances (see kuler for an excellent example) but mostly its just a bunch of crap (see Flash scroll bars, user interfaces, and slideshows). Besides, most of the time the same things can be achieved with JavaScript.
I’m not a total hater. I appreciate that Flash opened up web design to designers who would not otherwise have embraced the web due to technical limitations. Like it or not, the common JavaScript versions of Flash-esque visual effects came after Flash had been doing it for a long time. And good visual design helps usability and makes the web a nicer place to hang out in.
The final nail in the Flash coffin? None of the designers I look up to use it. Jason Santa Maria, Khoi Van, Andy Clarke, Cameron Moll - these guys make incredible things and none of them use Flash. And that pretty much does it for me.
Originally posted on 10/25/08 at http://likesalmon.wordpress.com
Turns out the width and height properties only work on anchor tags when used in conjunction with display:block. WTF?
So this does not work:
a { width: 100px; height: 100px; }
But this does:
a { width: 100px; height: 100px; display:block; }
Again, have I seriously never run into this before? Do I always just give up and work around this problem? Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.