Monthly Archives: August 2009

Use touch to create empty files

By Ammon | Published: August 31, 2009

I find myself needing this all the time, especially when I’m doing a tutorial on something nerdy.
Create an empty file in the current directory from the command line:
$ touch filename

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Portrait finishing in Gimp

By Ammon | Published: August 26, 2009

I took some portraits of my co-workers in my DIY photography studio recently. I don’t have some essential equipment (like an external flash) so the shots were not as awesome as I knew they should be. Gimp to the rescue!
I found a brilliant tutorial on just this subject. Its written for Photoshop, [...]

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Animated GIFs are the future

By Ammon | Published: August 26, 2009

Its hard to be flashy on craigslist. Sure you can make your add one big image, but users need to cut and paste! So in the interest of usability and in the name of awesome, I give you the world’s sweetest animated GIF:

That’s right, it just don’t stop. Ever. Not even [...]

Posted in Animation, Gimp, Inkscape | Leave a comment

My Current Local Developement Environment

By Ammon | Published: August 4, 2009

Here’s my setup:

13″ Macbook 2-1 with 4GB Ram and 2.16mhz Dual Core processor
24″ Samsung HD flatscreen external monitor
Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope 9.04
Firefox 3.x with Firebug, YSLow, and CodeBurner
XAMPP for PHP, MySQL, and Apache
VirtualBox with 4 virtual machines: Windows XP with IE 6, 7,  and 8, plus OSX running Safari
Gimp and Inkscape for graphics
Gedit with snippets enabled [...]

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VirtualBox on Ubuntu Jaunty for Testing Internet Explorer in Windows

By Ammon | Published: August 4, 2009

I really loved using VMWare Fusion in OSX to test my webpages in Windows.  The power to just drag a whole Windows installation into the trash when it gets jacked up is intoxicating. Unfortunatly, Jaunty is still not supported by VMWare, and the bugs were just to much. Plus, I really didn’t like the [...]

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lftp is awesome

By Ammon | Published: August 4, 2009

I’ve been looking for a command line ftp utility that does tab completion and supports sftp. lftp is it! It comes pre-installed on Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty.
change directory: cd
change local directory: lcd
list directory contents: ls
list local directory contents: !ls
print local working directory: lpwd
Put a file: put filename
Put multiple files: mput filename1 filename2
Get a file: get [...]

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