My Geek Notes

I learned a few new things about the Javascript Date object today:

1. When using this constructor: new Date(year, month, day);, month is 0 based. So, if you want to create a date object for September 30, 2007, it would look like this: new Date(2007, 8, 30);
2. It’s far better to use a completely different constructor - one that takes a date string, parses it, and returns a valid date object. So like this: new Date('9/30/2007'); will generate September 30, 2007.

Well, I’ve had a little free time here in “NorCal” – and I’ve spent some of that free time messing around with Art Rage 2. I’m continually being impressed by the programs ease of use and it’s robustness. When you first sit down with Art Rage 2 - I’d suggest you take the time to read the keyboard shortcuts and even edit them if you’re so inclined.

After you’re comfortable with where things are – practice with the different tools and adjust the controls of each tool to get a feeling for what can be accomplished. Personally I like to use the paint brush with 50% pressure, 65% thinners & 80% loading. Those settings simulate gauche or a thick watercolor.

I still can’t believe this program is only $20 bucks!? I’ve found it to be most enjoyable!

Anyway, below is an image entitled “A Northern California Summer” that I painted in 30 - 45 minutes with Art Rage 2.

Take care,
Ikeman

I can’t help but get really excited about XMBC getting a Linux port. I’ve got a modded XBox that I use to play a variety of media formats: XVID, DVD, MP3, MP4, etc. It’ll even act as a karaoke machine if you have CDG files to go along with MP3 files. The fact that it’s getting ported to Linux means that without a serious amount of effort (unlike most things with Linux) I can get a simple media PC setup that’ll run just about anything I want - at least, that’s the dream, right?

Recently, I’ve been using Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server (TFS) for source control. Both my last job and my current job use it and as a Microsoft developer, and so, whether I like it or not, I expect to see a lot more of it in the future; but that’s really beside the point. Microsoft’s diff / merge tool simply isn’t adequate. It highlights the differing line just fine, but it’s not smart enough to tell me what’s different.

Years ago, I started looking around for a good solution and found KDiff. It’s an open source project hosted on Source Forge. It’s a wonderful piece of software that does exactly what you’d expect it to do. It even tells you if the only difference on a given line is just spacing (which typically has zero impact on code execution).

I wanted it to integrate with TFS nicely without having to work around it and found the necessary command-line paramters to feed to TFS:

Compare:
%1 %2

Merge:
%1 %2 -o %4

So to make them work with TFS, open Visual Studio, go to Tools -> Options and under the Source Control -> Visual Studio Team Foundation Server tree, click “Configure User Tools. . .”. That’s where the magic happens.

That’s pretty much it. It makes dealing with different files, concurrent checkouts, and other issues related to development and source control so much better.

Found this interesting map of Linux distributions today. I’m sure this doesn’t include them all, but it was interesting nonetheless.

I was browsing around the other day and found that Thunderbird 2 had been released. I’ve been casually checking the mozilla site ever since I noticed that Thunderbird 2 was in beta. My current version of Thunderbird had not yet detected the upgrade but I thought what the heck I’ll give it a try.

Some of the new features like improved searching, custom message tagging, and advanced folder views, are really nice. Since on occasion TB on WinXP crashes, I was also hopping for an overall stability improvement, as well.

After I installed the new version, which was painless by the way, I noticed a rather annoying issue. All new messages in my Inbox were already marked read even though I had not opened the Inbox and had not read any messages. I started to look a little closer and the messages appeared to come in as un-read but then change almost immediately. After searching Google and the Thunderbird forums I found a few posts where others had the same issue. The forum posts had attributed it to the filtering rules.

After messing with the rules, turning them off etc. I still had the issue. Then I noticed that every time the message alert pops up the messages that appeared in the alert were getting marked read. One of the new features in the 2 version is that when a new message is received an alert pops up and tells you about the new message then disappears. The new pop alerts contain more message information, including a message preview, than they did the past versions. Yep you guessed it the message preview was marking the message as read when the alert was fired off.

The fix turned out to be pretty simple, don’t show message preview text in the alerts. To disable this setting open Thunderbird, Click on the Tools menu in the menu bar then click on Options under Tools. In the Options window, select the General Tab and click the Customize button next to the Show an alert checkbox. In the Customize New Mail Alert window, un-check the Message Preview Text checkbox and click the OK button. Click the OK button to close the Options window. That’s it, now you’ll still get the message alerts minus the preview and the message will not be marked read until you read it or mark it read yourself.

This is an update to a post I made about how the themes are broken in phpMyAdmin 2.10.x.

While getting a new development environment setup I thought I would check to see if any progress had been made to update some of the themes I use for phpMyAdmin. I found that the following themes have been updated and the version it works with:

The one I use the most:
Very small PMA-Version 2.7 - 2.10

Others that I usually download:
Arctic Ocean PMA-Version 2.9 - 2.10
Grid PMA-Version 2.9 - 2.10
Silk PMA-Version 2.10
Paradice PMA-Version 2.10

The updated themes can be found here

After searching and searching for some sort of solution to fix the crashing that happens with Firefox on Linux when exiting a page with Flash 9 content, I finally found a good workaround that will get me by until someone at Mozilla or Adobe gets it fixed for good. I found this solution while digging through a couple of threads on some message boards. Once I saw it posted a couple of times I figured I’d give it a try myself, and go figure, it’s working!

1. Open up a browser window to some web page that has Flash 9 content on it - Yahoo, Digg, MSN, CNN or whatever - they all have ads in Flash (most times).
2. Move that browser to another desktop or minimize it - make sure not to close it.
3. Open a new browser and use that as your primary browser.

The key seems to be that when you close the only page with Flash on it, it crashes and kills Firefox at the same time. If you have another browser window open then it keeps the Flash alive there and anything you open or close on your primary window doesn’t crash. Simple and stupid, but I’m game until someone finds something better.

ArtRage 2 is a free digital painting application that allows you to use a handful of tools that mimic the real thing. The free version let’s you save and print as much as you’d like. Pay $20 bucks and you’ll gain a few extra tools with the ability to edit and fine tune those tools… not to mention several other features that are disabled in the free version.

If you don’t want to drop several hundred dollars on Painter X yet still want that real media look and feel than this is the software for you!

I played around with ArtRage 2 a little last night and was very impressed!

I’ve been using Linux (Slackware w/ Fluxbox) as my primary desktop OS for the last couple of years and continue to tweak it to perfection adding or modifying apps. I’ve done the same thing with my Windows (XP Professional) laptop over the same time period as I use both Linux and Windows for work in testing how websites render across browsers and platforms.

This last week I’ve been looking into a solution to my number one annoyance with Windows - the lack of a decent terminal/shell app. The command prompt doesn’t even come close to what I can do with Aterm or Xterm on my Linux box. When I SSH onto a server I can use Putty, sure, but even that is lacking in the stylistic options.

The solution - Cygwin. I printed the 66 page manual with the intention of tweaking it to do what I need, but my primary reason for installing it was to get Xterm and OpenSSH installed so I can finally have a decent terminal/shell app on Windows. The initial install does not include either Xterm or OpenSSH, but has a lot of the other core tools for Linux. Here’s the simple set of steps I used to do the install.

1. Go to http://www.cygwin.com/ and download the setup.exe file (the “Install or update now!” link).
2. Run the setup.exe file and walk through the wizard - I left everything default except for the “Download Site” where I chose ftp://mirrors.xmission.com because it’s the closest one to my location.
3. On the select packages step expand the “Net” section and click on “openssh: The OpenSSH server and client programs” (it will select other required packages for you like “openssl: The OpenSSL runtime environment” right below it along with any others in other sections).
4. Also, on the select packages step expand the “X11″ section and click on “xterm: Xterm - X terminal” (again, it will select other required packages for you).
5. Click Next to proceed.
6. On the last step check the 2 boxes to “Create icon on Desktop” and “Add icon to Start Menu”.
7. You should now have a Cygwin shortcut icon on your desktop, clicking it will bring up a command prompt and create some default files then put you at the prompt line for your input.
8. type startx at the prompt, hit enter, this will open up the xterm window where you can type ssh blah, blah, blah.
9. Any time you want to install other apps, just run the setup.exe file again and add or remove your apps - super easy!

I’ll be adding some more tweak instructions as I work my way through the manual and install some more of the apps that are available. There is even the option of getting Gnome and KDE working under Cygwin - check out those options with the following links.

For Gnome - http://cygnome.sourceforge.net/
For KDE - http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/

I’d love to hear about your installs, setups, and tweaks.