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

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.

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!

Recently I’ve run into some issues with the way phpMyAdmin handles themes in the 2.10.x release. It appears that in 2.9.2 they changed the way some of the styles were set in the css files.

The result is that none of the themes that I regularly use, “Very small, and Arctic Ocean” look right. The most annoying thing is the tr.hover and tr.marker style are set so that when you browse data it makes the row text that your highlighting disappear. I know your saying why don’t you change the style in the css file? We’ll it’s not that simple, it appears that 2.9.2 made a lot of changes with regard to layout and themes. I can only guess that since none of the themes I use have been updated yet that the theme designers have found it a little difficult as well.

Generally I’m all for keeping up with the latest version in order to keep up with bug fixes and security patches but since the whole purpose of phpMyAdmin is to make it easier to manage your database and the data in that database, not being able to see the info in the row you selected is just not going to work.

So the version that I’ve found that works is 2.8.2.4

I’m hoping that the theme designers out there are working on getting their themes to work with the latest version of phpMyAdmin. Good Luck.

I’ve heard several complaints from first time Wacom users - frustrated with the stylus not performing like a pencil or other real mediums. My first question to those people is - “Have you adjusted your brush settings?” More often than not they say no … or say that they don’t know what to set there brush settings at. So, in an effort to educate I’m creating this little tutorial.

First things first. Locate your brush settings panel in Photoshop CS1 +. Window>Brushes (F5) Now that you’re in the brush settings panel you can follow the different configurations for brushes below:

My Favorite - Multi-Purpose Brush (click image to see full-size)

Sketching - #2 Pencil (click image to see full-size)

Well, that should get you started. Don’t be afraid to experiment a little with the settings for your desired results. Check back often … I’ll try to add more brushes to this list on a periodic basis.

Since I couldn’t find a good list anywhere else (insert sarcastic context here), here’s mine:

1. Google Browser Sync - syncs bookmarks, history, cookies, and passwords across multiple computers.
2. Add N Edit Cookies - edit cookies one at a time. Handy for development
3. ColorZilla - a handy color picking tool.
4. Firebug - edit and fiddle with css, html, javascript, etc. in any webpage.  A must have for any web developer.
5. Flashgot - pair this with your favorite download manager for easy downloading of multiple files.
6. Gmail Manager - toolbar to keep a watch on multiple gmail accounts.
7. IE View Lite - opens pages in IE for those websites that just don’t look right or work in Firefox.
8. ShowIP - shows the IP of the server to which you’re connecting in the address bar. Nice if you’ve messed with your host file and are unsure of which domain is pointing where.
9. Tamper Data - mess with any of the HTTP headers, cookies, or other form elements prior to posting back a web page. Always interesting to see what’s getting sent in a given web request.
10. Web Developer - I use this less now that I’ve found Firebug, but still gets plenty of use in my daily development activities.