Archive for Tech

Scheduled Maintenance This Weekend

// March 25th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech

My one long year with multiple site outages and high ping response times is almost over. I’ll be moving from Dreamhost to my old host – Netfirms. I would be moving my blog and a couple of other sites so people who do stop by once in a while expect some downtime over this weekend while I’m doing this. If everything goes as planned this should be a smooth and easy transfer.

CSS3 and A Few Things I Should’ve Know Before Today

// March 7th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech

With CSS3, which is currently under development, you don’t have to break an arm and a leg to get rounded corners. Yes I’m a big fan of rounded corners. Just include this in your css.

border-radius: 5px;

Google Chrome recognizes this out of the box. But on Firefox, which is my default browser, it doesn’t show up. A little more research gave me this.

Layout Engines used by different browsers:-

Gecko: Firefox

Webkit: Apple Safari & Google Chrome

KHTML: KDE Konqueror

Presto: Opera

So for rounded corners in Firefox just include this line in addition to the border-radius rule.

-moz-border-radius: 5px;

-webkit-border-radius: 5px;

That should take care of Firefox and the second line for webkit should take care of Safari. Frankly speaking, these are all the browsers that I really give a shit about.

Switch to Linux: Part 1

// February 24th, 2010 // No Comments » // Linux, Tech

UbuntuLogo

I’ve recently decided to try and switch completely to a Linux operating system. Partly because I like the idea of using open source software that is available for public scrutiny. Also because I wanted to start improving my Python.

As a part of this process I installed Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala in addition to my Windows 7 and started using it as my primary os. I’m known to be partial to Fedora but this time around I wanted to just go with Ubuntu owing to the humongous user base, which means better support information thats available out there.

Some of the issue I faced, in hope of receiving some excellent suggestions from the community of-course -

Issue 1: I have a Logitech MX Revolution multiple button mouse. Apart from the fact that the mouse is jittery all the time, the buttons are not detected by default. Installed btnx and enabled revoco for my mouse. Everything seems to be fine for now.

Issue 2: I’m partial to Photoshop and I use Illustrator on and off to design weird logo’s sometimes.

Issue 3: No Windows Live Writer replacement for Linux. None of the blog clients simple cut it. Even if MS wants me to pay for Live Writer, I probably would. It’s that good. Installed VirtualBox > Installed Windows XP > Installed Windows Live Writer.

Issue 4: Non existent Netflix support. I’m not a big fan/addict of Netflix but I do like watching movies instantly once in a while. But when I try to do that under Linux I get this rather unpleasant message – “Our apologies – streaming is not supported for your operating system.” Excuse me, but is that even correct English? shouldn’t it be “on your operating system”?

Issue 5: Old Firefox. It seems the Firefox build that is available in the Ubuntu repositories is almost always older than the current available Firefox. My version is 3.5.8 whereas the latest available version of Firefox is 3.6. If you need the latest Firefox you need to remove the one you have and get the latest from Mozilla. It’s imperative that I work with the latest version as 3.6 has the latest CSS, DOM and HTML5 support and I need those things since I’ve started working on those.

reCAPTCHA Installed On My WordPress Blog – Fuck You Comment Spam

// January 26th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech

Recaptcha_logoJust installed reCAPTCHA plugin for on my WordPress and it works and integrates “B E A Utifully” with my current theme and looks cool. A lot less work for my Akismet plugin now. Wonder how the two plugins would complement each other if at all.

Click to comment to see what I’m talking about.

Upload Any File to Google Docs

// January 20th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech

Google promised uploading any file format to Docs which is kind of like a backup network GDRIVE. It promised to roll out this feature in a couple of weeks. Hasn’t it been two weeks already and where is my option to upload any file? Another thing that they’re yet to deliver on is annotations for my Google Analytics.

google_docs_upload_any_file

Update 1: According to the Google blog post about this, not it hasn’t been 2 weeks yet. I was just getting impatient.

Update 2: Hope everyone has file upload on their Google docs by now. I just got mine yesterday. (01/24/2010)