Saturday, October 27, 2007

Installing Rails on Ubuntu using VMWare Server

I installed Ruby on Rails,I think ;), on a VMWare Server installation of Ubuntu 7.10 using the following tutorials.

To install VMWare Server and Ubuntu: http://cmsproducer.com/Ubuntu-Linux-Windows-VMware-Server

To install Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu: http://paulgoscicki.com/archives/2005/09/ruby-on-rails-on-ubuntu/

Total installation time took me about two hours from the start of downloading Ubuntu to finishing the last step.

Now let's see if I can figure out how to program Ruby on Rails.

My first jQuery bug

Update: Bug has been fixed/closed.

I submitted my first jQuery bug today,  I am pretty sure that it's a bug and not something I am doing wrong, but hey it wouldn't be the first time.

I was trying to use the new jQuery UI to add a drop shadow to a floating DIV. Unfortunately, I was not getting the results I was expecting.

Here is the test HTML I was using to recreate the bug:


<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head>
<title>Shadow Page Test</title>
<script src="jquery.js" type="text/javascript" language="javascript"></script>
<script src="jquery.dimensions.js" type="text/javascript" language="javascript"></script>
<script src="ui.shadow.js" type="text/javascript" language="javascript"></script>
<style type="text/css">
#Alert
{
position: absolute;
top: 200px;
left: 200px;
background-color: #ffffff;
width: 200px;
height: 200px;
padding: 10px;
font-weight: bold;
border: 2px solid #ff0000;
}
</style>
<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
$(document).ready(function () {
$(
"#Alert").shadow({ offset: 5, color: "#000000" });

});
</script>
</head>
<body>

<div id="Alert">
This is some Alert text!
</div>

</body>
</html>
Again I was using the Shadow pluggin from http://ui.jQuery.com but this is what I was getting:



Notice how the three different colored shadow layers line up under the div instead of stacked so it looks like a shadow?

Anyway I sent it into the bug tracker in jQuery, I am ticket number 1853.

Here are the files to recreate this bug. ui.shadow_bug.zip (17.71 KB)

Friday, October 12, 2007

A Visual Explaination of SQL Joins

Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror explains with visual Venn diagrams how joins work.  Even if you know how joins work it is still nice to see it in visual form.

Click here to see the joins.

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Click on your own Google Adsense links without breaking policy

Laurent Kempé writes:

If you are developing a site containing Google Adsense you might know that clicking on your own ad is not allowed.

To be able to test and click on your own ad and still follow Google AdSense Program Policies, just add following to your pages:

<script type="text/javascript">google_adtest = 'on';</script>

Don't forget to remove it on your production server! ;)

That's cool! The biggest worry of any Google Adsense participant is getting dropped from the program for clicking on your own links.

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Ze Frank

Not sure if you know who Ze Frank is but he is a pretty big internet celebrity (at least in my eyes) ... recently doing a year of video podcasts called the Show with Ze Frank.

http://www.zefrank.com

http://www.zefrank.com/theshow

Well anyways he was giving a speech at Rochester Institute of Technology tonight and I have been planning on attending since last month.

He's spoken at many TED Talks the one in 2003 is posted on Google Video and he actually gave a similar talk for part of his talk tonight.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1895918195820925057

As I was walking into the building he was walking out to which I introduced myself, shook his hand...really cool.

After the talk I went down and got into a discussion about online communities and how communities take off into the direction of their choosing ... all very interesting.

But I think what struck me the most was how approachable he was and easy to talk to.  I am sure he is quite used to it by now but I found that he was very easy to talk to and to ask questions.

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