Creating customized Mac icons for your folders, files, and applications is very easy – the most difficult part is ensuring that you have the right tools for the job. But hey, that’s why I’m here. 🙂 I’ve done the research to find the best ways to create your own customized Mac icons. Here’s a little tutorial on a couple methods that I have personally tested and confirmed.
Daniel J. Choi Articles.
I was recently doing some prototyping with Laravel, the self-proclaimed “PHP Framework for Web Artisans”. Â It seems to be gaining quite some traction within the framework community, and it boasts some cool features such as dependency injection via an Inversion of Control container and a groovy command-line interface called Artisan. Â Even better, the framework documentation is clearly written, detailed enough to dig beneath surface level, and (most importantly) it works.
Laravel ships with its own home-brewed ORM called Eloquent (based on the Active Record pattern), but I wanted to see how easy or difficult it would be to integrate another popular ORM, Propel, into the framework.  This would be an important consideration if a project were already using Propel with another framework, but wanted to transition to Laravel without having to rewrite its data mappings.  I found a solid post online that outlined an integration for Laravel 4 and Propel 1.6, but Propel is now in version 2 so some steps were no longer accurate.  I ended up figuring my way around the integration, and wanted to share my notes in this post.
I’ve been doing some development in jQuery Mobile, and though it’s still in Alpha, it’s a great library. That said, there are still some serious bugs in it and some other less than ideal things happening. In any case, working with jQuery Mobile has certainly helped my debugging skills along.  🙂  One of the toughest issues that almost had me pulling out my hair was figuring out how to wrap text in a jQuery Mobile list.  Read on for the fix.
For my final project in Computer Science 175: Intro to Graphics, I created a maze game with a buddy of mine. Click here for the project website – you can check out screen shots and even download the source if you’re interested!
Coda ships with syntax highlighting support for a lot of great languages, but some are noticeably left out of the mix. I was recently helping a buddy set up an environment to develop C programs on an external server, and while Coda seemed a clear better alternative to using Nano (particularly since we could still compile and run the programs from Coda’s built-in terminal), the program lacked syntax highlighting for the C language.
Adding highlighting for C (and a host of other languages) turned out to be pretty easy.
To add support for other languages, download this zip file, unzip, and copy the Modes folder into Contents > Resources of the Coda package distribution. To access the contents of the package, right click on the Coda application and select “Show Package Contents”. Then navigate to Contents > Resources.
If you are asked, overwrite existing folders and files. Note that if you only want to install certain syntax highlighting modes, just copy and paste what you need (of the .mode files in the downloaded Modes folder) into the Modes folder in the Coda package. I forgot which languages were standard to Coda so I’ve just included all of the ones I have in the download.
Here’s a list of MIME Types for Office 2007 files (those pesky files extensions that end with an x). Useful for file type checking in web applications and the like.
- .docm – application/vnd.ms-word.document.macroEnabled.12
- .docx – application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document
- .dotm – application/vnd.ms-word.template.macroEnabled.12
- .dotx – application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.template
- .potm – application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.template.macroEnabled.12
- .potx – application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.template
- .ppam – application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.addin.macroEnabled.12
- .ppsm – application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.slideshow.macroEnabled.12
- .ppsx – application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.slideshow
- .pptm – application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.presentation.macroEnabled.12
- .pptx – application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation
- .xlam – application/vnd.ms-excel.addin.macroEnabled.12
- .xlsb – application/vnd.ms-excel.sheet.binary.macroEnabled.12
- .xlsm – application/vnd.ms-excel.sheet.macroEnabled.12
- .xlsx – application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet
- .xltm – application/vnd.ms-excel.template.macroEnabled.12
- .xltx – application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.template
I’ve been very busy developing a couple projects over the past couple days, but here is a quick little trick to get around one of Drupal’s quirks. If you’re unfamiliar with Drupal, it’s a fantastic CMS (content management system) built on PHP and MySQL. For those blog-savvy among us, it is to general websites what WordPress is to blogs. I use Drupal to get sites up quickly and with great functionality, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is looking to build powerful, custom websites without “re-inventing the wheel.”
Anyway, Drupal has this strange quirk in its source that creates a small grey border on the top of tables inserted in a page’s content. Â A quick trip to my inspector revealed how to remove the top border from Drupal tables. Â Simply add the following line to your CSS.
body tbody { border-top: none; }
All there is to it. 🙂
I recently had to code a little web application that would interface with a MySQL database and display data on a webpage via PHP MySQL queries. The application had to support many international languages – the most difficult of which to deal with was Russian. Many forums suggested changing my character encoding to CP-1251, which is a standard Russian encoding in Windows. I needed support for all international languages, though, and using multiple character encodings wasn’t a headache I wanted to get myself into. It turns out that you can display all these characters using a UTF-8 encoding, provided you get the PHP and MySQL right. Â Read on to find out how to display Russian and other languages with PHP and MySQL.
One of the most common challenges any web designer faces is ensuring that their work appears as intended. Print designers have the advantage of creating the physical designs themselves, but web designers depend upon user environments (read, browsers) to render their designs correctly.
In the past, browsers could only render the fonts already installed on a user’s computer, which meant that users without a good library of fonts would miss out on designs that made use of uncommon fonts. CSS 3 introduces a new fix called @font-fact that could be the future of web design typography.Â