Posted (Updated ) in Uncategorized

It seems OSX 10.9 comes with a “feature” (previously off by default) whereby after 2 minutes on battery (the default display off time) the machine goes to sleep. This of course kills the wi-fi resulting in constant dropping of SSH connections, reconnection to IM clients (spamming friends) and a host of other internet related issues. It was badly thought out, badly implemented and just an all around bad choice.

In previous iterations of OSX there were two sliders; one for how long before putting the computer to sleep and the other for putting the display to sleep. Here’s a screenshot of the Energy Saver options in 10.9. Noticed the two have been unhelpfully merged:

Energy Saver Preferences in OS-X 10.9

 

Fixing this behavior is thankfully very simple and requires only a single terminal command:

1
sudo pmset -a sleep 0

Here are my power management settings after the change:

$ pmset -g
Active Profiles:
Battery Power		-1*
AC Power		-1
Currently in use:
 standbydelay         10800
 standby              1
 halfdim              1
 hibernatefile        /var/vm/sleepimage
 darkwakes            0
 gpuswitch            2
 disksleep            10
 sleep                0
 autopoweroffdelay    14400
 hibernatemode        3
 autopoweroff         1
 ttyskeepawake        1
 displaysleep         2
 acwake               0
 lidwake              1

And with that you should be back to having a properly functioning laptop. If you ever need to revert the change for whatever reason, use:

1
sudo pmset -a sleep 1

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Posted (Updated ) in Uncategorized

I just installed Ubuntu 13.04 in Virtualbox 4.2.16 and found much to my annoyance that the VM thought my mouse was a little higher than it actually was:

Ubuntu thinks my mouse is a little higher than it actually is

It turns out this is caused by having 3D acceleration turned on in VM Settings – Display window. After doing a bit of sleuthing I came across a forum post on virtualbox.org with a command that did the trick nicely.

Simply open a terminal and run

VBoxManage setextradata global GUI/Customizations noStatusBar

Restart your VM and voila. Perfect mouse working with 3D acceleration!

Mouse Y-Axis working as it should

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Posted (Updated ) in Uncategorized

Disclaimer: The details of this post are shamelessly ripped from phatness.com. All credit to those guys, I just wanted a copy for myself for future reference.


On every OS ever, Home, End, Pg Up and Pg Down keys work like so:

- Home -> move the cursor to the beginning of the line
- End -> move the cursor to the end of the line
- Pg-Up -> move the cursor up the length of the viewport
- Pg-Dn -> move the cursor down the length of the viewport

But OSX in all its infinate wisdom decided that doesn’t make sense. Instead they should work like so:

- Home -> move (nothing, not even the cursor, just your view) to the beginning of the DOCUMENT
- End -> move (nothing, not even the cursor, just your view) to the end of the DOCUMENT
- Pg-Up -> move (nothing, not even the cursor, just your view) up the length of the viewport
- Pg-Dn -> move (nothing, not even the cursor, just your view) down the length of the viewport

Now I’m not one to criticise… but that’s stupid and anyone who likes it is stupid 😉

 

How to Fix

There’s a really useful open source utility out there called DoubleCommand which is highly recommended and I’m sure broadly used. If you want a non-application solution there are also some config files to edit to get the job done.

Most Applications

Create a file
/home/<username>/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict and add the following:

{
    "\UF729"  = "moveToBeginningOfLine:";
    "$\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfLineAndModifySelection:";
    "\UF72B"  = "moveToEndOfLine:";
    "$\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfLineAndModifySelection:";
    "\UF72C"  = "pageUp:";
    "\UF72D"  = "pageDown:";
}

Terminal

Terminal preferences

Terminal preferences

Open Terminal – Preferences – Settings – Keyboard. Edit each of the following setting their action to ‘send string to shell’.

Key		Escape Sequence
 
Home		\033[1~
End		\033[4~
Page Up		\033[5~
Page Down	\033[6~

Now open /home/<username>/.inputrc and add:

"\e[1~": beginning-of-line
"\e[4~": end-of-line
"\e[5~": history-search-backward
"\e[6~": history-search-forward
"\e[3~": delete-char
"\e[2~": quoted-insert
"\e[5C": forward-word
"\e[5D": backward-word
"\e\e[C": forward-word
"\e\e[D": backward-word
set completion-ignore-case On

Other notes

Restart your machine for changes to take affect. Restarting individual applications also works if you can’t restart for whatever reason. I hear Firefox needs its own changes – if you happen to know what those are comment below and I’ll add them in.

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Posted in Uncategorized

SublimeCodeIntel is perhaps the most useful and heavily installed package for Sublime Text but it’s also very difficult to get working. The most common issue people run into is the dreaded endless

Info: processing `PHP’: Please wait…

This can be fixed by navigating to the SublimeCodeIntel package directory and running build.sh. For build.sh to compile we first need to install two things: pcre and XCode Command Line Tools. Annoyingly this is around 1.6GB of files!

 

Installing XCode Command Line Tools

Head over here and click View in Mac App Store. Hit install and watch your progress in the Purchases tab.

Once installed open it up and go to XCode – Preferences – Downloads – Components and install Command Line Tools.

 

Installing pcre

This little script is required by the scintilla package of SublimeCodeIntel. First install MacPorts then run:

sudo port install autoconf
sudo port install pcre
sudo cp /opt/local/include/pcre.h /usr/include/

You’re done! Navigate to the SublimeCodeIntel package directory and run sh src/build.sh. If all goes well at the end of compilation you’ll see a done! message. Restart Sublime Text and you’re good to go.

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Posted (Updated ) in Uncategorized
Removed 'Clear Scrollback' shortcut

Removed ‘Clear Scrollback’ shortcut

This would have to be far and away the most annoying ‘feature’ of Pidgin.

In just about every web browser, Ctrl+L is used to highlight the URL bar allowing easy navigation via the keyboard. In pidgin it’s used to clear the scrollback of the active window. As a web developer I’m always hitting Ctrl+L in the browser however every now and then I won’t take notice to which window is active on my desktop at the time and use it while Pidgin is active, clearing out the conversation I’m having with my contact at the time. Frustrating!

There was a bug post here about it but as usual the devs don’t particularly care and instead just pointed to their FAQ page. For convenience here’s how you remove the shortcut:

Open ~/.purple/accels and change

; (gtk_accel_path "<PurpleMain>/Tools/Preferences" "<Primary>p")

to

(gtk_accel_path "<main>/Conversation/Clear Scrollback" "")

Remember to remove the semicolon at the start of the line!

 

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Posted (Updated ) in Uncategorized

One week from this post I will be publishing an update for my Banner Slideshows module for LemonStand which upgrades it to use the newly released Nivoslider 3. This will provide a few nice benefits however the implementation isn’t completely backwards compatible so your frontend code may need updating. Details inside.

What do I need to do?

Simply press the Update slideshow button on your slideshow page in the Administration:

Hit the update button indicated above

Hit the update button indicated above

Then remove your existing slideshow code on your sites frontend and follow the instructions on the marketplace page (to be updated when the module update is released) to add the new version.

How does this benefit me?

The biggest benefit is its new responsive design which resizes with your browser – making it easier to build sites that scale from a desktop monitor all the way down to a mobile phone. I’ve whipped up a live demo to see this feature in action. Open it up and resize your browser window. Notice the slideshow resizes with the window.

Also new in this version of the module is full HTML support for slide descriptions:

HTML support for slide descriptions

HTML support for slide descriptions

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Posted (Updated ) in Uncategorized

Creating custom widgets with the Widgets module for Lemonstand is a quick and painless process. Below, I’ll describe how to build a widget for Lemonstands Contact module. I’ll call this module Simple Contact Widget.

Download the completed module from my GitHub repo.

While this tutorial will go over everything you need to do to build a complete and working module, it would be very beneficial to also know the basics of module development, naming conventions and so on. Take a look at the documentation Developing LemonStand Modules if you haven’t already done so.

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Posted (Updated ) in Linux, Uncategorized

I’m currently working on a mobile version of an existing website utilizing the Responsive Web Design paradigm. One problem I instantly came across was a perplexing page width issue on Android. Even with a blank, HTML5 webpage, the page width was appearing at almost twice the width of my phones native resolution (and 2.5x that of my browsers width). For the record, I’m using Android 2.3.3 vanilla with the default browser on a Nexus One.

Firstly an example:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Untitled Document</title>
<script type='text/javascript' src='https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.2/jquery.min.js' />
<script type='text/javascript'>
	$(document).ready(function() {
		document.body.innerHTML = $(window).width();
	});
</script>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

The above code gives a blank, HTML5 webpage that will display the pages width on load. When loaded, it would print ‘800’ on the screen – indicating the page was set to an 800px width. This was clearly wrong.

I quickly noticed that using the following doctype:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD XHTML Mobile 1.0//EN" "http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/xhtml-mobile10.dtd">

gave me the width I was expecting – 320px. Obviously this isn’t an acceptable solution for responsive web design and so another was needed. Meet viewports. With the addition of a simple META tag I was able to fix the issue (albeit losing the ability to zoom in the process). Simply add the following to your HEAD tag and you should be good to go:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; minimum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;" />

With this line added, my page now prints 320 to the screen as it should.

For more information, please see this StackOverflow post on the issue.

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Posted (Updated ) in Uncategorized

I’ve been frustrated for a while now at Chromes lack of a decent Amazon S3 extension. Firefox has S3Fox but the closest Chrome users come is S3 which only lets you browse and not modify the files in your buckets. Well that’s just changed!

Over the weekend I finally gathered up enough free time to add support for creation and deletion of files/buckets. While I was in there I made a few other modifications to improve performance and clean things up a bit.

Download the latest version (and the source: Github repo)

Adding a bucket
Adding a bucket
Deleting a bucket
Delete link when hovering over buckets
Adding files
Multi-select file browser for uploading files
Uploading Files
The uploading window
File delete
The confirmation you see when deleting files
Deleting a bucket with files in it
Error you see when attempting to delete a bucket with files in it

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Posted (Updated ) in Uncategorized

If you’re paginating your data and have tens or hundreds of pages, chances are you’d prefer only a subset of these be displayed in your page number list (example – see page list at bottom). Django-paginator gets 90% of your work done for you however it doesn’t support this one very useful feature. To make a developers life easier, meet flynsarmy_paginator!

flynsarmy_pagination
flynsarmy_pagination in action

 

Download it here.

This app is a simple subclass of django’s built in Paginator and Page classes. The only changes I’ve made are to add an optional adjacent_pages parameter to FlynsarmyPaginator and a .page_range_data variable to the FlynsarmyPage object with the following contents:

  • page_range – same as Paginator.page_range – a list of page numbers but only showing a subset of pages if adjacent_pages was specified in the FlynsarmyPaginator constructor.
  • show_first – Boolean value set to True if ‘1’ isn’t present in the page_range list above.
  • show_last – Boolean vlaue set to True if the last page isn’t present in the page_range list above.

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