I wanted to create a simple showcase of some work that I have done in the past few years. Sadly my “simple” idea ended up getting more and more complicated as I went on. In the end I think it turned out great. Hopefully my new site will function as a solid platform for me to advertise myself and my work.

About the design
For whatever reason, awhile back I decided I wanted to play around with some leather textures. I really liked the details in the material. Also, the stitching like you see in cars and such really jumped out at me. When I started playing with the logo and design I REALLY wanted to try and make it look embroidered. I poked around online for awhile and really never found any good suggestions on how to create such an illusion. My solution? Hand draw the thing! Every single “stitch” you see there was traced out. With my Wacom, it wasn’t to bad. Hopefully it looks pretty decent. Thoughts?

About the code
There isn’t a whole lot to say here. The site is valid XHTML 1.0 Strict, CSS, a dash of PHP (for the contact form), and of course good ‘ole JQuery for the pretty effects and AJAX content.

My next goal is to translate this static site into a Ruby on Rails application. As far as I know my host does not currently support RoR apps so I’m not sure how I’m going to share…

Anywho, take a look at my new digs and let me know what you think!

Enter LockTight. This fantastic[ly simple] preference pane provides the exact functionality we have all been looking for! The preference pane is available for both Intel and PowerPC architectures (disregard the filename, both panes on in that same archive). If you are rocking Snow Leopard check out this link for a newly compile version.

The only downside to LockTight is its requirement to use two modifier keys for you shortcut. I believe this is become of some limitation on how shortcuts work in Mac OS X combined with its potential conflict with existing shortcuts. Also, on the subject of WHAT shortcut to setup, I chose to use ⌘+⌥+x become of there proximity to each other. I liked that a little better than the default and have had no conflicts so far.

Hope this helps you out!

Microsoft quit developing IE for Mac way back around version 5.5. For me that creates a predicament when trying to fully test my work across all the most common browsers, the top of which is my nemesis Internet Explorer. You would hope that validating your code with W3 would be good enough to ensure consistent rendering across all the mainstream browsers, but experience has dictated otherwise.

Sure there are browser compatibility testing solutions out there, but more often than not these services become flooded and respond slowly to your requests. Additionally, they usually respond with screenshots which limit your debugging to what you can see only. Also, I found ies4osx, but I really feared that they may not provide a true representation of how it would look in IE under windows. Oh yeah, and it wouldn’t run on my computer…

I don’t know, maybe I’m old fashioned, maybe I’m inexperienced, but I like to bring up the source, make changes, and see how those changes are represented in the browser causing my problem. The good thing is between Mac OS X and Windows XP we can pretty much cover all our browser bases, BUT the big problem is the various version of IE that are in heavy use and Windows’ inability to install multiple versions together on one install of the OS. There are some potential ways of making this work, but I didn’t have much luck with them early on, and honestly I didn’t want to fool with Windows for any length of time.

SO here’s what I did. I downloaded VirtualBox from Sun Microsystems (VirtualBox is a great FREE computer virtualization software available for server platforms). I then created a VM with a base install of Windows XP SP2. I patched out the Windows install as far as I could WITHOUT updated IE past version 6 (!) and without installing SP3. This gave me a solid basic install of Windows with IE6 for testing my sites (~4.34 GB so far)

Step 2! At this point I would like a VM with IE7 and one with IE8. I figured I could just copy the VM’s virtual disk and create a new VM and I would be all set. The problem with straight copying the VM is VirtualBox serializes it’s virtual disks so it will not allow you to simply copy the “vdi” file without conflicting with your existing virtual disk. With a little research I came up with the command line utilities VirtualBox packages. Here is how to use it:

VBoxManage clonevdi [source] [dest]


Super simple! So I cloned it twice and updated / installed as needed so I would end up with three VMs: Window XP IE6, Windows XP IE7, and Windows XP IE8! (4.34 GB + 4.62 GB + 3.99 GB = 12.95 GB Total)

Ugh, the hard drive sacrifice for this method completely blows, but honestly this ended up being the easiest way for me to get good solid tests out of all the browsers I wanted.

Side note: If you already have VMs under Parallels and you’re looking to migrate to other solutions, I happened across this blurb about just that during my research. Maybe it will be helpful…

After many hours of combing the Internets and trying to cobble together a working model, I finally found the answer I had been seeking. That is the Holy Grail of CSS. The layout is brilliant and uses a sort of work around by making exaggeratedly tall columns and then hiding the excess with “overflow: hidden”. Perfect. Brilliant. Wonderful. Complete disaster in Internet Explorer.

At this time, I had a nice design and a solid layout that worked in pretty much every modern browser. That is except of course the (tragically) most used browser by percentage on the planet: Internet Explorer. At the time I looked around for a solution for awhile, but eventually backburnered IE compatibility. The harsh truth was that 80-90% of the people viewing this site would likely be using IE (some of which would even be version 6, but that is a whole other can of worms).

Finally I found an unexpectedly simple solution. Apparently there is a nasty little bug in our beloved IE that prevents “overflow: hidden” from functioning in divs that have their CSS position set to anything but relative. Looks like the bug started in IE6 and has “somehow” managed to survive two version revisions…

So this whole situation begs the question: What are they doing over there anyway?

Here a quick example page. Take a look at the source and CSS.

By way of a miracle, I ended up with a brand new white MacBook to give to my love. Since my proposal was impending at the time, I figured I would have to work the MacBook into the proposal. Obviously, setting a picture of the ring as a background would work, but having seen several others capture their proposals on camera, I immediately had the idea to capture it with the MacBook’s iSight!

I looked high and low for a command line program that would capture video from the iSight, but I had little luck. I did find isightcapture, but it only seems to support capturing single frames and forget about audio. VLC would capture video from the iSight and has a command line counterpart, but I couldn’t find any documentation on specifically capturing video with the iSight from the command line. Having little luck capturing video from the command line, I turned to AppleScript.

I considered trying to Automate Photobooth or iMovie to capture the video, but there were problems with both. At some point during my scouring of the Internet I found Iris. This program was relatively dated, but contained one key feature that would help me out. It had a shortcut key to automatically start recording video! ⌘+R (command + “r”) was just what I needed! Now all I needed to do was get Iris opened and send it the key combination. Enter AppleScript…

-- IrisActivateAndRecord1.scpt
tell application "Iris"
   activate
   tell application "System Events" to keystroke "r" using {command down}
end tell


That did it! The video starts recording. The next issue was hiding that the video was recording. The green camera “indicator” cannot be disabled (thank goodness…), but maybe I could at least have the application hidden and/or minimized so it doesn’t cover that all important picture of the ring.

-- IrisActivateAndRecord2.scpt
tell application "Iris"
   activate
   tell application "System Events" to keystroke "m" using {command down}
   tell application "System Events" to keystroke "r" using {command down}
end tell


That would minimize the sucker, but since it takes a bit to startup we needed a few delays. First we needed to way for the program to “initialize”. I decided to hide the initialization window and then attempt to minimize the camera window before any of the video feed showed. The script would then wait a bit more and start recording. Here is the final script.

-- IrisActivateAndRecord3.scpt
tell application "Iris"
   activate
   tell application "Finder" to set visible of process "Iris" to false
   delay 2
   activate
   tell application "System Events" to keystroke "m" using {command down}
   delay 3
   tell application "System Events" to keystroke "r" using {command down}
end tell


It will launch Iris if it is not already running (and bring it to the front if it is running). It will then immediately hide the application (i.e. hiding the initialization screen). After waiting 2 seconds, it will then bring Iris to focus again and minimize the application window. The script will then wait an additional 3 seconds for the camera to fully begin capturing video. Finally, the script will send the key combination to begin video recording. It works! But there’s more…

All this is great, but I have to get this thing to automatically start up with the computer. In hindsight, I could have just created an application out of the AppleScript and set it as a login item, but for whatever reason I didn’t think of this at the time. I decided to take the route of a launchd item and a BASH script. The script is dead simple.

#!/bin/bash
# Iris.sh
sleep 2
osascript ~/Desktop/IrisActivateAndRecord.scpt


The script sleeps for 2 seconds and then executes our wonderful AppleScript. The launchd file ended up being pretty darn simple as well.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/
PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
   <key>Disabled</key>
   <true/>
   <key>Label</key>
   <string>com.iamvery.inlove.Iris</string>
   <key>Program</key>
   <string>/Users/hayesj/Desktop/iris.sh</string>
   <key>RunAtLoad</key>
   <true/>
</dict>
</plist>


And there it is. The solution was pretty crude. If I really wanted to, I could have taken the time to research and develop a command line program that captures video directly from the iSight. This was a one time use deal for me, and as I see it, it worked well .

Check out the results!

I must say, I love this girl very much. She is my best friend, and it will be an honor to serve her as her husband for the rest of my life. We can’t wait for the wedding! Maybe you’ll be there!

Check out the video I caught of it all going down. It was recorded with the iSight on new laptop (check out how). The one she thought was my “big news” .

There are plenty of pictures and another video on my Facebook page. Check in the link out from the bottom of this page under “About”.

One of the most interesting parts of this update was their added “Document Connection” application. This application attempts to provide an interface for accessing documents on Microsoft’s Sharepoint and Live Workspace. Previously, the recommended way to use Sharepoint was via Internet Explorer. On a Mac, of course, you can only access IE in Windows and this has potential to lead to performance issues.

Though Document Connection is far from perfect, it does allow you to do some things that were before difficult or impossible from Mac OS X. With Document Connection you can edit Sharepoint documents without having to download, edit, and then re-upload them. First you must add a Sharepoint document library as a source.

You will then be able to “Edit” the library’s files “in place” as they appear in the library (assuming you have the proper permissions to do so). To edit a document, you must select the document you would like to edit and click the “Edit” button on the toolbar. If you would like to edit the item in a program other than the default you can right click the item and choose “Edit with…” from the context menu.

Document Connection also supports document “Check Out / In”. To do so, you simple choose the document you would like to check and either perform the action from the toolbar or the right click menu.

There is some functionality that you may expect, but for whatever reason is not supported by Document Connection. Firstly, there does not appear to be any way to delete documents from a Sharepoint library. The “Discard” option in the toolbar and right click menu is not used for deleting files. It is a way of essentially “throwing away” changes that you have made to a checked out item. The Edit > Delete menu item, though present, does not seem to function either. I would recommend working with a Safari or Firefox window opened to your document library so that you can delete files as needed.

Next, the “New File” item in the toolbar doesn’t seem to function the way you might expect. It seems to simply open an empty Word document so that you can start writing. There is does not seem to be a way of saving this document directly into Document Connection. To upload a new or existing file to a document library you have connected to, you can choose “Add File” from the toolbar and browse to your file’s location.

Another functionality that Document Control does not support is the editing of regular lists. If you try to add a list as a site source you will see bizarre, uneditable files something like the below screenshot.

Finally, I have found no way to create a new folder in a document library from within Document Connection. Again, my recommendation is to work with a browser window opened to your document library so that you can create and delete items as needed.

If you like to download this update, you can either get the update directly* from Microsoft with “Microsoft AutoUpdate”.

* Click “Finder” on the dock. Choose the menu item “Go > Go to Folder…” and paste “/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/MAU2.0/” into the dialog.

After realizing the intrinsic value of sharing information you have with the Internet, I decided that the Internet is so big that my little contribution would serve no purpose. Basically, I considered my knowledge pale in presence of everyone else in the world. This is probably true, but certainly does not pay me credit to the time and money I have spent to know what I know.

As I have continued through life, I have found begun to discover problems that are significantly harder to solve by simply referring to what can be found through search engines. I have spent many hours on one little problem, perhaps because I have not known how to properly search for the solution online, but just MAYBE I have discovered a problem that has not exhaustively been documented by anyone else!

I am going to try to take this as an opportunity to share the knowledge I have gained and the problems I have solved. Hopefully someone out there will find my frustrations useful…