Bronius Motekaitis - Web

DDB - a Drupal DDB Builder for building distributions on the fly

bronius — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 21:56:38 -0400

Ok, this is an unfair cross-post, but it's my cross-post, so comment where you will.. Either way, you'll have to wade through the copious collection of spam comments before I see it and approve... What's this about captcha?

Here's what I posted on lullabot after listening to a great podcast:

Because all good projects need a name, I would start there: DDB ("Drupal DDB Builder").

Dog Licks Screen Clean Flash Screensaver

bronius — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 22:20:40 -0500

I tried and tried to keep it low-key on the down-low but my favorite email service gmail refused to let me send to me and my small circle of friends this executable, so here it is on my website instead.

Attached to this post is a downloadable screensaver of a pugsley (sp) puppy dog licking the monitor from the inside of the computer. Adorable. But I'd have kicked it outside if I caught a mangy mutt doing that to my 24" Dell flat panel!

I take no credit for the awesomeness that is this video clip; I just used MDM Zinc to wrap it in a .scr screensaver and .exe windows installer. If you'd like it for the Mac, not sure I can help ya there... enjoy!

What the Font Worked the First Time

bronius — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 21:35:52 -0500

Well, I might be exposing my weakness as a designer by not immediately recognizing the ollowing font:

which is a title graphic for the intro flash to the Herrick Goldman Lighting Design website whose font I was asked to identify. It is used on the "inherited flash" intro for which I had no source .fla.

I took a screenshot with the free version of Gadwin Printscreen and saved it as a png, headed over to What the Font, stepped through the short wizard and was amazed at how simple the process and accurate the result was right off the bat. I included in my screenshot of the What the Font results screen (below) the text at the bottom with two suggested paths to get expert human help in the event that the right font was not automatically identified.

Why I didn't attend BarCamp-Texas

bronius — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 10:31:13 -0500

In our community, we have a relatively new geek/designer meet-up called Refresh BCS. The organizers of the same put on a Barcamp
this past weekend, but I didn't attend. Here's why...

(more to come... stubbed for my friend Google in the meantime ;) )

Gmail keeps getting better. New alert tells me Firefox is slowing down my session.

bronius — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 11:26:49 -0500

ok, I mistitled my url on purpose.. But I thought either way it's clever that based on my browser, they knew to toss up an alert tailored to me and my preferred web browser suggesting tips on how to speed up my gmail session. See screenshot:

Upon closer inspection, they actually sniffed out my use of Firebug plugin always running. They recommend disabling Firebug for gmail. I suppose it would be a good practice, in general, to just enable firebug for specific sites I'm working with-- what a novel idea..

Web PrintSmart 2.0 - printing entire or only snippets in one print spool / queue / job

bronius — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 12:02:12 -0400

I was stuck with the dilemma of printing out an entire website for complete overview review, but I didn't want to waste a Lot of paper (only a little). A coworker found a helpful blogpost to get me part of the way, and a comment within gave me the real answer: Web PrintSmart 2.0: HP IE plugin to print an entire or select snippets of an entire website (or web browsing session) in a single print job. In effect, it allows you to queue up small screen shot clips and then print only the ones you choose all from one convenient interface!

Philadelphia Orchestra broadcastst live via Internet 2 to select remote sites

bronius — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 15:38:35 -0400

In an interesting use of Internet 2, Philadelphia Orchestra broadcastst live via Internet 2 to select remote sites. Fortunately for me, I was invited to watch/listen at KAMU's studio at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas this afternoon. The studio did a fine job setting up the experimental show, but being the brother of an audiophile and maker of high quality recording equipment, I have to admit a hair of snooty disappointment in that there wasn't surround sound and a completely closed chamber immersion-style venue... But hey, it was a first run, and it was pretty darn cool for what did happen!

No rhtml, rxml, rjs or delegate template found for fleet/app/views

bronius — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 16:26:19 -0400

Fyi, rthml not rhtml is. Because I burned a day troubleshooting and researching, among other things, my version numbers, mod_proxy_html, and relative_path plugin in rails to see why I am getting the message:

No rhtml, rxml, rjs or delegate template found for fleet/app/views

, I thought it would be appropriate to share the solution. My render method (render_to_string, actually) is using a :partial call "fleet_import_format" which does properly translate to /app/views/fleet/_fleet_import_format.rhtml, however, my fingers called the file by the wrong extension: _fleet_import_format.rthml. I accidentally swapped the t and the h, and it made all the world of a difference. :(

mod_proxy_html.so binary for SuSE 10.1 for download

bronius — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 10:41:37 -0400

I had a tough time finding a compiled binary for mod_proxy_html (mod_proxy_html.so) and thought I should share now that I've found it. First, some obligatory keyword stuffing: mod_proxy_html.so is a compiled binary third party contributed module for apache SuSE 10.1. I couldn't find it on rpmfind. To learn to use it, check this tutorial on setting up a reverse html proxy, but then, you probably just came from there!

In SuSE, this file lives in:
/usr/lib/apache2

Don't Make Me READ: Steven Krug's book Don't Make Me Think

bronius — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 15:43:33 -0400

Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (2nd Edition)

Recently, I started into a great, handy, and very attractive book called Don't Make Me Think. It's an easy-to-follow guide to creating usable interfaces on the web.

Ok, I have to admit. I say "recently," but really, the attractiveness of the book caught my eye while at FlashForward2006 a few months ago. I haven't even finished reading the book... It's not tough to follow at all, but with all that it covers, one thing it doesn't do is create pockets of reading time and bark at me to return to it when time does present itself.