Monthly Archives: August 2009

Use touch to create empty files

I find myself needing this all the time, especially when I’m doing a tutorial on something nerdy. Create an empty file in the current directory from the command line: $ touch filename

Posted in Linux | Tagged | Leave a comment

Portrait finishing in Gimp

I took some portraits of my co-workers in my DIY photography studio recently. I don’t have some essential equipment (like an external flash) so the shots were not as awesome as I knew they should be. Gimp to the rescue! I found a brilliant tutorial on just this subject. Its written for Photoshop, but it [...]

Posted in Gimp | Tagged | Leave a comment

Animated GIFs are the future

Its hard to be flashy on craigslist. Sure you can make your add one big image, but users need to cut and paste! So in the interest of usability and in the name of awesome, I give you the world’s sweetest animated GIF: That’s right, it just don’t stop. Ever. Not even if you want [...]

Posted in Animation, Gimp, Inkscape | Tagged | Leave a comment

My Current Local Developement Environment

Here’s my setup: 13″ Macbook 2-1 with 4GB Ram and 2.16mhz Dual Core processor 24″ Samsung HD flatscreen external monitor Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope 9.04 Firefox 3.x with Firebug, YSLow, and CodeBurner XAMPP for PHP, MySQL, and Apache VirtualBox with 4 virtual machines: Windows XP with IE 6, 7,  and 8, plus OSX running Safari Gimp [...]

Posted in Developement Platform, Web Design | Tagged , | Leave a comment

VirtualBox on Ubuntu Jaunty for Testing Internet Explorer in Windows

Ed. Note: this method is no longer valid or necessarily a good way to go about things. See here instead: http://likesalmon.net/browser-testing-with-cloned-virtual-machines/ I really loved using VMWare Fusion in OSX to test my webpages in Windows.  The power to just drag a whole Windows installation into the trash when it gets jacked up is intoxicating. Unfortunatly, [...]

Posted in Linux, Software I use, Solutions, Tutorial, Ubuntu, VirtualBox | Tagged , | 2 Comments

lftp is awesome

I’ve been looking for a command line ftp utility that does tab completion and supports sftp. lftp is it! It comes pre-installed on Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty. change directory: cd change local directory: lcd list directory contents: ls list local directory contents: !ls print local working directory: lpwd Put a file: put filename Put multiple files: [...]

Posted in Linux, Solutions, Ubuntu | Tagged | Leave a comment