Author Archives: Ammon

Fun for Friday: Steve Jobs tells Flash to go screw

By Ammon | April 30 2010

In an open letter published on the Apple website, the venerable Mr. Jobs has thrown down the gauntlet: Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about [...]

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Webfaction, seriously, I love you

By Ammon | April 29 2010

Webfaction has been my hosting provider for a couple years now. I’ve set up prolly six or so clients with them as well. I am absolutely in love with them. I’ve never had a single problem with them or a second of downtime (that I noticed anyway). Their cPanel interface is great to use and [...]

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What to do when your javascript only works with Firebug turned on

By Ammon | April 27 2010

It makes sense, but I don’t ever turn Firebug off so I never would have noticed. That is, until I’m sitting in front of a client trying to show off a new website. That’s when I decide to turn it off. Yep. Turns out console is undefined when Firebug is off (of freaking course) so [...]

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Image Magick: Resize a batch of images so they all come out square, and preserve filenames

By Ammon | April 21 2010

The following command will shrink all .jpg’s in the current directory that are larger than 500px and center them on a square 500x500px canvas. Since the aspect ratio of the original images will be preserved and not all of the originals are square, the left over space will be filled with an off-white color. All [...]

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Image Magick: Resize a batch of images and preserve the original file names

By Ammon | April 21 2010

The following command will resize any and all .jpg’s in the current directory that are larger than 500px on either side and put them in a file called ‘resized’. Aspect ratios will be respected, and the same filenames will be used for the modified images. mogrify -path resized -resize 500>x500\> *.jpg Yes, you have to [...]

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Ubuntu Anecdote

By Ammon | April 8 2010

So the other day my boss brought over a computer for me to fix. Turns out he never partitioned this new hard drive he had installed. I fixed it but we didn’t have a copy of Windows around, so I went ahead and installed Ubuntu 9.10 on it. After years of subtle lobbying I’m switching [...]

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Ubuntu Lucid Lynx is coming!

By Ammon | April 8 2010

You can get the beta right now; I’ve played with it and it’s completely sweet. There’s some really bold design choices they’ve made with this version (window controls on the left!?) that I’m excited to explore. Ubuntu is Important You know, along with Ubuntu, I use Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Mac OSX every day. [...]

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Slickr gallery for Thematic

By Ammon | April 2 2010

Slickr Gallery is a sleek little WordPress plugin for displaying Flickr albums on websites. The themes included in the plugin don’t work with Thematic based themes so I made one that does. Download Download slickr_thematic_theme.tar.gz Installation Just download this file, un-tar it ($ tar -xvzf slickr_thematic_theme.tar.gz) and copy the extracted folder to wordpress/wp-content/plugins/slickr-gallery/themes. Then you [...]

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Use source to import large .sql files

By Ammon | April 1 2010

Its true, don’t waste your time with strange scripts and such if you’re trying to upload an .sql file that exceeds the limit. Just give up and use source. Note: don’t be confused that I don’t capitalise my MySQL commands. Its my silent protest against standard MySQL syntax: I think capitalising commands you have to [...]

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A plug for Lee Howard and Mystery Machine Studio

By Ammon | April 1 2010

Lee is the owner and sound engineer at the soon-to-be huge recording studio Mystery Machine Studio in Portland, OR. I built his website (http://www.mysterymachinestudio.com/). A CD that Lee recorded for local folk/pop hero Nick Jaina was just released to critical acclaim, and we’re trying to drum up some exposure for Lee’s beautiful little basement studio. [...]

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