Category Archives: Musings

Novacut is go!

By Ammon | September 2 2010

Our startup project, Novacut, got accepted to Kickstarter! Were building an open source, distributed workflow video editor, player and marketplace. The idea is that with all the sweet new camera tech thats available to and affordable by normal humans, its possible to create pro video without the backing of a network. The missing pieces are [...]

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Tile images in Imagemagick to create CSS sprites

By Ammon | June 3 2010

The Magick This will stack two images to create a CSS sprite. Very handy for flicker-free image rollovers: $ montage -background transparent -tile 1×2 -geometry +0+2 image1.gif image2.gif result.gif You could create a taller or wider stack by adjusting the -tile option. For example -tile 2×10 would stack 2 images across and 10 images down. [...]

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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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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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I’m switching to Chrome (on a trail basis)

By Ammon | February 1 2010

I thought I would be a Firefox user till I died, but holy crap Chrome is fast! I can launch Firefox, go make a sandwich, launch Chrome and be browsing before Firefox loads. This is particularly nice on our crappy Windows machines at work. JavaScript is noticeably faster. Chrome seems more stable and doesn’t do [...]

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WordPress Error: Unable to create directory / Is its parent directory writable by the server?

By Ammon | January 28 2010

If you get this error when you try to upload an image to your WordPress blog, there are two things you can do: Go to Settings > Miscellaneous in your WordPress admin area and make sure that ‘Store uploads in this folder’ is set to the default: wp-content/uploads (notice there is no ‘/’ before wp-content/uploads).  [...]

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Use your user’s public_html directory to serve webpages

By Ammon | January 20 2010

Using a public_html file in your home directory is much more convenient than /var/www for a local website development environment. The following commands create a file called public_html in your home directory and enable the UserDir module in Apache. From the command line, enter: $ mkdir ~/public_html $ cd /etc/apache2/mods-enabled $ sudo ln -s ../mods-available/userdir.conf [...]

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The difference between a working tree, repository, branch, and checkout in the Bazaar version control system

By Ammon | October 20 2009

I love using Bazaar for version control! It allows me to work on the same files as my buddies without accidentally overwriting their work. I’m also free to experiment and refactor without fear, because I can just revert my files to previous (working) version if I screw everything up. The key to understanding version control [...]

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