Loading ...Posts filed under ‘geeky’
OpenLaszlo
January 31st, 2008
This looks really cool. Maybe I will write a simple guestbook with it.
http://www.openlaszlo.org/demos
Bonus, found a tutorial for OpenLaszlo front end and php back end. Too bad it does require a java container to run. There are ways to get around that I guess.
I was watching this video produced by the author. It’s really very cool!!
dodo has been online for ten years
January 4th, 2008
the other night i realized something amazing. i’ve been to the online world for ten years. i got my first modem at home when i was 16 and i’m turning 26 soon. TEN YEARS.. that’s a long time. a very significant part of a life. from 16 to 26, a person can change so much. so i started to remember everything that happened in this ten years. i became so emotional i couldn’t sleep. perhaps every generation has its own thing that’s bound to change people’s lives and the internet is the one for mine.
now please excuse my poor english. i can never express my emotions in english the way i do in chinese. therefore i notice when i get emotional, i speak in chinglish.
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upgraded to wordpress 2.3
December 22nd, 2007
I’ve upgraded to wordpress 2.3 mainly to use their new sidebar widget feature. I thought it will be overly cool to not have to rewrite the sidebar.php for every theme. However, I’d like to have different sidebars for different views. Like the sidebar for my index page would look different than the sidebar for my single post. I haven’t yet figured out how to create additional sidebar for a theme. Do you know how to do it? Please share if you do. Thanks! N/M I figured out. It’s talked about here.
Consider the Ultimate Tag Warrior 3 plugin
If you are like me and use the UTW plugin, you might notice wordpress 2.3 now has its own native tags support. After the upgrade, I notice the old tags are not converted. I thought there must be already a way to convert them. Fortunately for us, wordpress 2.3 has also a built in way to convert your tags from the UTW plugin. Just go to your wordpress admin and look under Manage > Import. You will see the UTW import option.
where is IE7 refresh button?
December 18th, 2007
I can’t believe I googled on this. I thought IE7 took out the refresh button but in fact they just moved it. Moved it to the end of the address line. This also shows how little I used IE7 even tho I’ve been using Vista for over 9 months.
transparent PNG background
November 23rd, 2007
I finally found some time to put back the transparent PNG background tutorial. It’s by far the most requested tutorial from Dodo’s New World. People email me from this original post.
taskbar shuffle
November 1st, 2007
I used to use a free software called task arrange for windows XP to rearrange my buttons in the taskbar. But the software does not work in Vista. I found another software named taskbar shuffle today that allows you to drag the buttons around in your taskbar.
On top of that, it comes with two new features. If you love how middle button clicks close firefox tabs, you can now do the same to close buttons in the taskbar. You can also now easily rearrange the icons in your system tray if you wish 
Very awesome. I highly recommend it if you are looking for something similar.
How to STYLE a table using CSS (JSF examples)
October 18th, 2007
Tables are very important parts of the web interface. They are (hopefully) used for tabular data. It is one of the oldest and most basic HTML presentation tag but in order for it to smoothly fit into the new CSS age, we need to look at the most practical way in correctly setting up the markup and the CSS.
Nowadays, we no longer wish to make separate instances of a similar application for different clients. We want to thrive on making a single application that will fit the needs of as many clients as possible. This task is very challenging. In my opinion the ideal situation is to have the clients and developers both understand the benefits of the end goal and compromise to reach it. As developers we can always dream to have a single application reach the level of customization we can accomplish with many separate applications and yet don’t confuse the heck out of the end users. While I am unsure if that’s ever a possibility, I know ways that might help get us closer.
One of the biggest challenges is to give each client who uses the same application their own unique UI presentation. This is no small task and I only plan to address a small issue you might encounter in accomplishing this task. That’s how to mark up a table with the most amount of UI flexibility.
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Clear left workaround
September 25th, 2007
You may have run into this problem, you may have not. But I found an acceptable workaround to this particular problem.
Here’s the scenario.
So I have a two column layout where my navigation list (red) is floated to the left and my main content is on the right. In my main content I have another navigation list (gray) that floats to the left. And the text in my main content now wraps around. I really want my main content text below the gray navigation to still to the right of red navigation.
If I use a simply use a clear:left on the container around my content text, I will have it all the way below the red navigation list. This is expected behavior as clear:left means make sure there is no elements that are floated to the left of me. It however is not the ideal behavior I wanted.
In IE & Firefox (possibly other browsers) there is a *bug* that if you wrap the floating element in a fieldset, the fieldset acts as a container that stretches as far as the float elements.
This however really isn’t a good workaround because it uses a *bug* in both browsers and it DOES NOT work in browsers like safari. So I came up with a better solution today.
Float the ul element to the right with its width set to 100%, and then clear the container around the text to the right. This obviously only works if you don’t have anything above the text that’s also floated to the right.
Cutest Firefox poster!
September 20th, 2007
My coworker just sent me this cutest Firefox poster!! Everyone should get one.
I was very enraged by the JSF tag
h:selectOneRadio
Because it renders the radio buttons with the TABLE tag @_@ instead of something CSS friendly like list or div tags.
Fortunately if you use the tomahawk’s version of
t:selectOneRadio
You can render the radio buttons your own way.
Orientation of the options list. Valid values are “pageDirection” for a vertical layout, “lineDirection” for horizontal, or “spread” for developer placement. The default value is “lineDirection”. If the “spread” option is selected, this tag does not render HTML. Instead, the developer uses “radio” tags to position radio buttons for each of the SelectItem instances. See the “radio” tag for further information.
Emulate Float Center
August 24th, 2007
This entry talks about how to solve a common design scenario with different approaches. If you are not interested in the long explanation, you can just take a look the end result of my emulation.
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