Firefox 3 - With Colour Profiling Support!
Just wanted to let you in a little (big) secret. Firefox 3 is out! It’s effin’ insanely good, I can’t even believe it. http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
To get the full colour profile support, after downloading and installing open up a tab and instead of typing in http://whatever, type in about:config and press enter. It’ll warn you that you can screw things up, but just ignore the warning and continue on. Here’s where you can configure EVERYTHING about the browser. In the “filter” bar near the top, type in gfx and double-click the gfx.color_management.enabled option so that it’s value is set to true. Restart Firefox. Now your photos and everyone elses will look the way they should (no more desaturation on Flickr!) – wooo!
Welcome to 10.5! Migrating Your Tiger MySQL Databases to Leopard
After quite a bit of deliberation, I’ve decided to move up from Tiger to Leopard. Thankfully, the path to Rails w/ MySQL has been much easier than it ever was on Tiger.
So far, my greatest obstacle has been installing MySQL and bringing my old databases over from my backup. The gracious folks over at Hivelogic have created a brilliant, line-by-line tutorial for building MySQL on Leopard.
After getting MySQL up and running successfully, I completely overlooked the fact that my databases would be wiped clean. I realized the easiest thing to do would be to copy the databases from my Tiger backup.
Note: Both of my MySQL installs are Version 5, so I crossed my fingers hoping they’d be compatible and so far there’s been no problems.
Step 1. Make sure to turn off your current Leopard MySQL install. The command for this in the tutorial is: sudo launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.mysql.mysqld.plist which sends the unload command to your plist file.
Step 2. Locate the “data” or “var” folder in your MySQL backup directory. For instance, mine was in /usr/local/mysql on my Tiger install.
Step 3. sudo cp -rf /Volumes/Backup/usr/local/mysql/data /usr/local/mysql Or substitute the paths for the proper source and destination. This will copy the database folder from your Tiger backup to your fresh Leopard MySQL install.
Step 4. sudo chown -R mysql /usr/local/mysql/data mysql Give ownership of the database directory to the mysql user.
Step 5. Start up the server and you should be good to go!
Happy Leopard’ing.
Series: My arsenal of plug-ins - Bundle-fu
UPDATE: Looks like they’ve added functionality like this in Rails 2.0 using <%= stylesheet_link_tag( “main”, “forms”, “utilities”, { :cache => “frontend” } ) %>. Check out the latest release candidate w/ notes.
After writing about all of the nifty Firefox extensions I use on a daily basis, I had an idea to detail the Rails plug-ins and gems I’m in love with. This marks the beginning.
Tim Harper’s Bundle-fu plug-in was just the thing I was looking for while trying to cut down on the number of server requests per page. All you have to do is wrap both your stylesheets & javascripts in your layout file into separate code blocks, and bundle-fu will take care of the rest.
layout.rhtml
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<% bundle( { :name => "styles" } ) do -%>
<%= stylesheet_link_tag( "common", :media => "screen" ) %>
<%= stylesheet_link_tag( "main", :media => "screen" ) %>
... etc.
<% end -%>
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This outputs a one-liner pointing to one lovely file all your css:
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<link href="/stylesheets/cache/styles.css?20071111142032" media="screen" rel="Stylesheet" type="text/css" /> |
Here’s the install:
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script/plugin install http://bundle-fu.googlecode.com/svn/tags/bundle_fu |
Make sure to read the caveats page as there is a few (as always). I believe the largest is the fact that conditionally loaded stylesheets for Internet Explorer need to be outside of the code block.
Keep elements in line with grids
I just stumbled upon Allan Jardine’s Grid Bookmarklet, which quickly draws a grid in your browser on any page you’re viewing. It’s highly customizable as you go, so you can make sure your stylesheets are matching up with a proper grid template.
I could find myself using this one quite a bit.
Firefox Extensions I Use
Whenever somebody sits down at my laptop and uses it’s default browser, they’re generally curious as to what exactly is going on. It’s pretty cluttered (in an organized mess kinda way), and there’s all these crazy icon sets and toolbars everywhere. I’ve decided some clarification was in order, so here goes:
- Joe Hewitt’s Firebug – The premier tool for anybody interested in advanced web development & design. When I found this one my job became 147% easier. Quickly jump right inside the DOM and see what’s going on. Edit stylesheets, live. View the network statistics of each page you request. Oh, did I mention it debugs JavaScript? The list goes on…
- Yahoo’s YSlow – Can’t figure out why a page is taking forever to load? Convinced it isn’t SQL related? Enlist this helper to explain where the bottlenecks could be. (Requires Firebug)
- Chris Pederick’s Web Developer – I had this one before Firebug, and I was impressed by it at the time. There’s two wonderful features I find handy in it these days: “Automatically Populate Form Fields” and “Disable JavaScript”.
- Aaron Boodman’s Greasemonkey – Write custom JavaScript to be executed each time you hit a specified page. For instance, sick of filling in the username and password box on a site that won’t ‘remember’ you? Let Greasemonkey do it for you!
- Alex Sirota’s ColorZilla – This glorious tool adds a tiny eyedropper (much like Photoshop’s) to the bottom left of your Firefox window. A great alternative to print-screen, open Photoshop, paste, select eyedropper tool, etc.
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Kevin Freitas’ MeasureIt – A quick ruling tool which lets you draw boxes and see the width and height of any element, right in your browser.
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Devon Jensen’s Download Statusbar – Firefox’s built-in file downloader is bulky and old-school. This pretty gem downloads files in a minimalist fashion at the bottom of your browser and gives you more functionality over how to handle downloads.
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Zeniko’s Fission – A simple add-on which displays an animated loading progress bar to the URL (location) bar at the top. You even have a choice of colors. (woo!)
- Séparé – Purely cosmetic, truly organizational. Create lil’ orange tabs which separate one group of tabs from the next. (Warning: I have a feeling there may be some strange memory leak in this add-on, use at your own risk!)
And remember, if you find tons of use from any of these extensions then I urge you to donate! Most of them are developed by individuals who could probably use the help.
Think I’m missing one or two that you can’t live without? Let me know!
