I’ve recently upgraded to Ubuntu Jaunty – and therefore Gedit 2.26.1 – and I couldn’t figure out how to change the color of spaces shown by the ‘Draw Spaces’ plugin. This used to be set in the plugin configuration, but you now do it in the syntax highlighting theme – but how? What do you need to add?
The closest that I got googling was this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gedit-plugins/+bug/348500 – which almost tells you but misses out the crucial bit of info.
So, I asked the fine folks in the #gedit room on irc.gnome.org and they enlightened me; you need to add this to your syntax theme file:
<style name="draw-spaces" foreground="tinted_grey"/>
Where tinted_gray is one of your theme’s colours. I would put it at the top somewhere, with the rest of the global stuff. You can look in the cobalt.xml file in /usr/share/gtksourceview-2.0/styles for an example of a theme which does this. I thought I’d put this here so anyone else who get’s stuck trying to change this has a better chance of Googling an answer.
Download a modified version of the Gedit Twilight Theme, with this tweak added. To install, put the file into your ~/.gnome2/gedit/styles/ folder and restart Gedit. Then just select the Twilight theme in Preferences.
Tags: development, gedit, linux, tools
Posted in Technical | 2 Comments »
The new MySQL Workbench is now in beta and is looking very good:
You can import create scripts (mysqldumps), build diagrams yourself, with full drag and drop etc, and export create scripts. You can also annotate with text and images and export the diagrams as SVG, PDF, PNG etc… Here’s the PDF for the MODx 0.9.6.3 diagram shown, along with the MWB (workbench) file. That diagram is just an imported mysqldump of a MODx DB – all I did was click the auto-arrange button.
It’s available for Linux (32 & 64 bit), Mac and Windows. I’ve been playing with the 64bit version in Ubuntu and it seems to work great! More info on their blog, or get it here: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/workbench/5.1.html
Tags: mysql, offtopic
Posted in Technical | 3 Comments »
Here’s a command line version of Google Calculator:
Download gcalc here: http://www.codeistry.com/assets/files/gcalc.zip
It’s a little python script that talks to Google, using it’s calculator syntax. You’ll get the same answers if you type the queries into google
To use the script, just download the zip file, extract the file inside and put it somewhere on your path; I’ve started putting these kind of things in ~/bin. I originally found the script here (http://vrai.net/page.php?block=scripts) but it didn’t work too well, so I fixed it up. I’ve tested it on Linux, but it should work anywhere Python is installed.
If you’re using that script on Linux, then chmod +x gcalc it to allow it to be executed. If you’re using Windows, you might have to add ‘.py’ to the end of the filename. Then the syntax is very simple:
gcalc “1 hour 5 minutes in seconds”
1 hour 5 minutes = 3900 seconds
gcalc “100 + 2 * 5″
100 + (2 * 5) = 110
gcalc “41000 yen in british pounds”
41,000 Japanese yen = 277.129372 British pounds
Here are complete instructions on the syntax that Google Calculator supports.
Also, in the screenshot above I’m using Fish, the Friendly Interactive SHell because it does nice syntax highlighting, amongst many other cool things. Fish is here, if you want it.
Have fun!
Tags: code, fish, gcalc, offtopic
Posted in Technical | 2 Comments »
I’ve made a number of small updates to the Codeistry site today, which I’ve been queuing up on my local version for a while. I’ve made updates and corrections to my Accessibility made simple article, as well as minor updates to the 9 Steps to Improve your Small Business website and SEO for Fun and Profit ones.
I’ve also souped up the metadata that gets output in the page’s code, so that I’m now outputting a meta description tag – this outputs whatever I’ve typed into the page’s Description field in MODx.
I’ve also started using MODx built in meta keywords system, so some pages now have some keywords set.
A little while age I also added a Creative Commons license to the page footer but forget to mention it on the blog. This means that the site’s content is now actually marked as copright of Codeistry now – which it wasn’t before. As I’ve chosen a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license, this also means that anyone can re-use, re-mix, translate or re-purpose any of the stuff on here for whatever they want, provided it’s non-commercial and they credit the original source.
Anyway, here’s the old footer:
and here’s the new one:
Tags: accessibility, codeistry_website, modx
Posted in Non Technical | No Comments »
As a web designer & developer, I see a lot of websites, many of them belonging to small businesses. I’m also an independent, running my own business – my website is my shop window, so this subject is close to my wallet heart. There are some common things missing in a lot of the websites that I look at, things that would really improve the website and make it work harder for its owner. Fortunately, most of the missing bits are fairly easy to add.
This list is intended to make you think about your own website and give you practical, actionable steps that you can take right now to improve things. None of these things are difficult and most of them can easily be done in an hour or two. Print this off, mark the ones that you think you need to work on, and tick off one a week.
See the 9 Steps to Improve your small business website article for the steps!
Tags: business, design
Posted in Non Technical, Technical | No Comments »
