Trent’s Blog

I just thought I’d share that one of my common design tools is ColorPix which does nothing more than give the hex and rgb colors for whatever your mouse is currently hovering over.  There are other similar tools out there, but about a year ago I got attached to it on my Windows machine at work, and felt lost at home on Ubuntu without it.  Well just so happens it works like a champ with Wine!  The download is the .exe file so all you need to do is wine that sucker up!

For the average Joe very little is pre configured for everyday needs like Java, Flash, mp3 codecs.. It is understandable that some of these can’t be installed by default for legal reasons, but why isn’t there a “Kick-Start” program on a users first login to set up all these common utilities?

This is yet another obstacle Ubuntu must overcome to gain wide spread use to the every day user.  It is understood that there are other “alternative” technologies being developed to avoid these issues but the fact of the matter is they’re just not up to par at this time.  Ubuntu no doubt has one of the easiest installs ever, but it may be necessary to run this sort of quick program on the first boot to get the user completely ready.

By the way the image above is not an actual program, but a quick mock up using QT 4 Designer.  I must admit they’ve done a nice job with their User interface tools and can’t wait for the Webkit integration!

While constantly doing websites I find myself always needing to work from the root web address. The problem is there is only one localhost. Well we can always create subdomains off of localhost in Ubuntu and Apache very easily(I’m sure other linux distro’s are very similar to do as well) I will walk you through it but there is also another tutorial on ubuntuforums.org.

First we need to add our domain to our hosts in Ubuntu. Todo so go to System -> Administration -> Network. Then click on the Hosts tab. Click the localhost entry and Properties. On a new line add your new aliases(subdomains).

Now on to Apache. We need to open up our httpd.conf file and add an entry for the new virtual host( sudo gedit /etc/apache2/httpd.conf )

Finally we should restart Apache and visit our new domain. Make sure the directory exists where you point your subdomain as well. To restart apache: sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Lately I’ve had a few users respond on my CSS Tooltips post about it not working correctly in Opera, so I decided to investigate myself.  I looked at the example I created and sure enough, it tries to work, but fails.  My first suspect was the :hover css filter since this is what the css tooltips are based off of.  Then I decided to do a few tests with Impromptu.  My test was to use the :focus selector on the focused button to change the background color in one of my themes:

div.jqi button:focus{ background-color: #31B639; }
div.jqi button:focus:hover{ background-color: #21a629; }

Just as I suspected it worked like a champ in Safari and Firefox, but Opera had trouble.  It would flicker when I hovered over the focused button, but would not return correctly.  I did a few quick google searches but come up empty.  Anyone know if this is a known issue?

I ran across Navicat’s Postgres Administration tool the other day and just out of curiosity I decided to install it on Ubuntu (the lite version). Uhho, there’s no linux version! Well as any linux fanatic would do I grabbed the Windows version and tried to install with Wine, and well,.. it worked. After clicking around a bit I don’t foresee myself switching from pgAdmin(it actually looks a lot like pgAdmin III), but it does have a few pro’s and con’s. They also have a MySQL counterpart, but there is a linux version available for it.

Of all the database admin tools I’ve used however I’ve found none as nice as.. yes, I’m going to say it.. Microsoft’s SQL Server Management Studio. I think the biggest thing Management Studio has going for it is the very clean interface, and the fact that every button doesn’t pop open a new window and it’s a one stop shop for user administrator as well as data manager. MySQL has the two separate applications, other than that I love their query browser as well. Are there any other great database admin tools out there that are reasonably price??

To all the Impromptu users tired of the same old themes and don’t want to create one, we have a new theme option. Example 14 contains an example of using this theme. Just view the examples.css to snatch the code!  This one has the look and feel of a much more traditional dialog box for all you old schoolers out there.  Anyone else have any good impromptu themes let me know, i’ll gladly link to you!

The next Ubuntu is almost here. I can’t wait and I’m sure you can’t either. Something about that automatic update that makes me dislike Windows, I don’t know why..