Pencils Down

Help for Web Programmers at the Mercy of Designer Fonts

admin — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 13:43:51 +0000

Working with a client where the designer they hired produced a nice looking design. However, even though promising to just use standard fonts there are a couple of very conspicuous parts of the design that use non-standard fonts. Sound familiar?

Google to the rescue! (I don’t know how they control what people spend time/money developing) I saw a reference to Google Fonts in a HN post the other day. What’s that?

Google Web Fonts provides high-quality web fonts that you can include in your pages using the Google Web Fonts API.

Just like everything else you can use google for, (especially CDN access to includes and the like) you can make reference to some non-standard font in the Google font set and then use it pretty much like any other font in CSS (have to quote the font name versus plain text(=standard font)). Again, with their simple example:

Making the Web Beautiful!

So, next time you are graced with a design present you can just smile.

Finally, Rounded Tabs Without Using Images

admin — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 14:00:37 +0000

Someone smart figured out a way to get rounded corner tabs in HTML/CSS without using any images at css-tricks.com. You can see an example at http://css-tricks.com/examples/RoundOutTabs2/.

Here is an image of the sample (note, the round outs at the bottom of the selected tab):

Why are images ‘lighter’ on FF vs IE?

admin — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 14:03:38 +0000

Take your favorite site with images. Load the same site on IE and FF. Compare. The images on FF are lighter – a slight foggy effect.

Long term client asked why their logo was all foggy. Odd, since it hasn’t changed in months. Didn’t notice the change until I compared browsers.

Any ideas?

Should a Designer Produce HTML and CSS?

admin — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 13:23:38 +0000

I have a long term client that wants to rework their web site. We tried a designer I had worked with, but they weren’t happy with the result. Probably too much part-time and indirect contact to convey their needs to the designer.

So, they hired a designer on their own. After selection I talked with the guy to make sure it wouldn’t just be a PSD as the output: he agreed. Once the design was agreed upon he didn’t just give me the PSD, he gave me a bunch of PNG files that he cut from the PSD. How nice.

Now we are going into week two of the process trying to get HTML and CSS out of him. I don’t think he has ever done this before. He is good at coming up with nice pictures with the right color schemes and fonts and the like, probably an art background. He is just lost coming up with the parts of the design you need to actually develop a web site – HTML, CSS and Javascript for any widgets/special effects in the design (there are a few).

Maybe I am expecting too much? Every other designer I have worked with has produced the initial HTML… layouts. Maybe I have just been lucky?

Does Phishing Work?

admin — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 22:02:10 +0000

I don’t know about you but I get phishing attempts on a daily (seems like hourly at times) basis. The phishing is in a couple of categories:

- Slick – these really look like the supposed company. But then they fall on their face with a yahoo email address or oddball url for ‘click here’ to enter your info.

- Wordy – these are jam-packed emails from innocuous sounding senders with reasonable titles as well. Maybe I do know a John Galway? And he’s writing about the Patriots game (something I care about). It’s only when you scroll down to the ’stop email’ link that you can clearly see it’s phishing.

- Pathetic – English is definitely not the first language of the sender. Typically not one complete, correctly spelled and grammatically correct sentence. Worse is the Asian character set email – complete jibberish.

- Million dollars – any number of swindles – African, Libyan, Middle East, orphan, cripple – you name it

So, given the bunch of junk that streams in continuously – does it work?

I have to believe everyone knows better about the Million Dollars; will ignore the Pathetic; realize the Wordy is junk. Even the Slick should sound alarms once you realize the kind of information being provided (of course, it’s too late – just clicking put you on a spam list)

Now, then, who is accepting the phishing attempt? I am guessing close to zero.

Then why keep sending them out?

It takes time to build a phishing list (or money to buy one). Takes money and time to develop an email program that won’t get you cut off from your ISP. If someone actually responds you have to do something smart (money and time) with the information to take advantage of it.

I wonder if the key is ‘close to zero’ acceptance and the laws of large numbers. Assuming you got 0.0001% response of any kind it would be just a matter of time before you had a quantity of information to work with.

Still feels like a complete waste of time (and money). Why not spend that much (time and money) on developing a neato iPhone or Droid app?

Maven ClassDefNotFound org codehouse classworlds Launcher

admin — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 16:04:46 +0000

Got this error running maven as part of Spring Roo ten minute project.

Lots of references on the internet about Linux users running maven 2 and maven 3 at the same time. That’s not me. I am a Windows user only running maven 2.

I had thought maven was setup previously as I use it regularly in Eclipse. Guess not.

Needed to do:

- MAVEN_HOME environment variable

- M2 environment variable

Then still getting the above error trying to run mvn –version.

On Windows there is a mvn.bat file in the maven/bin directory. Setting MAVEN_BATCH_ECHO=on then running the version command showed that the classworlds jar file was still not found – even though the above directory settings are correct.

So, forced setting CLASSWORLDS_JAR=”path to classworlds jar” in the mvn.bat file and everything is working correctly now.

My guess is I never really completed the install of maven, but was using the Eclipse plugin maven to actually run.

Chrome is Odd

admin — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 21:27:52 +0000

I have started using Chrome more and more often. It sounds like that is happening with a lot of other people as well. It is nice having such a clean interface. Seems like every time IE gets upgraded they odd more noise around the edges.

It is odd though:

- some sites do not support IE, but do support Chrome. At first I thought this was just a lark, but becoming more common as developers get tired of jumping through hoops to support version x of IE.

- when I first installed Chrome it kept complaining about a MS VC++ dll missing. Why on earth is Google counting on MS for anything?

- happened to pull up task manager for another reason and saw quite a few instances of chrome running. from my desktop I only had 1 running (pandora, but so what). why all these processes running?

- not sure I am hearing about many corporate desktops promoting Chrome as the browser of choice. or is Google even pushing that way?

- chrome store is a nice idea. it makes sense when running from your smartphone. doesn’t feel like the metaphor really works on the desktop.

I always fall back to what do non-tech users use. Not sure if installing Chrome (even though google.com pesters them every time the page is run) is a common enough occurrence outside of tech arenas.

oc4j Permgen Error Probably Isn’t

admin — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 20:26:49 +0000

After chasing down a PERMGEN error deploying/running a site on oc4j for a while I did the smarter thing and did something else for a while. Of course it doesn’t help that the top N google hits for “PERMGEN” aren’t even from Oracle/Java. So, you get all sorts if interesting advice for changes to Java memory management.

Then it occurred to be: the site was working fine before a recent set of changes, maybe something got broken?

Even better, it had to be some kind of configuration setting that was wrong, incorrect, bad. Any pure coding/linking error would have been more specific. I was betting config errors were buried in the oc4j logging somewhere and only the resultant “PERMGEN” showed up.

Turns out a couple of items were off in the config XMLs for the project: missing setters for injections, not including a new hibernate mapping file in the list of mappings. (I think that was the killer).

Took under 10 minutes to fix these things and everything started working again.

I really don’t like oc4j.

Browser Addin to Tell You What Font is in Use

admin — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 12:55:29 +0000

http://www.chengyinliu.com/whatfont.html

Simple: point and click

Best Editor I Have Ever Seen

admin — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 19:28:19 +0000

Codify is used to develop apps for the iPad on the iPad! The integration of touch with the editor is astounding. If only Eclipse did something even close to this for us mere mortals…

Oh, I forgot, one more thing: price is $7.99.