Last week we finished up quite a bit of work for one particular project that is exciting to us for a lot of reasons. Our Ithaca friend, client and professional photographer Shai Eynav has invented a very cool photo/camera accessory! It is called the Spider Camera Holster and was made as an alternative camera carrying method (notice there isn’t a strap on the camera, or the model in the photo above). I don’t need to say more than that because the video on the Spider website that we made really does explain everything (not that it needs explaining, you’ll get it when you see it).

As psyched as I was to develop the brand and put the video and microsite together with Shai and the AWP team I’m even more anxious and excited to actually own this product. No joke, I had it on for 5 seconds and that’s all it took for me to want one. We’ll be expanding the website in the future when the product becomes available (and adding a ton of videos).

Production side-note: we shot the hi-def video with Shai’s gorgeous Canon 5d mkII, which was wonderful to work with in Final Cut Studio. We’re serving the video up on Facebook (?!) because it looks/sounds/responds better than Vimeo and YouTube (we were shocked to realize that Facebook knows video)! Become a fan and watch this beauty unfold…

http://www.revfad.com/flip.html

¡ǝldɯıs ʇɐɥʇ s,ʇı
It’s that simple!

Follow us on Twitter: @AWPNY

<?php
//set timezone
putenv ('TZ=America/New_York');
mktime(0,0,0,1,1,1970);
?>

Just replace America/New_York with whatever your local time zone is. Check this page for valid entries: http://us.php.net/manual/en/timezones.america.php

For PHP5.1 or newer use date_default_time(’America/New_York’).

Also check this page in the Simplepie docs for reference.

Cheers!

The fix to get Cake working in the subdirectory was to add a single line to the .htaccess file in the Cake root directory ( the “/tw” folder in my case). The .htaccess file should look something like this:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule    ^$ app/webroot/    [L]
RewriteRule    (.*) app/webroot/$1 [L]

Add this line after “RewriteEngine on”:

RewriteRule /YOURCAKESUBDIR$ /YOURCAKESUBDIR/ [L]

Obviously, replace “YOURCAKESUBDIR” with the subdirectory your Cake app in running in. So my .htaccess file now looks like this:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /tw/
RewriteRule /tw$ /tw/ [L]
RewriteRule    ^$ app/webroot/    [L]
RewriteRule    (.*) app/webroot/$1 [L]

(The third line, “RewriteBase /tw/”, is necessary to get CakePHP working in the Mosso hosting environment. If your Cake installation is at the server web root (the Mosso “content” directory) then it should read simply “RewriteBase /”. If your site is not hosted at Mosso just eliminate this line.)

Thanks to Jeff Loiselle for the quick fix: http://jeff.loiselles.com/wordpress/?p=22

The save password feature is nice for preserving my own brain capacity! But you might be wondering, what about when Molly asks me, hey what is the login for AWP’s WebTree so I can post some juicy details about the project I just finished? I go to the site, and of course I can login (because I choose Remember my password). But I can’t give the password to Molly, because it is hidden. Is Molly out of luck? No!

Firefox does store your passwords where you can see them. Although a bit cumbersome, just head to Security > Saved Passwords. (Note: This is also where you can delete passwords that you saved accidentally, which might happen if your cat walked across your keyboard without you knowing).

But here is an even better method. Download this great Firefox Add-On, Web Developer Toolbar from Chris Pederick. As the name suggests, this toolbar is great for Web Developers. I use this tool when developing websites to examine what they will look like in a smaller browser, determine rendered font size, disable cache, disable images or css, outline table cells and even edit html live.

However, I use Web Developer Toolbar most for its Show Password feature. Once you have this spiffy toolbar installed, simply visit the site with the hidden password and choose Show Passwords from the Form menu. Password revealed, just like that! Completely for free! Imagine what I can do with the time I saved looking up obscure passwords!

Sure!

Well, the point is, if you haven’t yet: get Firefox.  As a Mac user, I am blown away by the improvements in speed and memory management in 3.0.  I honestly did not enjoy the Firefox 2.0 Mac experience, and used Safari as much as I could.  Windows users on the other hand, should already be using Firefox (boo, Internet Explorer), and 3.0 should be an upgrade.

The Firefox download site was down earlier today (did they not expect the traffic?!?) but we managed to get access by the end of the day.  I couldn’t wait that long and used BitTorrent to download what turned out to be an Italian version of 3.0 (I’ve sense switched back to English).

I’ve already stated my initial reactions.  The new look is great, too, it really opens up some more screen real-estate, which is something we always wrangle with as designers.

Compatibility-wise, there are updates availble for the Google Toolbar, Web Developer Toolbar, and the YSlow Firebug extension.  Firebug itself has a beta that works with 3.0, but the Firebug site has been down for the past few days.  You can find a mirror that has the code and a list of Firebug mirrors here.

Other than that, I’ve been enjoying the new experience.  I’m sure other AWP-ers will chime in over the next few days.

Did I mention boo Internet Explorer?  (explanation of previous link).

There’s a lot of times, though, where the standard Blueprint setup just doesn’t work. Maybe you want a site thinner than 950 pixels, or need larger spacing between columns, or any number of issues that are a pain with the standard Blueprint setup. Usually, to change things like this, you have to go and recalculate your column sizes widths and margins, and then write them all in by hand.

But hey, someone went and did the hard work for you, and though this is linked off of the Blueprint Code site, it needs to be better known: a javascript page to generate your own Blueprint CSS Grid. Just type in your max size, number of columns, desired margins, etc, and it creates it all for you, it even has a compressed version.

Nice.

But now you receive a destination based on the following:

Press 1 – new projects!

Press 2 – hosting & email help

Press 3 – website & webtree support

Press 4 – billing

We think this will improve the each and every call and get you to the person best-suited to talk to. We’ve also changed our hold music to match the new theme….which means we’ve let go of our old hold music: the orchestral Mario Bros. medley! Thanks to all the callers who recognized the theme music and pointed it out to us. You are wonderful.

Give it a try: 607.277.2757

Problem #1: How can I set up two Trac repositories running on the same Trac server?

The answer to this one was easier than I thought. Normally you would point tracd right to a single project like this (the $> represents your command line prompt):

$> tracd --port 8000 /path/to/your/environment/ProjectOne

If you have multiple projects, you need to give tracd the path directly to the environment along with the -e flag like this:

$> tracd --port 8000 -e /path/to/your/environment/

Simpler than I thought. After searching all over Google I found that solution right from Trac’s built-in command line help ($> tracd –help).

Problem #2: When I create a new Trac environment I get the message “Warning: Can’t synchronize with the repository (/path/to/my\ files/ProjectTwo does not appear to be a Subversion repository.)

Again, a massive Google search returned no good answers, but the solution was actually simple. All I had to do was edit the trac.ini file (line 156) to remove the \ (backslash) character from the path name. So I changed the line from:

repository_dir = /path/to/my\ files/ProjectTwo

to:

repository_dir = /path/to/my files/ProjectTwo

Fixed! You don’t even need to restart Trac if you’re using tracd, the built in server.

How did that extra backslash get in there anyways? Well, when you set up a new Trac project ($> trac-admin /path/to/myproject initenv) you will be prompted for several setup options including the file path to the new trac project. If you’re on OSX like me, you’re used to adding a backslash to directory names that contain spaces. As far as I know, Trac needs those backslashes to create the new project directory and files, but then it adds that same path to the trac.ini file, including the backslash. I don’t know if this is a bug… I’m just glad Trac is working now!

I’m not sure why it was doing this.

In Safari, it would generate the menu correctly the first time you clicked on it. Subsequent clicks to show the drop-down menu resulted in a increasingly narrow menu-width, until about the 5th click, at which point we’d hit the 0 pixel limit.

After much wasted time looking through the source code and finding nothing, I found a hint to an alternate solution in the API to the function that writes out the menu. There’s a new setting, called use_native_selects; that apparently was just added in this version. It looks like it is set to true by default, which was causing it to attempt some unnecessary crap writing out a JS menu instead of the browser-specific drop-down menu.

I added this line to my tinyMCE.init({}) settings:

use_native_selects: true,

And the problem was solved. Not as uniform an experience, but that’s ok. It’s functional, and that’s all I really care about. Not sure if there’s any other reports about this bug, but hopefully this will save you some time. Pretty annoying new feature, though, isn’t it?