just chewing away

Small tips and tricks for designwork and other brainfarts.

[justchewingaway]

Thank you so much for liking/reblog my post. All the support is very much appreciated. :)

Great work!

[pixel-city]

[ink-falcon]

Ygritte, kissed by fire.

I am doing sketch requests for 5 and 15$ patrons, every 3 or 1 months respectively.

So if you wish, go take a looks at this page

www.patreon.com/psamophis

I wish to thank my Patrons for supporting my work. Thanks to you guys I’m continuing doing these XD

[justchewingaway]

oops - something went wrong

I have some trouble with my main site christianleon.com - won't be fixed until after summer holidays most likely. In the meantime, here's my reel. Contact me on G+

[justchewingaway]

tricks for axure - continuous

Crop images

Instead of using the built in crop function in Axure (dead slow), just make a screenshot of the area you need and paste it in. On OS X CMD+4 lets you pick a rectangular screenshot.

pro-tip

Hold down CTRL while clicking the mouse and the screenshot is saved to the clipboard.

Keyboard shortcuts

CMD+4 and then SPACE wil let you capture a window

CTRL while CLICKING will capture the window to clipboard for pasting

CMD+4 and then 'SPACE' and then 'ALT' while clicking let's you capture a window without shadow

[justchewingaway]

enable raw disk access for virtualbox in win7

VBoxManage.exe internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename "f:virtualboxes\zfsraid1.vmdk" -rawdisk "\.\PhysicalDrive2"

To also make VirtualBox respond to Disk Flushes

VBoxManage.exe setextradata "ubuntu" "VBoxInternal/Devices/ahci/0/LUN#1/Config/IgnoreFlush" 0

LUN1 corresponds to SATA Disk 1

See http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch12.html#idp59345440

[justchewingaway]

Use the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool with custom ISOs

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/windows7/a/install-windows-7-usb.htm

http://withinwindows.com/within-windows/2009/11/01/use-the-windows-7-usbdvd-download-tool-with-custom-isos

windows install, usb install, fix, hack, remember, links

[justchewingaway]

Compare the contents of two folders with diff

diff -qr dirA dirB | grep -v -e 'DS_Store' -e 'Thumbs' | sort > diffs.txt

Box 4.0 screwed up my folders :(

[justchewingaway]

Graphs in processing

I needed to get some data into a processing sketch on the web.

As the (self?)conscious coder I am, I wanted to be a good boy and make the whole thing with objects and classes. That didn't seem to work too well with processing.js :(

What happened was that I made a class 'DiamondGraph' and started a new instance of it called 'browser'. Inside 'DiamondGraph' I defined all the methods I would need.

Then I went into HTML, and initiated the connection with Processing.js, using the exporter and adding some javascript code to let javascript know about the sketch. Mainly I used the guide from http://processingjs.org/articles/PomaxGuide.html#json for this. So I ended up with an object called pjs that was the objectholder for the sketch in Javascript.

I thought in my newbness, that I now could do pjs.browser.addPoint(n) to add a point on the graph, but no. It seems that Processing.js has a problem with scope, so all my object-methods are only available locally, ie. inside the sketch and not available to Javascript.

I made a hack, I think.

I added a function in the main code outside the classes that calls a class inside the object browser. This way, javascript can call pjs.piggyBackAddPoint(n) and it piggybacks onto the real browser-object, browser.addPoint(n)

It works, and I learned something. Yay!

http://christianleon.com/ktq/diamondgraph/

What did I learn? Loading things with ajax is asynchronous and I have to take into account network latency. Always add a success function so that the browser doesn't try to access stuff before the file is loaded.

Error: Undetermined String Constant This is an unclosed "

-- christian

[justchewingaway]

autostart apache2 on ubuntu

just for me to remember it sudo update-rc.d -f apache2 enable

[justchewingaway]

Fire an email from gmail - quickly with mailto:

If you've read my blog, you'll know that I love keyboard shortcuts. Just came to think of an idea that lets me fire an email from gmail quickly.

Typing mailto: in the address bar of Chrome gives me a compose email, when I'm logged in and I can just start typing with full address book-support as well.

Then I thought, 'I'll bookmark the page with a name of 'mmpo' (mmpo is just a quick sequence of letters that in my head says mailpost or something) so I can just type 'mmpo' into Chrome and get the bookmark.'

But when I did, I had to use the down arrow to select the bookmark. That won't do. :)

Textexpander to the rescue. I made a snippet with url https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&source=mailto and a return at the end and labeled it 'mmail'.

Now I can just type 'mmail' into Chrome and up pops the Compose email window. I changed mmpo to 'mmail' in TextExpander to make the label more like the other snippets in TextExpander

Time saved: Negligable Geek happiness: Priceless

Here's the snippet: https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&source=mailto%key:enter%

-- christian

[justchewingaway]

nginx + php = file not found?

If you install nginx like I did and setup a server, just remember to add the root to the server inside the **server { }** block. If you do it inside the **location{ }** block, you'll have to repeat the root-path inside every block, also inside the **location ~ \.php$** block. my server-block looks like > server { listen 80; server_name domain.com; access_log /var/log/nginx/localhost.access.log; root /var/www/; ## Default location location / { index index.php index.html; }

[justchewingaway]

after effects expressions

While doing graphics for an installation at VilVite, I needed 8 different combinations of one comp, to show videos to the user based on settings in the experiment the visitor was doing. One of the variables that needed to change was a percentage readout. I wanted to have the numbers in an expression control + add an % at the end. First I tried pickwhipping the expressioncontrol. That gave me the number I needed, but when I tried to add in the %-sign i got an error > thisComp.layer("variables").effect("efficiency")("Slider") + "%";  So I tried doing a toString() since the error said 'Division by zero' among other things. > efficiencyValue = thisComp.layer("variables").effect("efficiency")("Slider"); n = efficiencyValue.toString(); n + "%"; This time I only got > [object Properties]% Then it hit me, it was missing an object Index. > efficiencyValue = thisComp.layer("variables").effect("efficiency")("Slider"); n = efficiencyValue[0].toString(); n + "%"; If you don't use the array index [0] for the slider-control you'll get [object Properties]. And to top it all off, i could just put the objectIndex[0] inside the first line, and get away wtith one line of code. > thisComp.layer("variables").effect("efficiency")("Slider")[0] + "%"; And presto! More skills learned and goal reached :)  -- christian

[justchewingaway]

set your date in a VPS

Just got a VPS from [NodeDeploy](https://nodedeploy.com/clients/aff.php?aff=061) (affiliate link, non affiliate links below) and I wanted to set the time in Norwegian time to see the correct dates for logs etc. >date 012310072013.42 date: cannot set date: Operation not permitted I got an error, since I dont have access to the hardware clock in a Virtual machine. Seems that you have to do a symlink from /usr/share/[availabe/timesones] into /etc/localtime > ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Oslo /etc/localtime Non-affiliate link to [NodeDeploy](http://nodedeploy.com)

[justchewingaway]

checkout a branch from a bare git-repository

After pushing a new design-branch to my staging server, the post-receive hook wouldn't checkout the new branch for testing. Seeing as this is a staging server I wanted to just go live with the changes at once, since they worked ok on the dev-server (my mac). ssh into the stage server, and cd into the git-repo > git --work-tree=/home/username/path/to/worktree checkout new-design works like a charm. if you do it the other way, > git checkout new-design --work-tree=/home/username/path/to/worktree git responds with > fatal: This operation must be run in a work tree Just goes to show that git requires common sense. It can't checkout a file into a work tree, before it knows where that work tree is. Gotta love git :D

[justchewingaway]

via the fantastic 'We Fucking Love Science' on FB - click to enlarge :p

[justchewingaway]

update git on ubuntu 10.04

The repository for 'git-core' is only updated to git 1.7.04 on Ubuntu 10.04. If you want to update git to the latest, you have to add the release repo to /etc/apt/sources.list > deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/git-core/ppa/ubuntu lucid main > deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/git-core/ppa/ubuntu lucid main Afterwards do > sudo apt-get update > git --version should update and show you the latest version. -- christian