http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ showed that in every case the website was up.

Today I got a google dns error. I mean google for f**ks sake.

I’m supposed to be on holiday but I have been setting up another web site for my brother.

Design Seating is a fairly simple site but they wanted it to be kept clean and simple.

I think is came out quite well.

Its a website my brother and his girlfriend are running to sell great children’s clothes at great prices.

I’m sure I never had anything like this Thomas The Tank Engine jeans when I was young and I think I have seen Sam wearing a T-Shirt like the Spider Man T-Shirt.

Steve was the great artist who came up with the logo.  Its a bit over the top but they wanted the website to be bright.  Its simply a combination of 3 images from openclipart.org merged together in Inkscape.

The original website they were given looked like something from the 90s with anim gifs and flash everywhere.

They had flash images on the page which were the main menus links, unfortunately each one opened a different named target (i.e new tab/browser)

I have no idea how people can get away will doing such rubbish.

I now want to add a simple admin section for my brother to add new items and remove items when they are out of stock, but this shouldn’t take long now.  Then I shouldn’t have to do anything too it again.

I also had to fix a lightbox problem because of the length of the page.  E.g on the Dungarees page.  You can see my previous post here.

I think the items need more close up images of the childrens logos too.  Like on the thomas the tank engine jeans, they should have a close up of thomas logo.

On pages which were long there was a problem with the Lightbox ‘window’ appearing very low on the page or ever off the bottom of the page.

The problem gets worse the further down the page you go. So at the top of the page the lightbox location is correct, half way down the page it was only about 100 pixels off, but by the end of the page the top of the lightbox window is below the centre of the screen and ends below the bottom of the browser.

After some searching I found a few other pages with the same problem. One being here.

The problem is caused by a bit of code in the lightbox.js file. For some reason the top of the lightbox is calculated based on the height of the view port. I don’t know why this is done, but it doesnt work.

var lightboxTop = arrayPageScroll[1] + (document.viewport.getHeight() / 10);

I simply wanted the lightbox to appear in the same location regardless of how far the user has scrolled down the page. I changed the line to be this :

var lightboxTop = 50 + arrayPageScroll[1];

This makes the lightbox ‘window’ appear 50 pixels from the top of the browser.

My Lego Piste Basher has just arrived.

I’m just a big kid

I read that Blender and the Space Navigator worked under Linux and managed to borrow a Space Navigator from work over this long weekend.

I downloaded the 32bit drivers (3DxWare for Linux (i386)) from http://www.3dconnexion.com/service/drivers.html as well as the “Blender plug-in for Linux i386 (beta)“

Installing the Space Navigator driver

I extracted the 3dxware-linux-v1-4-3.i386.tar.gz file to /tmp/3d/

tar -xvzf 3dxware-linux-v1-4-3.i386.tar.gz -C /tmp/3d/
cd /tmp/3d/
sudo ./install-3dxunix.sh

I then recieved an error saying libXm.so.3 was missing.

/etc/3DxWare/daemon/3dxsrv: error while loading shared libraries: libXm.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I pressed CTRL-C to abort the script.

After a little checking I found that I have libXm.so.4 but not 3, so I created a symbolic link from libXm 4 to 3.

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libXm.so /usr/lib/libXm.so.3

I then re-ran the install script again.

This time it all worked.  I did not configure it to auto start though.

Now I simply started the driver via

sudo /etc/3DxWare/daemon/3dxsrv -d usb

and was greeted by the blue lights on the Space Navigator and the messages

3DxWareUNIX = V1.4.3
Device      = SpaceNavigator
Firmware    = V3.17

there was also a minimised window called 3DxWare 1.4.3, which appears the be the settings dialog (like the Windows Control Panel control)

I then ran the xcube example from /tmp/3d/ and the space navigator worked great.  I changed a few settings as I prefer pressing and pulling to be zoom in and out.

Installing the Blender plugin

I was a little surprised by this, as the forums said I should have a ~/.blender/ directory and I didnt.

I decided that creating the directory couldn’t cause any problems so I created a directory

mkdir -p ~/.blender/plugins/

and copied the 3DxNdofBlender.plug file into it.  The new NDOF icons appeared at the bottom of the viewport.  See http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-246/ndof-support/

See http://neilwightman.deviantart.com/

Recently they added new portfolio section which I really like.  I have only added a few photos to my portfolio @ http://neilwightman.daportfolio.com/

Most of the setup was easy, the only issue I found was that Ubuntu uses Alt-Middle Mouse to resize the windows. I have used xfce for years and I just couldn’t get used to this change in Ubuntu.

I did alot of searching and could not find out how to change it.

…. some hours later …

Well I finally managed to get Ubuntu to resize with Alt-Right Click (button3).

By default Ubuntu resizes with Alt-Middle Mouse Button, my laptop mouse has a very small middle mouse button. I use xfce on my other linux boxes and I wanted all the Window Managers to function the same.

I tried installing the CompizConfig Settings Manager. I then disabled the Window Menu which was using Alt-Button 3 and went to the resize window setting and made that Alt-Button3. This seemed to be ok, until I tested it. The Alt-Button 3 was still showing the Window Menu.

I tried disabling the Window Menu totally, but the settings simply wouldnt stay.

After a bit of searching I found this.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/compizconfig-settings-manager/+bug/146736
where it says:

open ccsm, go to Preferences, and if gconf is selected as a back-end, then make sure that the checkbox “Enable integration into the desktop environment” is unchecked.
Now you change change the bindings.

I’m not 100% what the “Enable integration into the desktop environment” checkbox provides, but everything seems to work ok with this checkbox disabled.

Also see http://wiki.compiz.org/CCSM#Backends_and_Integration

This workaround only works when you have the visual affects no though.  If you turn off the visual affect then compiz isnt controlling the right click any more and it goes straight back to opening the Window Menu.

I’m still trying to get the window manager to resize on right click without the visual effects being enabled. If anyone know, please let me know.

I took lots of photographs which are in the Lech 2010 gallery.

Like this

I also created some new panoramic images. These are here

We didnt take much video, that may be a good thing as I still have hours of videos from other trips which I have not processed yet.

(defun indent-buffer ()
    "Indent the current buffer"
    (interactive)
    (save-excursion (indent-region (point-min) (point-max) nil))
)

I found the above function at http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/ReformatBuffer

Recently I noticed that it was leaving tabs in (which I hate) and trailing spaces.  It was simply just indenting the buffer.

After some more searching today I found the untabify command and I created the following commands.  Mainly because I expected the command to be called something like tab-???

(defun untabify-buffer ()
    "Untabify current buffer"
    (interactive)
    (save-excursion (untabify (point-min) (point-max)))
)
 
(defun tab-to-spaces ()
    "Convert tab to spaces"
    (interactive)
    (save-excursion (untabify (point-min) (point-max)))
)

I then found this page, http://emacsblog.org/2007/01/17/indent-whole-buffer/ which has the best indent/format buffer function.

(defun indent-buffer-2 ()
    "Indent the buffer 2"
    (interactive)
    (save-excursion
        (delete-trailing-whitespace)
        (indent-region (point-min) (point-max) nil)
        (untabify (point-min) (point-max))
    )
)