These commands will either show/hide the hidden files and then relaunch Finder.app to show the changes.

alias show_hidden='defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES && killall Finder && open /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app'
alias hide_hidden='defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles NO && killall Finder && open /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app'

5. Lady Gaga — Born This Way

Amanda Palmer Goes Down Under

I guess it wouldn’t be me unless I did mention Lady Gaga somewhere in my breakdown for the year. She not only came out with one full-length album, she also released a remix album of the tracks on “Born This Way” at the end of the year. While this isn’t my favorite Lady Gaga album, that would be “The Fame Monster,” I did find some songs on this album that I fell in love with and of course there were a few that made me want to rip off my ears. As a whole, I enjoyed the new territory and I did expect more from her, but I did find myself listening to this album a whole hell of a lot.

4. Amanda Palmer — Amanda Palmer Goes Down Under

I use to follow Amanda Palmer religiously on Twitter for a few years, but after a while even an ardent fan can get too much Amanda Palmer, which is why it took me a little after the fact to find out about her “Goes Down Under” album that came out. It wasn’t until I heard, and saw, the remix of “Map of Tasmania” that I was hooked into this cheeky set of tunes that she wrote while touring the “Land Down Under.” My favorite is definitely “Map of Tasmania” and I would definitely go out and get the remix versions by “The Young Punx” which feature Peaches.

3. Teddybears — Devil’s Music

I had inadvertently listened to Teddybears over the past few years without really knowing it and it finally dawned on me after I heard Robyn’s cover of “Cobrastyle” where I had heard it before. This year they released another great album following up on their 2006 debut “Soft Machine” titled “Devil’s Music.” It’s wide and varied but keeps a consistent strength of songs through the whole album from start to finish. They also team up with some great guests artists including Eve, The Flaming Lips, the aforementioned Robyn, and my personal favorite, CeeLo Green & The B-52′s on the track “Cho-Cha.”

2. Florence + the Machine — Ceremonials

Secret Codes and Battleships

I had listened off and on to Florence + the Machine’s previous album “Lungs” earlier in the year, but it never made a huge impact on me. When I heard their initial offering of “What The Water Gave Me” a few months ago, I was ravenous! When the full album came out a few months later, I could just put it on and listen to the whole album as I worked and it seemed each song was as good or better than the last.

1. Darren Hayes — Secret Codes & Battleships

Without a doubt, “Secret Codes & Battleships” was the album I was waiting most intensely for the entire year. Darren Hayes had been working on this album for the better part of two years and constantly teased his fans with updates here and there about the progress of the body of work. When it finally did come out in October, I was amazed at how perfectly themed the entire collection was. I rated each song of the 12 track album 5 stars in my library. I bought the super-deluxe fan edition which included a vinyl record just because I ended up loving this album so much (I don’t own a record player!) The second CD included in the fan edition wasn’t anything to sneeze at either. It included some very well-archetechtured songs that for one reason or another did not fit into the grand scheme of the album as a whole. Mysteriously, after some digging around, I had found a song titled “I Wanna Know” by Darren Hayes earlier on in the year that I absolutely loved and hoped would be released on this album — it wasn’t, and it wasn’t found on the CD of extras either. Why I can’t seem to find a release of this song will be lost to the ages, but I hope one day it will end up somewhere worthwhile.

Honorable Mentions

Fantasy

These artists didn’t release a new album this year but they did pass along singles or “teaser” tracks to whet our appetites.

I Will Never Be the Same – Hold (Instrumental), Fantasy

I am a huge fan of Josh Atchley’s ”I Will Never Be the Same” project and supremely upset that I’ve never been able to see him live because he’s all the way in Los Angelos, and I will probably never get the chance to go there anyway. That being said, I’ve been frothing at the mouth since his “Standby” album release in 2009 for more music and he has been slowly releasing a few teaser tracks here and there and hopefully he will be releasing a full-length album later this year. You can listen to these teaser tracks on his SoundCloud page. My personal favorites are “Hold (Instrumental)” and “Fantasy.”

Marina & The Diamonds – Radioactive EP

I was turned on to Marina & The Diamonds whenever I saw a fan-made video which integrated the majority of her songs from “The Family Jewels” into a remix that accompanied a professional-level music video featuring some of our well-loved princess fairy-tales from history. She released an EP late last year called “Radioactive.” It varies greatly from her previous album, but I have to say the song is extremely catchy and dance-worthly. I am looking forward to a full-length album whenever she decides to release it.

Open an eBook in Dropbox

So sue me, I like reading books on my iPad and I like using iBooks. Not the Kindle App, not the Nook App and heaven forbid you make me read a book in any of the dozen or so other third-party Apps available in the App Store or make me use Adobe Digital Editions on a desktop.

Another thing I hate to do is tethering my iPad/iPhone to my decrepit MacBook (circa 2007) when I buy an eBook online just so I can load it into iTunes and then sync it to my iPad/iPhone. I try to buy ePubs when I can and I usually do it on a desktop computer (maybe another Mac — like my work machine — quite a few miles away from my home computer.)

In the past I tried uploading the files to a server and downloading it to the iPad (doesn’t work) and even e-mailing it to myself (also doesn’t work, damnit!)

After using Dropbox to transfer the bought books to my home computer where I would then transfer it to iTunes, I then realized “You know what, Self? Maybe can I try to open these books on the Dropbox App on my iPad and read them there!” I attempted a quick drag-and-drop of the file into my Dropbox on my computer which quickly synced over to my iPad and ta-da — eBook goodness!

When you get to Dropbox on your iPad, just click on it and wait for it to download. You can’t view the book in Dropbox itself, but if you click the arrow in the top-right corner of the App screen, you can “Open In…” iBooks (or your choice of third-party App that can read the book’s format.)

However, the book will not automatically transfer itself to other iDevices or iTunes, but you can just do the same trick again to get the book on the device you want. The nice thing is that when you do get around to tethering and syncing your iPad to your computer, you will have no problem transferring the book back to iTunes.

You will run into problems if the eBook has DRM but there are ways around these things.

Lucky for me, I actually do that quite often, but this past week I took a class on something I wish I would have learned before my wedding.

I’ve been getting into crafting the past few years and I joke that I’m a middle-aged cat-woman because of my hobbies and the fact that I get to bed early most nights. Also a few years ago, I started attending “Crop Weekends” with a group of girls in the Tri-State area called “Cropper’s Delight.” Recently, they started adding more generalized crafting classes to the amenities they offered during their cropping weekends. I was particularly interested in their glass etching class after I saw Meryle’s various etching projects that she showed-off on Facebook.

After an exceptionally difficult car trip from Brooklyn to Mahwah, NJ, I finally made it to her class and learned how to etch a plate using a Critcutted vinyl template and some etching creme. I was absolutely amazed at how easy this technique was. After sticking the vinyl to the plate and applying a healthy coat of etching creme, it takes about 10 minutes for the chemical process to eat away at the glass and leave a permentant mark on your glass.

I say I wish I knew this technique before my wedding because it would have been much easier for me to create my own Sand Ceremony glasses rather than searching all over earth for someone to etch one for me and send it to me. It also would have been great to create my own favors with the technique.

After I showed Adam what I had produced, he immediately saw a deal on Gilt for recycled glass bottles and ordered me a few dozen with the aim of me taking custom orders off of Etsy. Now what am I going to do with all these bottles?

To keep a swf from overlapping html, set the wmode parameter to “transparent”.

 

 

Example:   recipe-widget at http://www.foodandwine.com/holiday-guide

 

<param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”>

 

See how the New Year’s dropdown overlays the widget.

Other examples and discussion:

http://www.aleosoft.com/flashtutorial_menuoverlap.html

http://www.codingforums.com/showthread.php?t=156189

This wouldn’t be something we could easily fix as the advertisements are served from an advertising partner and we would have to have the partners contact the advertisers to fix their flash advertisements. We were about to give up and deploy without a fix, as the advertisement only showed up very ocassionally on a few pages, when someone from the marketing side sent an email asking us to bump up the z-index even higher and see how that worked.

I bumped them up to about z-index: 9999; but no dice. Finally, I did what I probably should have done at the beginning and just did into the gabillion lines of code of the offending advertisement and look for z-indexes being specified. And ‘lo and behold, they were setting their ad to 1000000. Hmm. Thanks, guys!

Obviously, they wanted their advertisement to show up above anything else on the page, but that becomes a problem for us when our users wouldn’t be able to navigate the site.

I decided that so this doesn’t happen again, why not just set the z-index to the largest z-index possible? After playing with Firebug in Firefox, I found that yes, indeed there is a maximum z-index and Firefox will automatically truncate the value if the maximum is exceeded. After a little more research, the maxmum is different and what happens when you exceed the maximum depends on which browser you use.

It seems Eric Puidokas did all of the research for us and came up with this nice table explaining the maxmum values and what happens if you exceed those values.

I made a simple test page to find these limits and figure out what happens when you exceed them.

Browser	Max z-index value	When exceeded, value changes to:
Internet Explorer 6	2147483647	2147483647
Internet Explorer 7	2147483647	2147483647
Internet Explorer 8	2147483647	2147483647
Firefox 2	2147483647	*element disappears*
Firefox 3	2147483647	0
Safari 3	16777271	16777271
Safari 4	2147483647	2147483647
Opera 9	2147483647	2147483647

The “lowest” maximum value is “16777271″ but as it’s a outdated browser, I went with the common value of “2147483647″ and then “2147483646″ for the child element per my previous post.

I’m not sure if there is etiquette when it comes to using z-indexes on a page, and that’s why I was originally hesitant to make the z-index some outrageous number like “1000″ (only to find out other people seem to yawn at “1000000″) but I hope with this change, we won’t have to deal with drop-down menu z-index problems ever again.

I’m updating one of our brand websites to include a hover-over drop-down menu to its navigation. I was really proud of myself yesterday for doing this simply without the aid of any JavaScript or jQuery but our QA engineer discovered that the menus were getting covered by other elements lower down on the page in IE 6 and IE 7.

Urgh.

After fiddling with the z-index of the menu element itself, I finally did a cursory search on Google and found quite the peculiar fix for this problem. I’m sure this is old news to the web gurus out there but I’ve been out of the loop for a few years on recent IE hacks and workarounds since I’ve mostly dove into Ruby on Rails coding full-time.

The trick to this fix is to make the parent element’s z-index higher than the child element that is having the problem. And not just the immediate parent of the child element, but the closest parent that has the relative positioning attribute defined. For me, this was 3 or 4 levels higher than my absolutely positioned child element.

Can I stop supporting IE 6 & 7 yet?

More information on the fix: Relative, z-index, and IE

However, this time it didn’t work, 1Password would not even save the log in information for me ever again!

Having better things to do with my time, I dealt with the minor inconvenience for months but after having some annoying down-time at work to kill, I flexed my Google-fu and found a quick work-around for troublesome form fields that don’t want to auto-save and don’t want to auto-submit.

There is a feature that I had forgotten about, after you fill in a form, you can right-click on the form and a menu will pop-up with the option for “1Password” and under that menu will be “Save Login…” Select that option and your friendly “Save Login in 1Password” dialog will pop-up. Here, you can save your log in normally. If you’re lucky, you will be able to auto-submit again. If not, you will at least be able to have the form auto-fill and you’ll have to do the heavy lifting of just clicking the submit button.

Here is 1Password’s guide to “Website Login Issues” that may be able to help you further if you’re still having problems.

When I moved away from college, of course I would miss my parents, but the hardest thing and the most that I missed was Lily. She couldn’t talk on the phone like my mom or come to visit like my dad would. Whenever I did go home during vacation times, I always felt that Lily held some kind of grudge over me like I had abandoned her. I was arguably the most attached to her whenever she was a puppy and was always eager to take care of her and do the “doggie” chores. I’m sure I probably over-state how she treated me when I got home because I am not sure dogs have resentment or complex feelings like that, and it was more likely it was my own guilt of leaving her behind. After a few days, she would likely come and cuddle back up with me and we’d be best friends again.

I’ll never forget the way she was always there for me whenever I went through my most trying times growing up, like heartbreak and my paralyzing loneliness that no human could have healed. Even with Isabella, my new dog, even though we’re best friends, I still don’t have that level of understanding and uncompromising loyalty that Lily displayed to me.

While I was home over Christmas, there was an evening where the whole family sat in the family and watched the movie “Inception.” For more reasons than one, that night was the nicest for me. We had a low-key Christmas and it wasn’t about the presents or whatever we were eating for dinner. We all had tough 2010s and needed to spend and do less over the vacation. That night Isabella was especially restless and was cranky over not being able to sit with me and Adam on the couch. I then relented and snuggled up on the floor on a blanket with her. Slowly Lily made a rare entrance and plopped herself down on the blanket on my other side and let me hold her. I wish I would have had someone take a quick snapshot of the setting because I’ll never forget this moment and when it happened I told myself to hold on to it because it might be the last time I saw Lily. It turned out that I was right.

When I got a message on my cell phone and then a message left for me on my work phone from my mother for me to call her right away, I knew immediately it was pertaining to Lily. She had been especially sick the past week and had stopped moving and eating. When my mom told me they had made the decision to put her to sleep, I started to bawl right in the office. Obviously, I knew it was coming, it was hard to not see what was coming, it just weighed on me so heavily that my best friend was leaving me and I couldn’t be with her to help her on her way and see her through.

So here’s to Lily, the best friend a woman could have, made of endless love.

I’ll see you at the Rainbow Bridge.

Lily and Rachel

rachel theme for oh-my-zsh

This morning I got a note saying it was accepted into the main branch and is publicly available when you pull it down. If you’re using oh-my-zsh or interested in trying it out, check out my theme!

Unbelievable, coming from a network of nerds and geeks who have posted articles in the past about password management. And here the CEO uses short, easily guessable and repeated passwords for everything from the company’s Google Apps account to his personal Twitter account.

Ironically, any of the commenters that login via Facebook Connect were not affected!

Just one more reminder to change your passwords every few months and make them as secure as possible!