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'

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.

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.

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!

I can’t quite understand why this isn’t a default feature of ActiveResource, but wouldn’t one think that developers would need to have at least two different environment services like development and production?

My co-worker, Matt Parker (@moonmaster9000,) imagined a better way to handle services and ta-da, Breadboard was born!

When I was implementing Breadboard on our front-end code, I quickly found that there were a few bugs that needed to be weeded out before it could be widely used by the team. For one thing, whenever you were inheriting site settings from parent classes, that would automatically be set for you, but with Breadboard it wasn’t checking if the parent class was assigned a proper site service and would automatically fall back to the default service value. I made a patch that performed the necessary checks on parent classes before the fallback to the default service.

Another interesting bug that we found was that sometimes the services were not getting set. It ended up being that when an ActiveResource model set self.site, it also set @connection equal to nil which was a key component missing the Breadboard gem that was causing some inconsistencies. A quick method write solved the problem and we were able to get Breadboard out into the workflow of the Online team.

That got me thinking about myself and what I carry around. Until the end of last year or the beginning of this year I had the bad habit of not carrying a emergency roadside kit with me, especially considering the amount of trans-state traveling I do throughout the year, this was a disaster waiting to happen. I now carrying a roadside kit, albeit a very cheap one, which contains a set of jumper cables, a bunch of tools and wrench pieces, and flares. My car is small and the battery isn’t huge so I think the small jumper cables will be enough but I found earlier this year when a friend’s battery died that they were no match for her gigantic SUV (oh, the joys and benefits of having a super-compact car…! Have I mentioned enough about how much I love my car?)

I realized that I have been doing some things right. I always carry a sleeping bag with me in the off chance I will have to do some dirty work underneath the car or, heaven forbid, if I need to sleep in the car for some reason. My car seats are reasonably comfortable (for me, some relatives and friends hate them) and if I’ve had to nap in the car I’ve done so successfully. Then again, I take after my father who is capable of nearly sleeping anywhere save for sleeping standing up.

The article did bring up something I haven’t thought about. I should probably keep an extra set of clothes and maybe even shoes, just in case I find my travels taking me someplace that I can’t get home to change or I messy them with bad weather or car trouble. I also don’t have a first aid kit which seems horribly overlooked considering how accident-prone I am.I’ve also been meaning to get a travel sized flashlight but have yet to stumble upon one. It also seems like it would be a good idea to keep some sort of energy or granola bar in the car since I’m hypoglycemic and I’m intolerable in that state.

Here’s a broken down list of things I usually keep in my car:

1. Sleeping bag
2. Roadside kit & Tire fixing tools
3. Portable dog crate
4. Reusable grocery bags
5. Napkins
6. Umbrella
7. iPod/iPhone charger/axillary connector kit.
8. Backseat cover for dog and dog harness
9. Things to donate/return
10. GPS

Here’s some things I should think about keeping in the car:

1. Extra set of clothes/shoes
2. Sweater
3. First Aid Kit
4. Energy or granola bars
5. Flashlight
6. Coupons