Sam’s random musings

Where is your closest cloud?

MySQL error code lookup:

I’ve written a simple web frontend for the perror utility which is provided by MySQL. Some distributions, or some systems running older versions of MySQL do not have this utility, and sometimes, I don’t have access to a shell, I ran into this very problem over the weekend when I was on vacation, so I needed a quick way to be able to lookup these errors. Long story short, I now have this utility working and it’s available to all. I figured I’m not alone, so I’d let everyone hit it if they needed to.
You can get to it by just going to http://www.phpcult.com/mysql/123. Replace the last thing with 123, 111, 122, 120 whatever and it will give you the meaning. Hope this helps people.

This would be a good, widget/ bookmarklet I think

(Via Planet MySQL.)

‘DOM-foolery’ with Images:

So, what I wanted was a way to select all images in a specified area and apply a customized corner effect to them. I also want it to work invisibly within a CMS environment, requiring no prior knowledge or, for that matter, even conscious effort from it’s users.

So, what are the alternatives? As it turns out, not even CSS3 or Mozilla specific styles can offer us much help. Moz can do borders that curve behind the corners — a nice enough look, but not what we’re after here. Safari can hold multiple backgrounds but that’s not much use elsewhere. The only viable solution appeared to me to be a touch of ‘DOM-foolery’.

Firstly, we’ll need to work out a repeatable method to get the effect, forgetting (for now) about sound markup technique.

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Very nice clean implementation. might play around with this today…

(Via SitePoint’s Design Blog: Pixel Perfect.)

The Web Designer’s Sketch Pad:

The Mockup Maker is a hefty, 75 page, spiralbound sketchpad — unremarkable other than for the fact the each (one-sided) page has a diagram of 800×600, 1024×768 and 1280×1024 screen sizes with 5 pixel markers up the left side and across the top.

On of the problems I’ve found with presenting ‘onscreen mockups’, is clients believe they are finished art. Even if you tell them a dozen times ‘this is an early phase mockup’, they often still can’t seem to think beyond what’s onscreen.

The Mockup Maker looks like it could be good for presenting consistent, neat and (hopefully) impressive mockups that clients understand aren’t finalized.

I like it when someone follows through with a simple idea.

This looks really cool!

(Via SitePoint’s Design Blog: Pixel Perfect.)

Sorry for the repost, but it’s been one of those days again…

Free Form for All:

All of the blood, sweat and tears that I put into designing that form in XHTML and CSS last week is coming to some good. After much continued fussing, I finally got it to render reliably and consistently across several major Web browsers, so at the very least, my labor satisfied the challenge at hand. But, having heard with near unanimity the general frustration that people feel about forms, I thought I’d do the civic thing and release a genericized version of my work — and let others freely borrow, steal and/or adapt it for their own needs.

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p>This is actually a really nice simple piece of work, that I am sure will expand in the future. If are having problems with form elements lining up this might be the thing for you.

(Via Subtraction.)

Hillegass: Cocoa Style:

I have come to realize that I do have some definite style guidelines that I live by. This is an effort to codify them into something coherent and share them with the world. It is also the basis of my talk at the O’Reilly Mac OS X Conference.

I like to code in a set style (or as close to one as I can) it makes returning to my own code easier. I think I could live with these for a while. I also like that for the most part there is a reason for the style, not just it looks good to me

(Via .)

The Coccinella:

Jabber chat client with whiteboard communication Share a common window on your computer with two or more other Coccinella users. Some of its features:

• Write text with any font, size, normal, bold, etc.
• Toolbar with basic drawing capabilities
• Flexible editing of each item in the canvas window
• Support for foreign language character sets, from swedish Ã¥, ä, and ö, to Chinese (Unicode)
• Extended functionality via plugins, see Extensions. This includes mp3’s on all platforms, video, synthetic speech of written text etc.
• Full QuickTime support on Macs and Windows
• Open source with the Gnu public license.

(Via .)