Uri's Blog

Have you ever watched the movie Field of Dreams? Don't worry, I haven't either. It's an old movie about a guy who wants to build a baseball field out in the middle of nowhere. Someone tells him the famous line: "If you build it, they will come." And sure enough when he builds the field, the legendary (dead) baseball stars show up to play. A similar thing happened to me (no, not ghosts or voices in my head) as I worked on a project to create hi-quality handouts for my presentation at the 2010 T-Cubed International Conference. I wanted some way of using my favorite editor Emacs, org-mode, and CSS to create the handouts. And sure enough, as I moved forward with the project, solutions seemed to, well, pop out of nowhere.

Saving streaming videos to disk is supposed to be easy with VLC but in fact it's not, specially on Windows platforms. (I've always had better luck with mplayer. In Linux, mplayer URL -dumpstream is usually all you need.) In contrast to a regular video file, a streaming video file downloads in "chunks." These video files can be downloaded to your computer with VLC if you know the right settings.

An excellent tip from /home/evidad. Use C-x C-v RET to quickly reload a file. (It’s technically the command to find an alternate file, but it highlights the current file by default, so you can load it.) Thanks,Evidad!

What if you need to create a quick macro that you won’t use next time you load Emacs?

I was sitting on a very boring Sunday School lesson on prayer (it wasn't his fault, it was the first time he was teaching middle schoolers), when it occurred to me -- what better way to engage kids and get them excited about prayer than by having them send a text message to Jesus?

Most kids nowadays not only have cellphones but they also have text messaging plans, and they "get" text messaging. (In fact, they get it so much that some of their parents limit their texting.)

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working on my brother’s site and I forgot how much of a pain it is to work in CSS and Drupal. In theory, CSS is great — its supposed to be a visual design language for the web. But in practice, browsers don’t implement it correctly. Internet Explorer (IE) is riddled with bugs and even the beloved Firefox (FF) has a few bugs here and there. What this means is that it is a huge pain in the rear to get sites to look the same across different browsers (heck, even different computers — PC and Mac) and so you have to test, test, test — test your site across different OSes and different versions of the same browser. I spent, I kid you not, 2 days trying to style a search button because IE didn’t implement the feature, and I’m spending another 2 days getting to the bottom of a weird spacing issue in horizontal lists in FF. The bottom line is that you can easily get lost in the technical details.

Likewise, in theory, Drupal is supposed to be the promise of powerful websites for the masses. In practice … not quite. While the creators were generous to share their code with the public, it was made at a time when nerds thought good user interfaces were for stupid people. This mentality still shows at times — Drupal has a notoriously “quirky” interface and hard-to-read (and sometimes lacking) documentation. Like CSS, you can easily get lost in the technical details.

Here are some general tips to keep you motivated and on track: