CTO, Software engineer and Team leader
Archive for November, 2009
Technorati checks my blog
Nov 25th
So I applied for Technorati enrollment and they gave me the KNQ3S98TZ58S token for verification. I have to just create a new blog entry and publish in it to verify my domain claim. That’s the price to get into their area.
Enjoy!
How to add a nice jQuery slider
Nov 15th
This weekend fun was adding to my website the cool sliding control from Jérémie Tisseau website. That pretty it was, I immediately started thinking it as a container to my BNR exchange rate page. The coded worked perfectly, with few modifications.
Firstly, WordPress uses the $ operator for Prototype library, so if you want to add your jQuery library the invocation to WordPress Firebug will report the error “$ is not a function”. So here’s the fix: you’ll have to change any occurrence of the $ sign to jQuery. Just like in the following example:
$(document).ready(function() {
// Expand Panel
$("#open").click(function(){
$("div#panel").slideDown("slow");
});
// Collapse Panel
$("#close").click(function(){
$("div#panel").slideUp("slow");
});
// Switch buttons from "Log In | Register" to "Close Panel" on click
$("#toggle a").click(function () {
$("#toggle a").toggle();
});
});
TO:
jQuery(document).ready(function() {
// Expand Panel
jQuery("#open").click(function(){
jQuery("div#panel").slideDown("slow");
});
// Collapse Panel
jQuery("#close").click(function(){
jQuery("div#panel").slideUp("slow");
});
// Switch buttons from "Log In | Register" to "Close Panel" on click
jQuery("#toggle a").click(function () {
jQuery("#toggle a").toggle();
});
});
Change screen orientation of a Microsoft Surface application
Nov 3rd
Microsoft Surface is designed to allow MultiUser and MultiTouch interaction.While MultiTouch is easy to acknowledge, the MultiUser and designing a smart changing of Surface’s screen orientation is a little difficult coming from desktop computing, where the monitor’s down will be the same always.
In order to understand the need of changing the screen orientation on a Microsoft Surface, you might want to think about it’s normal usage: Collaboration and User experience. In the implementation for a group of 4-8 people, sitting around the Surface, their need for rotating the environment is almost zero or otherwise they will experience dizziness and losing their focus while rotating the environment for one of them.
While for the situation in which you have casual visitors(as in BMW implementation in their showrooms), who sit in pairs working on one Surface, you might considering rotating the window such that the ’Down’ of the application would be the nearest edge to them.
How to add Zend Debugging capabilities to Apache
Nov 2nd
Most developer use a local website to test and develop their applications. One of the most used servers is Apache. Since for many developers setting this complex tool is not worth spending their time, some use smart installers who can do those settings for them. I personally use Vertrigo server, who brings me the advantage of 0 time for install, 0 time required for setting and making other tools work together, like MySQL, PHP, PHP MyAdmin, Zend Optimizer etc.
This tutorial is for Windows environment, but it can be easily adapted to Linux or MAC environments because all the settings are done in the configurations files.
The problem that I want to solve in this tutorial arises when one might want to debug its work. I mean, you wrote your application in PHP. There are some tools to allow you to debug it, but either are costly, like Zend Studio and Zend Server or are hard to setup, like XCode. At the end of the day, you’re paid to create applications, not to do dirty settings in 10 or so files in order to enable a simple debug feature.
How to make a Print Screen on Microsoft Source using WPF
Nov 1st
After we took a look inside of Microsoft Surface, let’s see how to take a later look on the surface, by creating printscreens of the application.
In some WPF applications you’ll need to take a quick screenshot of the user’s screen, allowing him (or them, in case of Multi User Surface) for later reviewing. Now, on Surface there can be only one full screen and active application. So it use the entire screen of the device.
Here are the steps in order to accomplish that:
First, we need to add to Visual Studio project the references to the libraries that we’ll use:
using System.Drawing; using System.Drawing.Imaging; using System.Windows.Forms;
Then, we will add create the method that will do the actual saving to a specific file, with the format PNG:
public void MakeScreenshot(String fileName)
{
Bitmap bmpScreenshot;
Graphics gfxScreenshot;
//first, we create&set a bitmap object to the size of the screen
bmpScreenshot = new Bitmap(Screen.PrimaryScreen.Bounds.Width, Screen.PrimaryScreen.Bounds.Height, PixelFormat.Format32bppArgb);
//Using the bitmap, we create a graphics object
gfxScreenshot = Graphics.FromImage(bmpScreenshot);
//Copy the rectangle (the screen in our case) - from the upper left corner to the right bottom corner
gfxScreenshot.CopyFromScreen(Screen.PrimaryScreen.Bounds.X, Screen.PrimaryScreen.Bounds.Y, 0, 0, Screen.PrimaryScreen.Bounds.Size, CopyPixelOperation.SourceCopy);
// Do the saving, outputing a file by supplying the name and format it as PNG
bmpScreenshot.Save(fileName, ImageFormat.Png);
}
That’s all, folks – Use and enjoy!
