Digital Intuition

Reporting bugs with ajaxPager

Matt Spence — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 17:57:46 +0000

If you are having problems with ajaxPager please report bugs or request support on the jQuery ajaxPager project page. Please make sure you include details on replicating the problem, including browser details, with a url to either an example or example code in paste bin or equivalent service.

People have been posting bugs on the comments and I’ve completely lost track of them. This is partly my fault as I should have correctly earlier, but if people could move there bugs over to the project page it should make it easier for me to manage them.

Thanks

New Projects

Matt Spence — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:37:38 +0000

I’ve been so busy both at the University of Kent and with my freelance projects that unfortunately this site and my open source project ajaxPager have gone a little neglected. This evening I stole some time to add some of the projects I’ve been working.

Be sure to check them out in the portfolio

Hopefully I’ll be able to find a bit more time to spend some time fixing the problems people have been finding with the ajaxPager. Having said that I quite bit of stuff lined up so can’t promise anything.

Avolus Booklet Cover & Chocolate Box

Matt Spence — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:31:01 +0000

Avolus specialises in providing Private Jets , Helicopters , Yachts and Chauffeured Cars worldwide. This month they have an event in Moscow, they had a booklet but needed a cover design to give that little something extra.

They are also giving out chocolate boxes and need an Avolus branded label for them.

list8D

Matt Spence — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:24:57 +0000

list8D is a project funded by JISC and the University of Kent to provide an out of the box solution for reading lists. A while ago a bunch of us went up to dev8D, a rapid development event hosted by JISC, where we had 2 days to throw together a prototype of a solution to a user problem. We quickly realised that a lot institutions had pretty poor system for handling reading lists and throw something together with symfony. Our prototype won the event and went down so well we went on to get funding and are now developing it into a open source project.

The project is a way off a final release but we will be releasing our initial code very soon. I knocked up this concept, we’re not really at the design stage yet so these are likely to change a lot, but I had some ideas and I wanted to get them down.

You can find out more on the project blog.

University of Kent Template

Matt Spence — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:13:41 +0000

Code named Apollo this was a long overdue redesign of the University’s web template. Designed by myself in conjunction with a complete re-branding of the University, it had to be versitile enough to be reused by each of the University’s many departments. A few years down the line since it’s initial inception the back end is being redeveloped as Bacchus but the design remains the same.

The template is a Dreamweaver template that uses php and JavaScript to produce dynamic web pages with out confusing publishers with the back end code.

New Library Catalogue

Matt Spence — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:03:01 +0000

The University of Kent is preparing to roll out the latest version of their library catalogue, but the new skin doesn’t offer a huge improvement on the previous version or answer a lot of our users requirements.

After being sent to Chicago for some training on how to skin the new system, these are the designs I came back with. Over the next few months I’ll be implementing these into the Library Beta Catelogue, you can read about progress on the project at the Library Catalogue blog.

Student Data System Reskin

Matt Spence — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:50:58 +0000

The team responsible for Student Data System specialize in back end systems and databases, and had a built a useful and function packed system. However the user interface had long gone neglected so as part of the Web Team I proposed we get a small budget together to contract an external design company to redesign the student front end. Then in collaboration with Business Systems implement the new design to make the interface easier and more usable.

These are the designs that the external company (red bullet) has produced and we are just waiting on other project dependencies before implementing.

La Monnerie

Matt Spence — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:38:47 +0000

Due to launch next month, La Monnerie was a simple blog on a tight budget. Designed to get the client able to publish posts and galleries online as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Comment and Uncomment Code Quickly in Coda

Matt Spence — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:14:00 +0000

Comments are great for making sense of code, they’re also really handy for debugging. By “commenting out” code you can prevent it from being from run without having to delete it.

Doing this for a single line is easy peasy just stick you cursor at the begining of the line and tap / twice.
doSomething();
becomes
// doSomething();

However commenting out multiple lines is a bit more of a pain: click at the beginning,insert /*, click at the end insert */.

Recent I discovered a way to do this really quickly in Coda, just select the code you want to comment out, hold down cmd and press /. You can also go the other way, just make sure you selection starts at the /* and ends at the /* and it will remove the comment for you.

Find Out What A Symlink Links To Linux/Mac OS X

Matt Spence — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:02:30 +0000

A couple of times now I’ve needed to find out what’s a symlink and where it leads. Turns out it was under my nose the whole time. Rather than use ls I tend to use ls -l I use it because it displays each file on a new row which makes scanning down them much easier. dhcp0931:/ matthewspence$ ls -l


total 124982
drwxrwxr-t   42 root           admin      1496 24 Sep 14:38 .
drwxrwxr-t   42 root           admin      1496 24 Sep 14:38 ..
-rw-rw-r--@   1 root           admin      6148 17 Sep 09:44 .DS_Store
drwx------    3 root           admin       102 31 Jan  2009 .Spotlight-V100
d-wx-wx-wt    2 root           admin        68  3 Sep 16:23 .Trashes
srwxrwxrwx    1 root           admin         0 24 Sep 14:38 .dbfseventsd
----------    1 root           admin         0 23 Jun 07:19 .file
drwx------  120 root           admin      4080 25 Sep 15:14 .fseventsd
-rw-------    1 root           wheel    196608 14 Sep 23:10 .hotfiles.btree
-rw-r--r--    1 _www           admin       205  4 Jul 17:35 .htaccess
drwxr-xr-x@   2 root           wheel        68 18 May 19:29 .vol
drwxrwxr-x+  88 root           admin      2992 25 Sep 15:02 Applications

It not as clear in this post because the columns are wonky but give it a whirl in your terminal and you’ll see what I mean.

What it also does is display a load more information on the file than normal, including permissions and last modified date. Crucially for use though, if the file or directory is a symlink there will be a -> at the end of the row with the path of the linked file or directory relative to the symlink.
lrwxr-xr-x@ 1 root wheel 11 3 Sep 16:05 var -> private/var

You can also use the readlink command to find the link path of a specific symlink but this requires you know what is and isn’t a symlink.
dhcp0931:/ matthewspence$ readlink var

private/var
tells me var is an alias of private/var.

And of course you can use
man readlink
for more info on the options available to readlink (-f and -e being the key ones).