Jake A. Smith

Odin for Mac

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 16:09:26 -0600

This is a Wineskin wrapper I made for "Odin", software used to flash Samsung phones. It works on Snow Leopard, and should be fine on other versions of OSX as well.

Twitter Bootstrap

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 22:54:06 -0600

Twitter Bootstrap:

I found this thru David Boskovic recently and it’s made prototyping and framing pages really quick and easy. Good stuff.

Pretty Placeholders

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 13:22:02 -0600

Pretty Placeholders:

It’s exactly what it sounds like. And I like it.

Facebook Tabs and Anchor Targets

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 21:45:50 -0600

Facebook Tabs and Anchor Targets:

When target=”_parent” doesn’t work, try the base tag. It’s awesome.

LESS gui complier for mac

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:10:06 -0600

LESS gui complier for mac:

Working with LESS just got WAY easier.

Google Web Fonts

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 14:20:40 -0600

Google Web Fonts:

I don’t know how I missed this, but google has this huge web fonts thing. It’s cool.

jakeasmith/Lemonstand-Textmate-Bundle - GitHub

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 14:36:58 -0600

jakeasmith/Lemonstand-Textmate-Bundle - GitHub:

I’ve been working with Lemonstand on a project lately and, in the process, created a textmate bundle to go with it. It’s a work in progress, but it’s finally progressed to the point that it’s usable.

Textmate Pro Tip

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 11:41:06 -0600

This is a feature of OS X Lion. A quick way to get to recently opened files and folders.

CMD+Tab to Textmate. Without releasing CMD, tap 1. Viola. Now you can use your arrow keys to select an item and press enter to open it.

1000 Push Up Challenge

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 08:55:59 -0600

So, this morning I was feeling incredibly motivated and decided to do 1000 push ups and build out a one page site to broadcast the adventure. I figured I would be more motivated to do it if people knew what I was doing and I invested a little time into it beforehand. And it turned into a fun little 45 minute project and I thought I’d share about it here.

First off, the social interaction. No modern website is complete without it. I went the easy way out and used facebook’s comment box. I love how easy they made that. Of course, there is also the like button. It seemed like a must.

What was more interesting was the push up tracker. I didn’t feel like pulling out MySQL this time. I was working with a time constraint, this page wasn’t already on top of a framework and I didn’t want it to be and I really didn’t want to be adding rows to the database by hand. I’ve been addicted to Google Spreadsheets lately, so I did a quick search, looking for a way to pull JSON data out of it.

As it turns out, my three minute search didn’t turn up any quick and easy way of getting JSON. However, CSV is a snap to get. All you have to do is go to the Publish settings and it will guide you thru getting whatever CSV data out of it you want. Tossed in a PHP script to parse the CSV, turned it into JSON, sprinkle on some jQuery plus a ten second timer and voila! Self updating push up dashboard.

Fun morning project to start my day off. Now, I need to dig into Lemonstand and start knocking out those pushups!

Textmate 2 Tips

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 01:20:15 -0600

Textmate 2 Tips:

This should be helpful over the coming months. My biggest question right now is why the tabs are attached to the title bar instead of the text window. How does that make sense? :)

earthlights: this is probably strangely accurate.

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 05:40:42 -0600

earthlights:

this is probably strangely accurate.

Google giving away $75?

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 04:29:18 -0600

Google giving away $75?:

It seems like Google is doing a ridiculous amount of promotion for free advertising. I wonder if their sales are down.

CSV to MySQL.

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 01:11:00 -0600

This is probably one of those times when I should be using snipplr or something.. Oh well.

LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE ‘/your_file.csv’
INTO TABLE your_table
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ‘,’
LINES TERMINATED BY ‘\n’
(field1, filed2, field3);

Pro Tip: mod_rewrite

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 20:28:34 -0600

Trying to combine mod_rewrite directives in .htaccess when you have AllowOverride None in the vhost config.. doesn’t work.

AllowOverride All ftw.

A Fresh Start with OS X Lion

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 19:03:00 -0500

After some problems and frustrations, I finally just wiped out my mac, took it to the Apple store and asked them to reinstall the OS for me. I didn’t have a Lion disc and didn’t feel like paying for one, soo.. yeah. Anyway, I’m sitting at the salon waiting on my wife while she gets a haircut, I have about half an hour of battery left so I decided to configure this “new” mac as quickly as possible.

Here’s what I got done in about 30 minutes. I’ll update this list with changes I make to it throughout the rest of the week, both so I have a list of what to do with new machines in the future and in the hope that someone else will gain something out of seeing what I work with.

The first 30 minutes

OS X Lion
Chrome
Textmate
Spotify
Transmit
MySQL
Sequel Pro
MySQL Workbench
Configure Mail
Configure Apache
Configure terminal
Configure hot corners
Sync chrome
Dropbox
KeePassX
Download Smashing Magazine’s wallpaper of the month
Adium

Things I did later

Configure dropbox
Twitter
Reeder
Skype
TinyGrab
Wunderlist
Photoshop
Skype
VLC
Handbrake
Propane
Firefox
Opera

Learning Web Development

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 16:56:31 -0500

Learning Web Development:

When I first started learning about web development I read every page of HTML Goodies I could. I even saved some of the pages to floppy disc so that I could go back to them when my mom was on the phone. (See kids, there was this thing called dial up…)

Lately, I’ve been looking for good tutorial sites to supplement official documentation. I’m learning some more advanced development techniques myself as well as mentoring a few people. SitePoint and A List Apart used to be my go to for development questions, but they really haven’t been cutting it the past couple of years. (Though the ALA archives are an awesome resource, especially in the CSS world.)

I’ve heard of them before, but it’s only been in the past few weeks that I’ve really paid any attention to the TutsPlus network. In short, they’ve blown me away. They cover everything from code and design to visual effects and music production. And it’s not just your standard PHP and Javascript. You can expect to see tutorials and articles on brand new services, framesworks and cutting edge techniques.

I love them and I’m seriously considering paying the $9 / month for premium content.

Pro Tip: KeePassX

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 19:16:21 -0500

Pro Tip: KeePassX:

Keeping track of all your personal passwords is a pain. Even more so when you’re working with a team. Using KeePassX on a network folder that everyone can get to makes life a hell of a lot better.

And the pro tip? Use keyboard shortcuts! CMD+b will give you the username. CMD+c will give you the password. CMD+i will give you the URL. And CMD+u will open the URL in your browser of choice.

Lion and Apache VirtualHosts

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 18:39:50 -0500

Lion and Apache VirtualHosts:

Apparently OS X Lion not only comments out the virtualhosts link by default, but also drops it inside of a conditional. It will throw you if you’re not thinking about looking for something like that.

Backbone, PHP and PUT

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 16:12:00 -0500

Backbone, PHP and PUT:

Backbone’s description of Model.save is backwards. Save is PUT and edit is POST. In addition, I just found out PHP doesn’t have a clean way of accessing PUT variables. Here’s how you do it.

This is just cool

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 16:15:36 -0500

This is just cool