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June, 2007

Mephisto, Liquid and Article Tags

By Cristi - posted on June 30th, 2007

The default theme that comes with Mephisto, Simpla, doesn't include any article tags, even though Mephisto supports them through URLs. Tags can provide a clue to visitors of what the article is about, before reading it - and they can also improve the page ranking (for search engine optimization).

After checking the Mephisto documentation, I found the solution. Tags are available as an array article.tags, inside the articles for loop. Here is a sample code that displays the tags for the current article:

ActionScript: this, _parent and _this.parent

By Cristi - posted on June 29th, 2007

It seems that ActionScript has a very interesting, yet unusual way, of defining scopes. Take a look at the following source code:

    m.onRollOver = function() {
	trace("this: " + this);
        trace("this._parent: " + this._parent);
        trace("_parent: " + _parent);
    }

Schedule Windows XP to Automatically Shutdown

By Cristi - posted on June 29th, 2007

I started to get quite annoyed today when I arrived at work and found my computer still on. Usually the person that leaves last, takes care of turning off all the computers, closing the windows and all the rest. But it's human to forget and here comes a simple solution to take care of this problem. Windows XP (I think this feature was included from Windows 98) comes with a task scheduler that allows users to set various activities that will be performed daily, weekly, monthly - at specific times.

Flickr Photo Collage with Ruby

By Cristi - posted on June 28th, 2007 and tagged under

Yesterday I played a bit with Ruby, RMagick and FlickrAPI. I have to admit that I'm very impressed by the ImageMagick library and the RMagick Ruby bindings seem to work very smooth.

Shutter Speed, Aperture and Shadows

By Cristi - posted on June 25th, 2007

Yesterday as I was trying to create some studio-like photos in a home-made setting, I learned about a not so obvious link between shutter speed, aperture and the amount of shadows in a photograph. This definitively isn’t brain science – but it does seem a bit unusual. Suppose you have two sources of light, a natural side-light and an artificial flash.

Mephisto

By Cristi - posted on June 20th, 2007

Deciding on a blog platform wasn’t very easy – after some reading, I managed to pick just three in the “finals”: Mephisto, Typo and Wordpress. I wanted something that runs on Ruby on Rails, since it would prove to be a new opportunity for me to get used more to this environment, but Wordpress did seem to have a lot of features, plugins and in general, it proved to be a very stable platform.