ejhildreth's Blog - rants, raves, and occasional tips

I can't tell you how many times having a Subversion (SVN) repository has saved my butt with clients in the past. Most recently, one of my clients had inadvertently deleted their entire site and did not have any backups to restore it. Dun-Dun-Dah! SVN to the rescue!

However, when restoring the files, it became increasingly frustrating how many times I was asked for my password when browsing the file directories in KDESVN (Hey! Back off! I like using a GUI tool to browse my SVN repos and will eventually learn the command line syntax). So, after I "fixed" somebody else's mistake, I turned my attention to setting up a RSA private key/public key cryptographic pair to be able to access my SVN repository securely, and without being repeatedly asked for my password. Here are the steps I followed:

Lullabot developer Addi Berry put together some great screencasts on how to setup local Drupal test environments on Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu. Even though I have been running Kubuntu as my primary OS at home for over a month now, I hadn't actually set up my test server yet! To make sure I didn't make a misstep, I used Addi's video as the basis for the setup I did on my machine, but command lineified it a bit:

1. Open Konsole
2. Login as root
   • sudo -s
3. Make sure that the repository is up to date
   • apt-get update
4. Install Apache, MySQL, PHP5, the PHP5 GD Library, and the PHP5 MySQL configuration
   • apt-get install apache2 mysql-client mysql-server php5 php5-gd php5-mysql
5. Enable Clean URLs in the conf file
   • vi /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default
   • press i to go into insert mode
   • Change AllowOverride None to AllowOverride All in the <Directory /var/www/> section
   • press esc

Well I hosed my $70 Sony earbuds today jammin' out to some tunes in Amarok. When leaning back in my chair, I ended up yanking the wire too hard and now have an unusable pair of headphones. Well, it looks like I get to use my Logitech USB headset and perform air traffic control while I wait for a replacement pair to get shipped to me.

One problem though, I have switched out my Vista box for a Kubuntu box and the USB headset doesn't automatically get recognized by the OS. Luckily, there is a command line way to get around this:

asoundconf set-default-card Headset

In my role as a web designer at the Idaho Commission for Libraries, I design Drupal themes for our e-Branch in a Box project. On my most recent theme, I wanted to use a gradient background with rounded corners for the block titles. Since we run a multi-site setup, I was a little bit apprehensive to use a jquery solution and ended up using a background image instead. The problem with this technique is that when the block titles are too long, it would wrap around and not align in the image correctly. Since this was a theme for sites that I do not do the day to day maintenance for, I needed a way to catch the titles (the unknown) before they were printed out to the screen and shrink them up a bit. Template.php to the rescue!

Since all blocks are themeable, I went to the Drupal API and looked up the theme_block function. Next, I copied and pasted the function into my Template.php file and made the following modifications:

Taking a cue from my colleague from Dotted i Design, Michael Samuelson, I have gone a little bit charcoal rainbow crazy. The default color scheme in X-Chat leaves something to be desired if you are constantly looking at the screen. If you are like me, tweaking colors is one big rabbit hole! Once I started, I kept tweaking and tweaking for over an hour. Here is a screenshot of what I ended up with:

If anybody would like to use a similar color scheme in their copy of xchat, you simply need to replace the colors.conf file with the following values: