Tips and Tricks

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!

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

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.

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.

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:

I am starting to get used to the RPM + YAST package system in openSUSE to install software. However, I came across one thing just struck me as annoying; the mish-mash way that applications add items to the menu and the locations that they install themselves into. The one app in particular that triggered this post was KeepassX.