justaddwater.dk

I recently deleted a branch from our (svn) code repository. Did you know that it’s the general recommendation to delete a branch after a merge to ensure that nobody commits to it. (see svnmerge wiki for more on that advice)
Svn checkout, svn info, etc. all fail when you try to access the deleted branch immediately:

$ [...]

Here is a short one-liner that really annoyed my colleagues today.
I set my mac to read aloud all changes in the repository since yesterday:

git log –pretty=format:”%an commit %s, %ad.” –date=relative –since=yesterday |say

if you remove the “say” command in the end it’s actually pretty readable:

pagerbak commit VA17, 34 minutes ago.
pagerbak commit VA17 – Not used, [...]

I learned this nice little hack to bypass the standard browser setting that normally prevents background images from being printed.
The hack makes use of converting the background-image to a list item with an image.

/* Hack, to trick the browser to print another logo
Unfortunetaly, Firefox on Windows doesn’t show logo on [...]

Sometimes, when doing web development, we forget that not everybody are as familiar with the web jargon as ourselves.
This example from Pixum (internet photo developer) shows a good detail:

The status message from Pixum gives immediate feedback that makes it easy to go to next step
Note that the status message contains a link to the shopping [...]

After running into some trouble with getting a Greasemonkey to work, I just wanted to share this list with you of things to look out for when your Greasemonkey script does not seem to run. What are the common pitfalls you see around. I’ll gladly add them here.
I am trying to get a Greasemonkey script [...]

I ran into the challenge the other day to style a<button> element to make it look like a link (with underline and everything).
Unfortunately, the <button> element does not react to text-decoration: underline;
But according to a discussion at the CSS Creator forum, there is a way out:
I was just messing around with it and for some [...]

For an internal demo, I had to make my own disabled and :hover states of some buttons.
In Photoshop (Elements) it was dead easy by adjusting the color in each layer.
I found that the following settings worked very well:
In Photoshop, create a new layer for each button state. Select the layer and choose “Enhance” > “Adjust [...]

UPDATE 9 hours later: Changed to “remote = origin” to the specific branch “remote = dean” which works!
Short explanation on how to pull changes from different Git repositories into your local Git repository.
Last week I worked with three different Github forks of a project. Now for standard, when you clone a Github repository, the remote [...]

Thanks to one of our dear readers we just discovered a bug in our commenting system that basically meant that you could not leave a comment on any of our posts. This has now been fixed and you can now again tell us your thoughts.
Of cause we should have noticed, since the amount of spam [...]

I trimmed my installed Rubygems on my local development machine. The command “
sudo gem cleanup
” is just for that.
Only problem: What about my older Rails apps that require a specific version of Rails, ActiveRecord, etc.?
My solution:
gem list –no-versions | grep -v “^active” | grep -v “^action” | grep -v “^rails$” | xargs sudo gem cleanup [...]

In our company’s basement a small server room where we put a few sandbox machines we use for quickly starting up projects, simple project and version control management. Over the time, quite a few of our clients have benefited from this setup as it can create instant project infrastructure.
But what is the cost of having [...]

One year ago I published “Design Guide or HTML Markup Guide” with link to the HTML guide we did for the biggest Danish business internet portal.
The HTML guide is a really useful tool for every public authority that must deliver applications for the portal.
As a help for my own work back then, I created virk_dk_htmlsnippets:

Snippets [...]

My problem this week: I wanted to share some work with a colleague. Unfortunately we have not yet setup our caplab environment with git server. Nor did i want to push this particular project to GitHub or Unfuddle. My alternative was a file-based setup:

Each developer’s machine has it’s own Git repository.
On my machine I had [...]

At a recent project I had to work in a full-blown .NET environment. Here are some of the tips I collected from my colleagues.
Visual Studio
I added the methods below in the Macro editor (Tools > Macros > Macros IDE)
Stop the build on error. When an error occurs I am notified instantly and able to fix [...]

Just home again from two weeks vacation, I found this in my delicious popular feed (i usually scan the delicious popular feed for links others find interesting).
Using CSS to Fix Anything: 20+ Common Bugs and Fixes
Good explanations to some of the usual I run into. For instance, the double margin float bug in IE 6 [...]

Learning web design by a hiphop video is really neat.
Four years ago we had the usability rap (along with the excellent gangsta-style cartoons from the OK/Cancel guys):

(the mp3 file with the actual rap seems to have disappeared… could anybody point me to a working link?)
Now there is this even cooler rap. Web design [...]

At a recent project, there was a requirement to describe the CSS used on a site, as a documentation, other developers could use. We decided to go a bit further — not only documenting the CSS classes — but making a guide that developers could find easy to use. Also we wanted developers with little [...]

Emil Stenström’s recent “Sharepoint 2007 from an interface developer’s view” is definitely worth reading if you care about webstandards, accessibility and decent frontend code in general.
Here are some of the quotes that really stand out in an excellent article that i really recommend you read before picking your web development platform.
One major problem is that [...]

Scott Berkun brilliantly notes that the word “innovation” has lost it’s meaning. Stop saying innovation – here’s why
Use better words instead. Often people mean one of 1) we want new ideas 2) we want better ideas, 3) we want big changes 4) we need to place big bets on new ideas. Great. Any [...]

Happy New Year everybody. Here is a tiny Textmate or E-Texteditor Snippet: Convert HTML entities for viewing code. I created this recently for a HTML cookbook on a project, where we made HTML pages showing HTML example code. It converts

& to &amp;
< to &lt;
> to &gt;

That’s it. Basically, I made a copy of one of [...]

Just a tip I spent some time on figuring out: Found information today on how to use TortoiseSVN to manage svn:externals. I’m working on a big project where we need many different branches and parts to use the same css and images libraries throughout all subprojects.
I had to Google to get the information on how [...]

I have for long been struggling with an internal legacy application that wraps the content page in a frameset. Very annoying because I have spent some time to reverse engineer a poor-mans API to the application.
Problem: An inline “reverse” framebuster script that makes sure that everything is nicely(?) wrapped in the frameset. As you [...]

I figured the original bookmarklet toolbox needed an update. Added Quirksmode detection, layout grid and updated PageInfo to accept framed pages.

I think Zeldman has a fantastic point here:
Drop-shadows don’t fill shopping carts. Aside from a few buttons and arrows, nearly all of the work of a user interface is performed by words. Yet most designers don’t question the text their clients dump on them, and most budgets don’t cover editing and writing. Learn how word [...]

Here is some agile methodology worth paying attention to, stating that even wrong decisions allow developers to keep momentum and push a project forward:
> If we decide not to make any decisions we lose 10 times $822, for a total of $8,220
> per week. Let me say that again: blanket indecision loses $8,220 per week; [...]

Cameron Moll posted detailed tips on how to modify a standard Microsof Sharepoint 2007 installation into something with an acceptable output that’s valid XHTML and CSS, and less bloated with a much smaller footprint. In other words, a workaround for making Sharepoint work a little better out of the box.
First of all, it’s a [...]

Yesterday BBC published a short article entitled “Web 2.0 ‘neglecting good design’“. The journalist apparently attended a talk by Jakob Nielsen where he talked about usability issues in Web 2.0. The article is basically just a summary of the talk, and the main focus is that many websites, in the rush to be more Web [...]

The standard windows command window (console) sucks for several usability reasons:

Standard windows keyboard shortcuts don’t work. It’s not possible to copy/paste without using a special menu.
This special menu is best accessible with the mouse (or a long range of shortcuts)

Compare how it should be
CTRL + V
With how it is in the standard console:
ALT + SHIFT [...]

Firebug keeps surprising me. I’ve recently been working on code for several web designs and this little trick helped me to understand existing HTML and CSS much faster. Just to give an example I use our Justaddwater RSS feed page (but could be any page).
Before you start, get Firebug for Firefox (if you haven’t got [...]

UPDATE May 1st, 2007 (forgot the two final steps 8 and 9).
I’ve run into the situation a couple of times where I get started on a client’s office, but due to delays and politics it takes time to get a proper versioning control server set up.
It turned out to be easy when I figured out [...]

Thomas and I are interviewed in Danish newspaper “Børsen” today. The article is a 10,000 feet business overview on the productivity gains and possibilities with Ruby on Rails.
I really like the picture (by Reimar Juul) and the fact that the article mentions both Justaddwater.dk and Copenhagen Ruby Brigade. Woot!

Click image to view larger version
For [...]

Earlier I wrote how we use Ruby on Rails as rapid prototyping tool at work. Hobo is a promising plugin for Ruby on Rails to speed up development even more. At work, we’ve been looking into rapid prototyping of web applications for quite some time. Hobo might even help us to speed up development even [...]

Daniel Szuc tipped me about The Usability Toolkit, now available from Sitepoint.
I just ordered a set, and I’m really looking forward to this, as I remember Daniel mentioned the toolkit when I met him at UI 11 last month.

Understand usability and get the tools to put it into practice
Learn the essentials with over 125 pages [...]

It is no secret that all versions of Internet Explorer on Windows prior to version 7.0 has a flaw in its PNG renderer. The flaw basically involves the rendering of the alpha transparency and means that the images cannot fade nicely into the background.
The IE PNG bug explained
In the screenshots below you can see the [...]

The numbers are in! Jesper first asked the question in “Design for Browser Size — Not Screen Size” and quickly after Thomas Baekdal of baekdal.com took up the challenge. After publishing his preliminary results he have now unveiled the final report:
The report finds, among other things, that the majority of people browse maximized or very [...]

Technique for using the toolbox: Locating problems in HTML.
I decided to make a little toolbox that’s easy to apply on web pages, when investigating problems with web pages. Basically, it’s the tools I used when investigating the case I described in “Why web standards matter (case study)”
I split this into two posts. This is [...]

I decided to make a little toolbox that’s easy to apply on web pages, when investigating problems with web pages. Basically, it’s the tools I used when investigating the case I described in “Why web standards matter (case study)”
I decided to split this into two posts. This first one is about the toolbox. The [...]

Scott Dietzen of Zimbra posted a decent article about security issues in AJAX web applications.
Ajax security considerations. Subject to the additional precautions enumerated below, Ajax applications can be made as highly-secure as the web technologies upon which the Ajax model is based.
The article mentions several issues and Scott has put some thoughts in how [...]

The Internet Explorer team is preparing to ship the next major version of the world’s most popular browser. The IE team has written an update on which CSS bugfixes that will make it into the final release.
Update of existing CSS on websites
Before we get to that rather long list, I feel it’s important to know [...]