Ciclismo – Semana 27

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Este fin de semana por un problema de comunicacion no pudimos ir a rodar el sabado, y para no faltar el domingo fuimos de nuevo a recorrer la mosca y la glorieta en la primavera, el bosque esta en uno de los momentos mas bonitos desde que comence a visitarlo en bicicleta, las lluvias han sido generosas y los colores verdes se asoman asi como los nuevos retoños.

20090705_082954

Aprovechando, dejo una fotografia que tome el dia de hoy en un bonito atardecer con algunas nubes interesantes, la imagen fue tratada en gimp para el procesamiento.

Atardecer en B/N

Atardecer en B/N

New Blog Theme

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After looking almost a hundred of very good free wordpress themes I found the one I liked and surprisingly didn’t take too much effort to put some style thanks to the child themes functionality.

My new blog theme.

My new blog theme.

New Logo

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I’m working on a redesign of my web page, it is the first time I’m doing a wordpress theme and within this redesign (that is being hard for me) I came with this new logo that came with the communication idea in this internet times, those bubbles in the center came from the Pink Floyd album art “The Division Bell” (one of my all time favorites).

cmanon-logo

cmanon-logo-a

I’m asking to my 10+ visitors to give me some feedback about it.

GIMP FX-Foundry

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Encontre una serie de plugins para GIMP llamados FX-Foundry que me parecio bastante interesante y viene con un set muy completo de efectos de todos tipos, creo que vale la pena echar un vistaso.

el campanario

Diseño Web

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Siguiendo este excelente tutorial de como hacer el diseño de una pagina web segui los pasos haciendolo con GIMP, he aqui el resultado.

web-layout

Usando jQuery en Wordpress

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Hoy estaba trabajando en un plugin para wordpress para la compañia que trabajo y tuve algunos problemas para usar ajax y me encontre este interesante tutorial que comparto con ustedes ademas de este recurso en la revista Smashing Magazine.

New Agregado Theme

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I’m really exited with the new agregado theme provided by Smashingmagazine and just changed my theme, I’ve detected and corrected a couple of issues:

1. There’s a typo in the audioscrobber feed:

On the functions.php line 499 says:
$simple_url .= ‘/recentracks.rss’;
And should be:
$simple_url .= ‘/recenttracks.rss’;

2. I saw my flickr pictures being resized and comment two lines (103 annd 104) in the query-carousel.css:

#mycarousel img {
padding:3px;
border:1px solid #4f383d;
margin:0 13px 7px 0;
/*
height:40px;
width:40px;
*/
display:block;
}

This display the correct size of the flickr images, please let me know your comments on this new theme.

User Centered Usability Design

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This week I’ve learned about usability design centered on the users’ perspective, here are my favorites quotes from the book I’m reading:

“include in the definition of ’users’ those who manage direct users, those who receive products from the system, those who test the system, those who make the purchase decision and those who use competitive products”.

“When we talk about identifying needs, therefore, it is not simply a question of asking people, ‘what do you need?’ and then supply it, because people doesn’t necessary know what is possible” … “Instead, we have to approach it by understanding the characteristics and capabilities of the users, what they are trying to achieve, how they achieve it currently, and whether they would achieve their goals more effectively and have a more enjoyable experience if they were supported differently”.

“it is always tempting for developers to create products they would want to use or similar to what they have done before”.

Pay attention to your users. :)

Busy Days

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I’ve been busy with my master lately I’m in two very interesting classes, one e-business related and the second one related to interface design (I’m very interested on this one).

I’ll let you a couple of sites related to interface design interaction, http://www.useit.com and http://asktog.com.

I’m going to publish some of my first learning on this class soon.

Zend Debugger + Eclipse + Apache

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I wanted to install the zend debugger with eclipse and apache, and found this spanish tutorial, and want to resume the steps I followed:

I assume you have already installed eclipse 3.3 + pdt.

1. Download the corresponding debugger from: http://downloads.zend.com/pdt/server-debugger/, I use amd64 so I got ZendDebugger-5.2.12-linux-glibc23-x86_64.tar.gz.

2. Untar the file in a directory in your home, I used /home/user/Bin/ZendDebugger.

3. Edit your php.ini file and add the following directives:
zend_extension=/home/<user>/Bin/ZendDebigger/5_2_x_comp/ZendDebugger.so
zend_debugger.allow_hosts=127.0.0.1
zend_debugger.expose_remotely=always

4. Verify that the extension is loaded with the simple function:
<?php phpinfo(); ?>

5. Restart eclipse and start debugging!
screenshot-eclipse.png

Site Revamped

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Today finished the first part of my site update, that consist on an upgrade of the original hemingway theme to support wordpress 2.3.3, and the new widget functionality, also added some slick mini icons; removed the old code for the legacy hemingway bar.

On the photo side installed the excellent NextGen Gallery plugin, and I’m in the process to update my pictures.

February Screenshot

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Here you have a screenshot of my desktop, I hope you liked:

screenshot-desktop.png

PHP MSSQL 2005 Problem – Solved

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Trying to make a connection to a MS SQL Server 2005 database from PHP, I always got an error message using the mssql_connect saying:

Warning: mssql_connect() [function.mssql-connect]: Unable to connect to server: {servername}.

I tried several solutions like, updating the ntwdblib.dll (on windows; I had the same error on linux) library, configuring the tcp/ip properties on sqlexpress but nothing I still having the same error.

At the end I changed the ip address on the server name by the respective server name and finally worked!.

So instead of:


$server = 192.168.50.1;
$user = 'sa';
$password = 'sapassword';
$conn = mssql_connect($server, $user, $password);

Changed for:

$server = cmanonserver;

Transfer DVD to iPod Classic

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After several attempts to transfer some of my concert dvds to my ipod, finally got them working, here is how:

I first update the ffmpeg packages from medibuntu, after this install dvd::rip package from multiverse, once I had dvd::rip opened a new project, and select the option to “Encode DVD on the fly” in order to save some space in my disc, here is an screenshot about the settings I used to encode:

dvd::rip encode options

Once I had the .avi file I execute the following command to convert the file to a .mov:

ffmpeg -i 24_1_001.avi -f mov -b 1800 -maxrate 2500 -vcodec xvid -qmin 3 -qmax 5 -s 640×360 -padtop 30 -padbottom 30 -acodec aac -ab 128 24_1_001.ipod.mov

The result is a good quality video to enjoy it in your ipod.

OpenSuse 10.3

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This post is not a review of openSuse 10.3.

I downloaded the DVD for my AMD64 bits computer and it is one of the most buggy installation I’ve tried in the Linux world, I were not able to install it on my computer, all the times I tried it always get stuck installing the grub package, I checked the media to know if there was a problem with it, but the installer told it was ok, I tried to repair the install once it was started and when I chose the repair option and click next, the computer just restarted.

I will stick to Ubuntu and will wait patient for the next (Gutsy) release.

AWN

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Today installed the avant-window-navigatior patched with the reflection code, it works like a charm, it is a very nice utility to complement my Compiz Fusion installation, here you have a screenshot:

cmanon screenshot
New Version of AWN

Eclipse

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I’m trying to setup my development platform for PHP on Linux, I chose eclipse PDT, to complete this task with PDT version 1.0 need to download and install eclipse 3.3 RC1, to make it work per the module requirements, after a download of 250 mb approximately, it didn’t work.

I’m trying to install the old PHPEclipse plugin. Wish me good luck!

UPDATE: I just downloaded the old PHPEclipse plugin and it worked with the Eclipse 3.2.2 IDE.

UPDATE: I just noticed that for the new version of PDT tools you need to run Eclipse with Java 5 JDK.