No words….

The new 52" HD Apple Cinema Display

While testing some of my own JavaScript code in the new beta build of Chrome for Mac, i was presented with this error:

Chrome for Mac error

Im just tired of having to recalibrate my LCD every time i re-install Mac OS X or just reset my user account, so im just saving here for my own use, a ColorSync profile for my Samsung 206NW displays.

If you happen to use a Samsung NW series LCD display with a Mac, feel free to give this profile a test. It is calibrated with Photo / Video editing in mind, that being said, the color temperature (white point) is “warmish”.

Cheers.

Instructions: Just unzip and move the .icc file inside /Library/ColorSync/Profiles/Displays/

Open display preferences and select the new color profile.

Download Below:

SyncMaster 206NW Mac OS X ICC ColorSync Profile

I took these HDR pictures some days ago with a friend’s camera… maybe its time to get a better camera for myself.

So you are moving your website or blog to a new domain / url, but what happens to all that people and search engines trying to reach the OLD domain that you are leaving ?

Well, as you maybe noticed, I have moved my blog to a subdomain (yes, now this blog is at http://blog.massanti.com) and i was somehow worried about how to deal with all that people and search engines still going to the OLD url (http://massanti.com), so obviously, one thing came to my mind: “Apache redirects”.

This took me a whole 5 minutes to write, so I’m writing it here just for anybody interested.

Basically, the goal was to redirect anybody going to massanti.com/someblog/post/here to blog.massanti.com/someblog/post/here AS LONG as the file doesn’t exists on massanti.com: i.e: i don’t want massanti.com/somedir/somerealpage.html being redirected to blog.massanti.com/somedir/somerealpage.html.

So what i did was to create a .htaccess file in the root directory of massanti.com with the following contents:

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c>
   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f [NC]
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d [NC]
   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://blog.massanti.com/$1 [R=301,L]
</ifmodule>

Let’s analyze this:

• The ifmodule encapsulation is self explanatory, it basically means “do whatever you find inside me only if the mod_rewrite module is enabled”.
• The first RewriteCond line takes whatever url parameter we get and checks if a real file exists, while the 2nd line does the same, but for directories.
• The “[NC]” bit in each of the conditions tells mod_rewrite to ignore casing.
• The RewriteRule line will only execute IF ANY of the 2 RewriteCond conditions is TRUE (if no real file and no real directory is found in the file system matching the URL request), AND if that happens, it will redirect the client’s browser or search engine to the new page (blog.massanti.com/ + the requested URL) and it will send a 301 permanent redirect header, telling the browser and search engines that the redirection is permanent, hence, causing most search engines, browsers and RSS readers to automatically update all the URL’s to the new ones.

It was some days ago when i was contacted by one of the visitors of this blog in order to create a “black box” solution to solve the video encoding part of a video sharing website similar to youtube.com.

As you maybe know, i have posted some months ago a really basic script to automate some of the tasks, but, what about integration with your actual website framework ? what about queue management, what about multi-server encoding environment ?

Those are all the usual questions when a potential customer calls, so i spent some days developing a complete black-box solution for this issue, using all open-source software, with the following features.

• Fully automatic video encoding queue management.
• Support for 1 to n encoding nodes with fully automatic transaction control (still in beta-testing).
• Support for the following video formats: Windows Media, Quicktime, DV, Avid DV, DivX, xVid and almost any imaginable format (any format supported by mplayer is actually 100% supported)
• Support for HE-AAC audio (Stereo near-CD quality sound at 48kbps).
• Fully automatic thumbnail generation in 3 different positions of the video stream, supported output formats are JPG, PNG and GIF.
• Fully automatic metadata injection, including all the popular “iTunes like” tags.
• Fully automatic iPod Touch / iPhone compatible stream generation.
• Support for more than 1 output format (managed from a presets file).
• Fully automatic Pixel and Display aspect ratio correction for proper video resizing and scaling.
• Possibility to select how many CPU cores to use for the encoding process (only on multicore cpu’s)

There are a several more features that I’m still developing. If you are interested and you want more details, you can contact me at: diego (at sign here) massanti.com. I don’t bite

After a lot of work I’m happy to say that Sticked is ready!

Sticked is a WordPress theme that i had in mind since too many time ago, and now, i am sharing it with you all .

Features

• Customizable background and body textures. [Click here to see screenshot]
  You can select from a bunch of available textures for both your page background and your main body background, you can even create your own if you feel like.
• Customizable colors for “Stickies”. [Click here to see screenshot]
  Sticked will add a new setting in your admin UI, there you can select an specific color for each post.
• Compatible with most modern (and not so modern) browsers.
  Sticked has been tested with the following browsers: 
  • Internet Explorer 6: 80% – (Some minor image glitches due to the lack of support for PNG transparent images in this browser).
  • Internet Explorer 7 & Internet Explorer 8: 100%.
  • Safari for Mac and Windows: 100%.
  • Opera 9 for Mac and Windows: 100%.
  • Firefox for Mac and Windows: 100%.
• Styled blockquotes:
  By using the <blockquote> tag, you can create specific boxes to highlight parts of your content, examples below: 

  This text is enclosed between <blockquote></blockquote> html tags.

  This text is enclosed between <blockquote class=”mac”></blockquote> html tags.

  This text is enclosed between <blockquote class=”warning”></blockquote> html tags.

• Proportional fonts:
  Sticked uses proportional fonts, that means that the text size will be readable and consistent at any resolution, including big LCD screens.
• Widgets Ready:
  Sticked is compatible with most WordPress sidebar widgets out there.

Theme Downloads and Tools

CLICK HERE to download the latest version (0.6) of Sticked for WordPress 2.5

CLICK HERE to download a PSD (Photoshop) file containing a blank header.

Installation is like with any other WordPress Theme, just upload the contents of the zip file inside your wp-content/themes/ directory and you are done.

If you have any question or suggestion, feel free to leave a comment here.

Hi there, as you maybe noticed, I did a complete redesign of this blog and I am using for the first time a custom WordPress Theme that i have created from scratch.

This is my first ever WordPress Theme so i hope you like it

The idea for Stck’d was to create a theme with some smooth visual elements while maintaining an easy to the eyes structure and focusing on the contents, instead of graphics.

It is on my plans to release this theme for free as soon as i finish fixing bugs, etc, so if you like it or you have any comment / suggestion, feel free to leave a comment in here, any feedback is appreciated.

April 7, some updates:

Per-post color selection:

It is now possible to select the post-it color on a per post basis, just add a custom field called “color” to your post, and it will automagically change the paper color for said item. Available colors are:

• Cyan.
• Green.
• Pink.
• Yellow.
• Magenta.

Stck’d is now compatible with the following browsers:

• Internet Explorer 6.
• Internet Explorer 7.
• Internet Explorer 8.
• Opera 9 for Windows and Mac.
• Safari 2 and Safari 3 for Windows and Mac.
• Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 for Windows and Mac.
• Stck’d renders 100% perfect in more than 50 linux / windows / mac / BSD browsers

// Diego.

In the past days, i have been working on the design and development of a new “community like” website. Since the main purpose of this site is to inform fans of a rock band about tour dates, news, events, etc, WordPress was my CMS of choice for the backend (on top of that, i have been waiting a lot to have a chance to learn the WordPress Theme API), but the real problem showed up when i had to choose what forum software i was going to use.

At first, i started by using phpbb3, which is great, but even the fact that there are some WordPress integration solutions, etc, i had to hack a lot the integration code, and it wasn’t really working as tight as i wanted to… and then…. i found bbPress!.

bbPress is a fairly young forum software developed by the same guys in charge of the WordPress codebase, it is not only a pleasure to work with it, but it is also a pleasure to modify it to fit your needs. It uses a templating engine almost 100% identical to the one on WordPress, it integrates seamlessly with WordPress, and, on top of that, it is fast as hell, what more could you ask for ?

If you are curious enough, you can take a look at how things are looking so far, keep in mind that this is still work in progress

Office 2007 is a great suite of productivity applications, Microsoft Word has been for years my word processing application of choice, same goes for Microsoft Excel when it comes to spreadsheets, and… until some days ago, Microsoft Outlook (not Outlook Express) has been my email application of choice.
Not anymore.
Some days ago i was hired to design and code a series of newsletters for an Argentinian magazine, and even the fact that email marketing / newsletter design is not my main job, i decided to do it because, after all, it is just (x)HTML and CSS, so it should be pretty simple I though… well, i was really, but really wrong. (more…)