The new 52" HD Apple Cinema Display

]]> http://blog.massanti.com/2009/12/13/the-all-new-52-apple-cinema-display/feed/ 1 http://blog.massanti.com/2009/12/09/quirky-error-in-google-chrome-for-mac-beta/ http://blog.massanti.com/2009/12/09/quirky-error-in-google-chrome-for-mac-beta/#comments Wed, 09 Dec 2009 22:59:01 +0000 Diego Massanti http://blog.massanti.com/?p=1114 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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Round 1 – The CSS deal.

The first thing that you will realize when designing a newsletter with beautifully written HTML and CSS is that 90% of email clients (being them applications or web clients) will just totally strip out your CSS. In some cases like Hotmail or Windows “Live” mail, you can just fix that by including your css inside the <body> element, but still, some other clients like gMail will just ignore it, and all your design goes to hell. Period.
So in order to “fix” that problem, i had to use “Inline CSS” (!!!) and all my beautifully written code became just a bunch of crap, with things like this:

But ok, you can’t expect each and every email client out there to fully support each and every thing, so i was OK with that… at least until the moment when i decided to test my code in Microsoft’s flagship email client “Outlook 2007″. OH MY….

Round 2 – The “I don’t care about standards” deal.

It took a lot of time and effort to educate web designers / developers out there so they write proper code for their pages; code that is semantically correct, code that doesn’t use tables for anything but showing tabular data, and code that is based on Cascade Style Sheets (CSS) when it comes to the visual part of this story.
All this being said, we were in a position where you could write a really good looking HTML newsletter, without using tables, almost totally CSS based, and you could be really confident about the fact that it would render ok in most email clients, or, at least “acceptable” in the worst case scenario (uhmmm… gMail? somebody).
It used to be like this, ’til a new player joined the game: Outlook 2007.

Round 3 – Let’s use this joke…. ermm Render Engine.

The development team in charge of giving us all the new Outlook version had a great idea: Instead of using IE7′s (which is pretty decent, ironically) engine to render the HTML view of emails, let’s use the Microsoft Word HTML rendering engine.
I dont really know the reasoning behind this. Outlook 2000, Outlook XP and Outlook 2003 all used Internet Explorer to render the HTML view of email messages, why change now to that CRAPPY engine.
In any case and to sum up all this, right now Outlook 2007 does not supports 2 of the most indispensable CSS properties: “Float” and “Position”, and without these 2 properties, even thinking about a table-less CSS design is impossible if you want your Outlook 2007 users to see your newsletter with proper formatting.

Ideas, solutions, workarounds ?

I wish i had one, but i don’t. Right now i think that the only solution so far is to go back 6 years in time and “start” designing newsletters with TABLES again, that, if you care about people using Outlook 2007 to read their emails. If you don’t care about them, then just converting your CSS to Inline CSS would be enough.

Visual comparison between different email clients

Below is a visual comparison between different email clients showing the exact same newsletter which is HTML / CSS based, without the use of tables for positioning.
Click on each link if you want to see a screenshot of each application doing the HTML rendering:
Outlook Express 6 on Windows 98: Even good old OE6 does a better job!
Yahoo Mail: Just perfect!
Thunderbird: Just perfect!
Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, just HORRIBLE, i really have no words for this. A shame.
gMail, doing a good job on rendering, but still needs improvement.