Blog

  • PSEC: Drag and Drop List Saving and Loading

    November 1, 2011

    I’m finally getting back to this. I’ve been reading articles here and there about the use of jQuery UI, trying to find a succinct reference. The source code samples on the jQuery UI demos page helped: you just invoke a method on the element you want to have a certain UI feature (e.g. sortable()). Behaviors are added magically! This is pretty cool. By using the SORTABLE features of jQueryUI, I have just saved myself at least a week of painstaking work rolling my own drag and drop code. (more…)

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    DSri Seah

  • Power Outage Back

    October 30, 2011

    Southern New Hampshire was hit pretty hard by a blizzard (“Nor’easter”, as we like to say) and I’m without power. Since this is such an early snowstorm, the trees still have leaves on them, and this means that snow sticks to them and brings branches crashing down on the power lines…this might be a pretty bad outage. I’ve been passing the time fantasizing about putting together an ultimate survival kit, or at least coming up with some way of making a hot cup of coffee when completely off-the-grid. I sponging internet from a friend’s studio, but email is spotty until power comes back. Fingers crossed!

    UPDATE: Aaaand, the power is back about an hour after I posted that. I was getting ready for an extended outage, figuring out how to ration my cans of beans, but oh well…I am counting my blessings.

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    DSri Seah

  • Half-Size Naked Binders

    October 27, 2011

    Half-sized Eco-Friendly BinderThe peeps at Naked Binder have a new half-size (5×8.5″) binder that I was thinking would be a good fit for a half-size Emergent Task Planner. What I like about Naked Binder’s stuff is that they are eco-friendly, and sell binders of various sizes made with unbleached boardstock. In practice, though, I find that the material is a little soft for my tastes in the giant 11×17″ one I have; maybe it is more acceptable in the smaller size? Naked Binder carries other binders as well, with different surfaces.


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    DSri Seah

  • Poll: 4×6″ Post-It Emergent Task Planner Stickies?

    October 27, 2011

    A reader just mentioned that he’d like a half-size Emergent Task Planner pad that he could stick to the inside of his notebook. Me, I like any paper that sticks by itself to anything, so I’m looking at the 3M Promotions Printing website…they have a 4×6″ 4-color product that might be workable if I can scrape together the money to produce them. If you’re interested in such a thing, let me know in the comments! I’d probably charge something like $10 for two 25-sheet pads (this is pretty much the minimum price I can charge on Amazon.com by my calculations).

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    DSri Seah

  • Constants for CSS

    October 26, 2011

    CSS doesn’t have constants or calculation capabilities. After looking at more comprehensive solutions (LESS and SASS), I just made a simple PHP5 template that does a couple clever things to keep things nice and tidy in one file. Here’s a simple example:

    <?php 
// Basic Typographic Dimensions: 

$basefontSize   = 12;
$gridSize       = 18;

$substitutions = array(
    '@timestamp'    =>    date('Y-m-d h:i:s'),
    '@basefont'     =>    $basefontSize . 'px',
    '@grid'         =>    $gridSize . 'px',
    '@basecolor'    =>    '#444'
);

/** DO SUBSTITUTIONS *******************************/
$fp = fopen(__FILE__,'r');
fseek($fp,__COMPILER_HALT_OFFSET__);
$output = stream_get_contents($fp);
foreach ($substitutions as $key=>$value) 
    $output = str_replace("[$key]",$value,$output);
header("Content-type: text/css");
print $output; 
__halt_compiler();
/** BEGIN CSS ** GENERATED OUTPUT ** [@timestamp] **/

body {
    font-size: [@basefont];
    line-spacing: [@grid];
    color: [@basecolor];
}    

/* keep adding CSS here */

    Free at last!!! Basically, define the constants up top, and write your normal CSS rules syntax at the bottom, and include the PHP file as you would normally include any stylesheet.

    More detail (with downloadable ZIP) over on the Code Sub-blog. This is part of the baseline grid typography experiment I have going on; it uses this templated approach to compute the various font sizes, margins, and line spacing CSS rules.

    UPDATE: Adding list of other solutions, too, that do more than my hack-up :)

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    DSri Seah