What a wonderful day it is, sir

It’s been a while since I wrote something, but I liked to share this with you all. I bought a new Dell Studio 1558 and all the fn-keys were working except the one to switch the displays…

I enjoy switching between dual-screen, using only my external 22″ or using only my laptop, when I’m on the road. So I was looking for a workaround.

This laptop, is my first machine with Ubuntu that uses an ATI graphics chip, so this was all quite new to me. But I have to say; I’m very very pleased with it.

Ok, so what do you have to do to get things working?

1. Create the script
Create the script, I called it toggleDisplay.sh and this is how it looks in my case:

#!/bin/bash
# Script to toggle display configuration on Dell Studio 1558
# author: Ruben Verhack
 
config="/tmp/display.conf"
current=`cat $config`
 
# Check if config exists
if [ ! -a $config ]
then
   # Empty file executes default
   touch $config;
fi
 
# Check if CRT2 is connected
if xrandr -q | grep "CRT2 connected"
then
   # Toggle between states
   case "$current" in
   '')
      # default
      xrandr --output LVDS --auto --output CRT2 --left-of LVDS --output CRT2 --auto
      echo "dual" > $config
      ;;
   'dual')
      # was dual, now external only
      xrandr --output LVDS --off --output CRT2 --auto
      echo "external" > $config
      ;;
   'external')
      # was external, now laptop only
      xrandr --output LVDS --auto --output CRT2 --off
      echo "laptop" > $config
      ;;
   'laptop')
      # was laptop, now both
      xrandr --output LVDS --auto --output CRT2 --left-of LVDS --output CRT2 --auto
      echo "dual" > $config
      ;;
   esac
else
   xrandr --output LVDS --auto
fi

This toggles your displays from dual screen to external only to laptop only, and from there to dual screen again. Note that my monitors were called LVDS and CRT2, you can easily check how your monitors are called by executing:

xrandr -q

Read more…

ruben Ubuntu Dell, switch displays, Ubuntu

Yesterday we’ve released a public beta from the new Doc? (v3.0)
Go and check it out at www.airdoc.be!

Here are some of the most important new features :

• ● Minimize/Close to tray (WINDOWS)
• ● Local Books
• ● Online Books Download
• ● Inline Search
• ● Performance Upgrade (SQLITE)
• ● Custom tree icons
• ● Complete design makeover

Take a look on our website to learn more …

michiel AIR, AS3, Doc?, Flex AIR, AS3, Flex

Hey,

Somethings been bugging me while skinning a flex application :

The label from the selected tab from the TabNavigator component is 1px lower than the other tabs. As you can see in the example.
(It has something to to with the bottom border I’m guessing).

This can help as a visual support you are on a different tab, but I found it rather annoying, so here is my fix for it.
A quick fix by changing the “paddingTop” property.

View source is enabled so can download the example there.
http://ninetynine.be/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/srcview/index.html

Read more…

michiel AIR, AS3, Flex AIR, AS3, Flex

Hey all, released v 1.0 from shAirUp today, I’ve dedicated a page to it. Check it out what it does and how to use it :
http://ninetynine.be/blog/shairup/

michiel AIR, Flex

MamppControl

Hey,

Yesterday I had some spare time, so I decided to take a look at the Cocoa collection of frameworks, APIs, and accompanying runtimes that make up the development layer of Mac OS X.
I’ve created this first application with XCode in Objective-C and named it MamppControl.

It allows you to start, stop, reload Mampp from the tray, with a handy tray icon & menu.
Mampp is the other name for Xampp on Mac.

XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use – just download, extract and start.

More information about Xampp here.

I know that there is a launcher includes in the xampp package, but it has no tray icon and stay’s visible in the dock.

Read more…

michiel Mac OSX, Tutorials, Xampp Mac OSX

Hi,

As a PHP developer it comes in handy to run your websites without having to upload them to your server. You can run them on your own computer if you want to, there isn’t much to it. I also like using the CodeIgniter framework for my projects, this is a really speeds up the whole process!

I will take you through the basic steps to set up your localhost to get CodeIgniter running.

1) Use Synaptic package manager to install “apache2″, “php5″ and “mysql-server”.

During the installation you will be asked to enter the password for the root user for your mysql-server.

2) Create a symbolic link, so that when you go to localhost in your browser, you get the website you want.

sudo cd /var/
sudo rm -r www/
sudo ln -s /path/to/website www

Always look before you delete something with “rm -r”, normally there should only be a index.html file in your www/ folder.

I prefer creating a link to my website that I put somewhere in my home directory, as this is being back-upped frequently, and is on another partition.

Read more…

ruben PHP, Tutorials, Ubuntu, Xampp CodeIgniter, PHP, Ubuntu

Yes, it is possible! To my own suprise, I was able to install Photoshop CS4 on Ubuntu.

I did it on a fresh install of Ubuntu 9.04 RC. It has known to work on Ubuntu 8.10, but it gave me a segmentation fault, probably because I had been messing around . I tested it with the trial version downloaded from adobe.com.

To do so, you need Wine. I will take you through the steps that I’ve taken:

Read more…

ruben Photoshop, Ubuntu Photoshop, Ubuntu

A missing feature in Flex is the ability to load fonts at runtime.

‘Why is this useful?’, you could ask. Well one situation is you’re creating an online rich text editor, and you want to add a font
to the font list. You would only have to edit the css and upload the new swf instead of the whole application. Or you want a client
to be able to add fonts without him having the source code from the application.

Luckily it’s possible in Flex to load runtime CSS compiled as an SWF with the StyleManager class.
StyleManager on LiveDocs

Fonts.css Example :

1
2
3
4

@font-face {
    src:url("fonts/Arial.ttf");
    fontFamily:"Arial";
}

How to compile the CSS to SWF?
Read more…

michiel AIR, AS3, CSS, Flex, Tutorials AS3, CSS, Flex

What do you expect of a decent modern OS? A great browsing experience and a decent mail client. Since I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 I had troubles with random crashes of Firefox when loading pages, and entirely random crashes of Evolution mail client.

So I switched to Thunderbird. But then same symptoms started showing. Giving me 5-10 crashes of Thunderbird a day, and serious troubles on heavy browsing.

The first things to do when getting crashes of Mozilla products are:

1. 1. Make sure you don’t have a lethal combination of add-ons
2. 2. Check if Flash isn’t the evil spirit haunting your browser, try the Flashblock add-on
3. 3. Make a new profile for Firefox and Thunderbird, by renaming your old configuration. You can find the configuration folders in your home. Mostly ~/.mozilla for Firefox, and ~/.mozilla-thunderbird for Thunderbird.
4. 4. Completely remove Firefox (make a backup of your configuration) and reïnstall it

I tried every possible thing I could do to fix Thunderbird or Firefox. But then again, why was Evolution suffering as well? Well the deal was that I had WINS resolution enabled in Samba. Found it in this bug report.

When upgrading to 8.10, Samba was upgraded too. This bug has been reported and hopefully will be solved in Ubuntu 9.04, launching 23rd of April.

So how do we fix this?

Read more…

ruben Ubuntu crash, Evolution, Firefox, Thunderbird, Ubuntu

For an AIR application that I’m creating (more about that later), I needed some way to show the users some event happened while the application was running in the background. So what’s better on Mac OS than showing growl notifications ?



Adobe has worked together with the Growl team to add support for AIR and flash applications.
Mike Chambers has put together an open source project named as3growl which provides an API to work with the new Growl build.

Read more…

michiel AIR, AS3, Flex, Mac OSX AIR, AS3, growl, Mac OSX, notification