I finally found a fix for my Wacom touch screen on my Gateway E155c. I noticed that it stopped working whenever the laptop resumed from sleep or hibernate. To fix this I had to tell vista that it needed to restart the service if it failed. If you are having this problem you can run services.msc from your start bar.

Then scroll down until you find the Wacom Touch Service

Double click on the Wacom Touch Service and go to the Recovery Tab

Change the highlighted areas in the image.

OneNote highlighter and screen grab did its job

Yesterday, I participated in CSS Off which is basically a 24 hour competition to see who can turn a Photoshop design into the best web page.

I used YUI reset-fonts-grids for speed and browser compatibility so I expect to get criticized because its CSS doesn’t validate properly. I also noticed that I have a small error in my tabbed menu when the font gets changed. I should of styled the background on the bottom instead of the top of the tabs so when it resizes it doesn’t gap. I also used could of used a definition list instead of misusing bold and emphasis tags.

Overall, I spent a little over 4 hours on the entire thing. I’ve never had to deal with a PSD file with so many layers before. Usually, I just get one or two backgrounds instead of 10-12 images.

Anyway, here is my Creepy Critters entry for the competition.

Lets see I haven’t updated this recently and because this is my personal blog I can write about whatever I want.

I recently bought a new laptop (Gateway E155c) with Wacom which makes the tablet a dream to use. I’m considering making my next post a video with all kinds of neat drawings and diagrams. Anyway, if you are looking for a portable laptop thats direct from gateway and really cheap on ebay, this is it.

I also have a new job. It has taken over a lot of my programming time for the three projects I want to complete and a new one I want to start. The money for the bandwidth has to come from somewhere and Adsense isnt doing so well while the market resets the prices for pay-per-click after the changes they made.

Anyway I plan to have the new Cool Pictures site out in about 5 weeks, complete with a full user authenticated system and new layout.

One of the problems I’ve had is how to push updates to static files like javascript and content style sheets. If you want to program for performance you have to use a far future expires header to cut down on HTTP requests. The downside to this is that when you update your script and it has the same file name, the users browser wont know that its updated. Entity tags still involve a HTTP request even though the cut down drastically on the data usage.

The tedious way to fix this is to put the version number in the filename and change every layout to link to the new file.

One of the ideas I brainstormed was to add a GET to the URL in each layout that prints out the build/version number. This is an OK fix in that I only have to update my app/config with the new version number but the downside is that the user has to redownload every static file again even if it hasn’t been updated. I could make version numbers for every static file. This is kind of tedious because I have to program a different version number into every layout.

Then it dawned on me that I could override the built in helpers like $javascript->link() and $html->metalink() combined with a simple array with the name of script and the build number to do version control for me.

so a config file like:

$versions = array(’myscript.js’=>’BUILDNUMBER’,'another.js’=>’BUILD2′);

In a layout:

$javascript->link(’my_script.js’)

becomes

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”/js/my_script.js?ver=BUILDNUMBER”></script>

By using a GET the browser is fooled into downloading the file without having to deal with a mess of older files which should be inside some sort of version control system anyway.

I’ll post the code I used later this week when I complete it. If something like this has already been created for CakePHP, I’d like to hear about it.

I haven’t messed around with my Google search history all that much but I saw a cool feature today that creates a heat map on a monthly calendar that tracked my search usage. If anything I still use Google way to much. These searches are also only from home desktop.

I think 150+ searches per day is a lot. I’m hoping I don’t hit 250+ any time soon. It would be nice if Google could provide this data in XML or some other downloadable format so I could play with it without having to drag it screaming out of their website.

And this is an embarrassing graph of my insomnia.

In honor of Digg implementing their image section I added Facebook Share preview support to my Cool Pictures site. Now anyone digging or sharing images on facebook will get a handy thumbnail preview. I’m also working on more robust user features so that more people can add, save and rate their favorite images to the site.

One of my friends suggested that I try the FireFTP plugin after I expressed both my love and frustration over CuteFTP and WS_FTP. This plugin is awesome it has the same layout of any popular FTP client as well as the useful features like drag-n-drop and SSL/TLS encryption. It is also totally free.

Download the FireFTP Plugin

With one picture I will sum up what is wrong with Digg.

Shout spam sucks. I setup an account to see how having friends on Digg could help you get on the front page. My 992 friend sample was made up of a random sample of all active users I could find online over a 2 day period.

In the last 48 hours 992 people on my friends list have made 12,227 shouts and then 9,321 other actions making shouts account for 56% of everything that goes on Digg. If every digg in the upcoming section is from shout spam then 1 digg results from every 3-4 shouts.

The front page of Digg needs to change. If a submitted story doesn’t get enough diggs to qualify in 24 hours it will never get to the front page. This leads to the annoying 24 hour viral marketing spam that is prevalent on Digg.

Its been about 10 days since I started my cool pictures project. I’ve added a lot of new features like an RSS Feed, sitemap, stats and easy navigation. I still want to give people the ability to upload and create their own niche communities. I have a few other ideas that I’ll keep under wraps for now.

In the last 3 days over 9,000 unique IPs have been to the site and viewed 66,000 images and consumed 10 gigabytes of bandwidth. The majority have come from Stumble Upon which is a really great tool bar. I’ve been using it for about a month already and I usually read things before they ever appear on the other big social bookmarking sites. Personally, I think SU is what Digg should have become.

After looking around the net for a way to execute cakephp scripts via a crontab I became fed up and made my own solution. I simply added a function to my existing controller and then executed it via a wget.

class PostsController extends AppController
function crontab {
// 404 if the request isnt from the localhost
if($_SERVER(’REMOTE_ADDR’) != ‘127.0.0.1′))
{
$this->cakeError(’error404′);
exit; // dont know if this is needed
}
// execute the cronjob
doSomething();
exit; // dont want to use a view
} // end controller

Now we just make a cron job to run every five minutes

wget –spider http://mydomain.com/posts/crontab