john.geek.nz - 38911 Basic Bytes Free » Tips

iPhone templates for UI prototypes

John Burns — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 04:24:08 +0000

I’ve recently started doing a lot of development for the iPhone and iPad and I wanted to be able to sketch layouts on paper.

Now it’s one thing to draw a rough iPhone layout, but it’s another to actually have them looking like an iPhone.

I started using the A4 iPhone Template from http://www.uistencils.com, but soon wanted something more photo realistic.

Behold my designs…..

They contain seven pages each of layouts.

Completely blank screen
Portrait with top carrier bar
Landscape with top carrier bar
Portrait Web Browser
Portrait Web Browser with address bar
Landscape Web Browser
Landscape Web Browser with address bar

Here are the download links:

Converting PDF files to HTML on Ubuntu

John Burns — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 11:45:27 +0000

It’s very easy to convert PDFs to HTML on Ubuntu.

The command is pdftohtml

If it’s not installed, you can install it with:

sudo apt-get install poppler-utils

Options:

-f  : first page to convert
-l  : last page to convert
-q : don't print any messages or errors
-h : print usage information
 -help : print usage information
 -p : exchange .pdf links by .html
 -c : generate complex document
 -i : ignore images
 -noframes : generate no frames
 -stdout : use standard output
 -zoom  : zoom the pdf document (default 1.5)
 -xml : output for XML post-processing
 -hidden : output hidden text
 -nomerge : do not merge paragraphs
 -enc  : output text encoding name
 -dev  : output device name for Ghostscript (png16m, jpeg etc)
 -v : print copyright and version info
 -opw  : owner password (for encrypted files)
 -upw  : user password (for encrypted files)
 -nodrm : override document DRM settings

Here’s a usage example

pdftohtml infile.pdf outfile.html

Downloading routes from a GlobalSat DG-100 with gpsbabel on Linux

John Burns — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 23:07:16 +0000

This is a GlobalSat DG-100

It’s an amazing piece of Kit, but the software that comes with it is absolutely rubbish.

You can download all of the routes (and delete them from the unit) in one simple command with gpsbabel.

gpsbabel -t -i dg-100,erase -o gpx /dev/ttyUSB0 outputfile2.gpx

You’ll still need to set up the times/distance for recording for the switch positions A,B & C. I have mine set to 1,5 and 10 seconds. Easiest way to set these up is on a windows machine with DG Manager.

Stopping Javascript from resizing the window in Firefox

John Burns — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 22:30:02 +0000

One of my pet hates on the internet is shopping sites which resize the window when you’re looking at a zoomed in image. Not all of us still use a windowed browser, in fact, most people now use a tabbed one.

Here’s how to stop javascript from taking control of your window size in firefox….

Firstly, Select “Preferences” from the “Edit” menu.

Click the advanced button…

And uncheck the “Move or resize existing windows” option.

Job Done!

Combining two images with ImageMagick

John Burns — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 23:39:54 +0000

To combine two images of the same size with ImageMagick, you simply do the following:

The following will overlay overlay.png on top of output.png

mogrify -draw "image SrcOver 0,0 0,0 'overlay.png'" output.png

While this one will overlay overlay.png on top of input.png and save it as output.png

convert input.png -draw "image SrcOver 0,0 0,0 'overlay.png'" output.png

You can download imagemagick from http://www.imagemagick.org/

Selective colour replacement with imagemagick

John Burns — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 23:31:07 +0000

Selective colour replacement is easy from the command line with imagemagick.

You can download imagemagick from http://www.imagemagick.org/

The following will replace all red (#FF0000) pixels with blue (#0000FF)

convert sourceimage.png -fill "#FF0000" -opaque "#0000FF" destimage.png

Deleting folders recursively

John Burns — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 22:26:51 +0000

I needed recursively delete folders named .svn within a directory structure.

The following will allow you dto do this from a command prompt:

FOR /F "tokens=*" %G IN ('DIR /B /AD /S .svn') DO RMDIR /S /Q %G

Remember, if you’re doing it from a batch file, you’ll need to double up the percent signs, thus:

FOR /F "tokens=*" %%G IN ('DIR /B /AD /S .svn') DO RMDIR /S /Q %%G

IIS 6- Setting up a write only FTP directory

John Burns — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 22:21:22 +0000

So, you want to set up a write only ftp directory on IIS? One where you can upload files, but not list them?

Easy…

First, create a new user which you will log in as.
Make sure this user is explicitly denied access to all files and folders on the system.
Now, add the following ‘special’ permissions to the directory you wish to make write only..

WordPress Super Cache plugin – Performance Benchmarking

John Burns — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 13:24:05 +0000

I’ve been doing some performance tests on WordPress to see how much of a difference the WordPress Super Cache plugin made.

It turns out that the plugin makes a huge difference.

Resource usage comparison over two (highlighted) tests. Cache is OFF on the left, ON on the right.

I kept increasing the rate of requests until the Disk IO rate was the same for both tests. With the cache turned off, CPU usage went through the roof to 400% of my allocation while still only serving up pages at five megabits per second. With the cache enabled, CPU usage settled at 20% and the data rate peaked at over 45 Megabit/sec.

I’m very impressed with the results… It seems that with a moderate spec server, you’ll hit your disk and/or network limit before you run out of CPU or RAM.

WordPress not sending emails on ubuntu – nrcpts=0

John Burns — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 23:55:09 +0000

So, you’re using sendmail to try and send emails from php/wordpress and it’s not working?

Are your mail logs (/var/log/mail.log) showing nrcpts=0 ??

Make sure the sendmail_path in your php.ini file (/etc/php5/apache2/php.ini) is set up correctly.

It should probably be…

1	sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i