Tag Archives: tutorials

Grub Error 13 and 17 together

Published: 12 October 2009
I just encountered a Grub Error 13 and a Grub Error 17 all for seemingly no reason. I fixed the problem, but thought I could save others undue headache. The Setup I have Ubuntu Linux installed on one hard drive which fdisk calls /dev/hda and Windows XP installed on a second hard drive called /dev/hdb. [...]
Posted in Linux | Also tagged , | 2 Comments

finding invalid foreign keys in Rails

Published: 15 November 2007
Sometimes it would be useful to tell users of your Ruby on Rails application if there is a problem in the database, such as some foreign keys are invalid. As an example, let's assume you have two models, Book and Author, such that each Book has an author_id which connects with Author via its [...]
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Grub Error 17

Published: 25 October 2007
Note: if this tutorial doesn’t help you, possibly because fdisk reports your known Linux partition correctly as Linux, you might also try my Grub Error 13 with Grub Error 17 tutorial. I just had an interesting time with trying to boot into Linux on my PC. Last night, I noticed my /boot/grub/menu.lst file had [...]
Posted in Linux | Also tagged , | 21 Comments

using Javascript and CSS to mark outgoing links

Published: 26 September 2007
It may be useful to your visitors to know which links will take them off of your site without having to hover over all of them. It might also be a nice touch to mark links pointing to PDF documents, for example, with a little Adobe PDF logo. With the help of Javascript [...]
Posted in Programming | Also tagged , , , | 4 Comments | Current music The Way I Are by Timbaland

using AJAX to implement a live search

Published: 14 May 2007
I recently implemented a live search on the quotes page, so I figured I'd give a tutorial on how I did it. A "live" search is like a regular search feature, but if the user has Javascript enabled, the search will run as they type, instead of waiting for them to hit the 'Submit' [...]
Posted in Programming | Also tagged , , | 1 Comment | Current music Beautiful Liar by Beyonce and Shakira

using AJAX to spiff up a gallery

Published: 3 May 2007
Lightbox is nice and all, but sometimes I find it clunky, particularly in Firefox when I have a lot of other tabs open. However, I don't want to go the route of having an image load by itself in the browser, because it would be so much nicer to have it integrated into my [...]
Posted in Programming | Also tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

how to reformat your pen drive

Published: 19 April 2007
USB pen drives are everywhere these days, and for good reason, since they’re dead useful. I use mine with my Linux box, my Powerbook, and various other systems I’ve had cause to stick it in. After a while, my 1 GB drive was only holding a few hundred MB. When I would [...]
Posted in Linux | Also tagged | 10 Comments

XGL/Compiz customizations on Ubuntu

Published: 18 August 2006
So I’ve got XGL/Compiz up and running and, I must say, it is hot. See the full entry for screenshots of what I’ve done so far. That’s the cube as I’m rotating it. That’s a photo of the city of Baltimore in the background with the capital dome on top of the cube. That’s the [...]
Posted in Techy | Also tagged , | 2 Comments

custom shapes in Photoshop

Published: 3 August 2006
Custom shapes can be very useful for making multiple objects that look the same. For example, say you want several photos to all be cut out of the same shape, like this: Creating a Custom Shape Create a blank 200 pixels x 200 pixels image. Select the Rounded Rectangle Tool and set its radius to [...]
Posted in Techy | Also tagged , | 2 Comments | Current music They Dance Alone by Sting

image generation in PHP

Published: 11 March 2006
Creating images on-the-fly can be a very useful skill. Using PHP's built-in image generation functions, it's pretty easy, too. This tutorial will detail how to have the titles of blog entries show up as automatically generated images. What we'll be doing is passing arguments via the URL to a separate file that will be [...]
Posted in Programming | Also tagged | 5 Comments | Current music Smile Empty Soul - This Is War