Tutorial

After some frustrations with conflicting documentation, I figured I'd make the blog post I wished I had at the start of this all. This forum post is what finally led me in the correct direction.

If you're using Universal Analytics through Google Tag Manager and are tracking Standard Ecommerce transactions in multiple currencies, you'll need some extra setup beyond the documentation they provide. You'll notice there's no mention of setting the currency when sending a standard ecommerce transaction because the Universal Analytics through Google Tag Manager doesn't support it. Thankfully, it's easy to add.

Recently I was working with Assetic for combining and minifying CSS and JS files but ran into an issue with regards to caching the created asset collection. The resulting minified file was being rewritten on every page load which was no good at all.

TL;DR: Get the asset collection's "last modified" property and compare it to the written minified file to determine if it needs updating.

Recently I ran into an issue where I had to generate content within a Drupal 7 cron run using node_view(). Normally there wouldn't be much of an issue here except that I was also trying to do some custom work within node.tpl.php in the main theme for the site.

After much frustration, I learned that during cron, the administration theme is used. After some thought, that makes sense and normally would not cause any issues but in my case it caused nothing but pain.

Recently I've been running into an issue when using OfflineImap to get my email. It took me a while to track down a solution to this problem so I figured a quick post was in order for future reference for myself and others. Below is a description of the problem, how it came about after working fine initially and the solution found.

With cron being depreciated in OSX a few versions ago, the proper way to run a script at set intervals is with Launchd. Below is just a quick setup for getting Offlineimap to run every 2 minutes to refresh your local email folders.

Here's a quick post on setting up Vim for Arduino development instead of using the Arduino IDE. If you're a heavy Vim user, it can be a bit of a shock to go into a different editor. Thankfully the setup is pretty easy to get this all working with Vim. This post is assuming you are comfortable with how Vim is setup and ideally already have an environment that works for you.

Just finished debugging a problem where I had text boxes whose performance was terrible. There was a noticeable lag between input and display and it was not usable.

After looking around it turned out the CSS3 box-shadow I had on the parent div which contained these text boxes was causing the performance hit. I assume that each time you type a letter, the browser has to re-render the box-shadow. I was using a box shadow of type inset for an inner gradient look so your results may differ with different box shadow types.

For the past few days I have been trying to debug a weird IE7 issue with regards to transparent PNGs. Everything on the internet was telling me that what was happing shouldn't happen so this was a pretty frustrating experience. I'm a mac user and use IETester for making sure websites work in IE. It's a solid app and hasn't failed me in the past.

This is just a quick post on vertically aligning a horizontal menu with CSS. There are many posts out there on how to do this, but on a current project, I found that none of the tutorials I found worked. I managed to stumble upon a way that worked. I know for many this will be common sense....this post is for everybody else.

Having a PS3 hooked up to an HDTV is great and all but if all your media is on your server you need a way to get the content to where it needs to be. This is where MediaTomb comes into play.

MediaTomb is an open source (GPL) UPnP MediaServer with a nice web user interface, it allows you to stream your digital media through your home network and listen to/watch it on a variety of UPnP compatible devices.

Your PS3 is a UPnP compatible device so MediaTomb is perfect for the job.