Solving technology problems, one at a time
For several days I’ve already been enjoying a great pre-Christmas present: a new Kindle DX! Despite being early, it didn’t come a moment too soon. For quite a while, I’ve been hoping for a better way to read to cope with my aging eyesight and tired eyes and the ever-increasing amount of reading on my desk. Most of my work-related reading in PDF format, and up until now, no device displayed PDF’s well except a computer or laptop.
The Accordion is one of the handy interface widgets that can be generated using jQuery UI. There are several optional settings you can add into the function call, including animation, auto-height, etc. If you find it is not working on IE7try adding “animated:false” as one of the options.
If you are running a debugger on IE, and see the error “invalid option on line 486” this is definitely the problem.
According to CDC statistics, U.S. childhood asthma prevalence more than doubled between 1980 to the mid-1990s and has since plateaued at those historically high levels. Although many triggers and risk factors for asthma have been identified, the reasons behind this increase are not yet understood.
A recent study by University of Adelaide researchers Whitrow, Moore, Rumbold, and Davies may shed some light on the rise in asthma in young children. The study appears to show that the use of folic acid supplements in late pregnancy can lead to increased allergic asthma in children of 3.5 years of age. This human study corroborates earlier studies in mice which indicated that supplementation with folate in pregnancy leads to an allergic asthma phenotype in mice via epigenetic mechanisms (changes in gene expression).
Continue readingToday I found that a Menalto Gallery v.2.3 site I run had simply stopped working. I had made no changes in weeks, so this was peculiar. Browsing to the front page brought up only the
Continue readingIf you want your linux-hosted site to be accessible by anyone coming from a particular IP address, as say from within a corporate firewall, but also accessible from anywhere else as long as they authenticate with username and password, use this formula in the .htaccess file for the directory:
#this section may need to be modified to suit your password authentication setup: AuthUserFile "/home/pathTo/.htpasswds/directory_name/passwd" AuthType Basic AuthName "webroot" require valid-user # allow users from inside firewall Allow from 111.222.33 Satisfy AnyContinue reading
After upgrading to SnowLeopard a new bug in Mail.app has appeared. About once a week, one or more emails will decide to reproduce themselves hundreds of times in a folder called “Recovered Messages”. If that email has a large attachment, it can quickly fill up the limited space allotted to my email account.
Continue readingIf you need to sync Powerpoint slides to a lengthy pre-recorded audio file in Presenter, the choice of format for the audio file is important. Save audio files intended for import into Presenter in mp3
Continue readingI’ve been experimenting with enhancing some of my photos in Photoshop to create more interesting images. I use a Canon PowerShot SD 990IS point-and-shoot camera that does a good job on the whole, but because the lens isn’t very high quality, images sometimes come out somewhat hazy. The camera actually captures a lot of detail but it takes some processing to bring it out. I’m not against using some tricks to emphasize what’s good about the picture, even to the point where it crosses the line into illustration.
For this project, I started with a fairly unexciting picture of my dining room. Its one strong point was the sunlight streaming in the windows which brought out the colors in the wood chair and tablecloth. This picture was one of several shots of the same scene with different exposure settings.
This was the lightest one, chosen for the detail visible through the windows. However in choosing the lightest exposure, the tablecloth lost a lot of its color. However I thought it had potential.
Original image
A while back, I worked on a flash game that teaches medical professionals how to find objects in a cardiac cart. A cart with 6 drawers isshown at left. When a drawer is clicked, it slides in from the top of the screen so that all the objects inside can be seen. The object of the game is to drag whichever object has been selected at random to a target at bottom right.
The original design allowed plenty of room for the drawers to move down to their open position without obscuring the target area.
But as time went on and more requirements came to light, the dimensions of the game had to be shortened so that the drawer overlapped the hand target when it was in its “open” position.
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In the last year or so, I got used to being able to export to just about any format from Quicktime Pro using Quicktime Conversions. When I upgraded to Snow Leopard, I installed Flip4Mac’s Snow
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