How to pronounce Linux

Another stumble find - to settle the Linux pronunciation debate once and for all, here is audio from Linus Torvalds himself (the original Linux author) pronouncing the word... with a slight accent :) Saying Linux

Firefox Extensions for Web Developers (and blog hackers)

The days of looking at an area on a web page and guessing the pixel dimensions or color are over! Well, at least if you have a few tools and use Firefox. I like IE, but Firefox has largely replaced it for my day to day usage primarily due to the customization and tools available for Firefox.

Here are a few add-ins that I find to be very helpful for web development and hacking my blogs or other web properties I use.

1. The eye dropper utility.
   
   • This is a great little widget that gives you an eye dropper in the bottom of your status bar. If you click the eye dropper, you can identify the color of any area on your page in RGB or Hex.
   
   
   • Get it at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/271
   
   
   
   



2. The measure it utility.
   
   • This add-in gives you a little ruler in the status bar that you can click to get a measurement overlay giving you precise pixel dimensions of any screen area. Great for measuring that new page element location or footer area and so on.
   
   
   • Get it at https://https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/539/
   
   
   
   



3. Web Developer
   
   • As described by CW: "Web Developer is another virtual Swiss Army Knife for coding. There's some overlap with Firebug, but where Firebug concerns itself almost exclusively with the content of a Web page, Web Developer offers tools to tweak how you're interacting with the page." I like this integration with the tool bar and the ability to work with CSS in particular.
   
   
   • Get it at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/60/
   
   
   
   

Random Quotes / Messages

Random quotes are a nice addition to a site to add a little fun content so I am including directions here to put them on your own blog.

1. Select a list of quotes to put on your blog.


2. Go to the templates tab on your blog customization and select add a new page element.


3. Select the HTML / JavaScript element


4. Paste the following code into the block




<i><center><script language="JavaScript">
//store the quotations in arrays
//change this number to reflect the number of quotes
quotes = new Array(2);
//just follow this pattern to add more quotes
quotes[0] = "Shave your head, get a wet sponge, and flip the switch, 'cause you're about to get a Truthocution!<br/>Stephen Colbert";
quotes[1] = "I believe all God's creatures have a soul... except bears, bears are Godless killing machines!<br/>Stephen Colbert";
//calculate a random index
index = Math.floor(Math.random() * quotes.length);
//display the quotation
document.write("\n");
document.write(quotes[index]);
</script></center></i>
</pre></li>



5. You can give the element a title if you want, but it is not needed


6. Save the element and drop in in your page where you want it.


7. Viola, you have random quotes...

Ok.... thanks for the applause, no really, thank you... Ok. So there are variations of this script all over the net. You can find a version you like better or hack this one up. Follow the links to check out sites with great little scripts and widgets for your blog, or watch here for more.

File Synchronization

A while ago, I was looking for a way to keep my multiple drives and systems in synch, and also to back up my files. As it turns out, so was my dad. I spent some time rummaging around the web and I came up with allwaysync. This application is easily the BEST at what is does, especially for the money. (free for personal use)

From the vendor: "Allway Sync uses innovative synchronization algorithms to synchronize your data between desktop PCs, laptops, USB drives and more. Allway Sync combines bulletproof reliability with an extremely easy-to-use interface."

We both use it at this point and it has been working most efficaciously. Pull the application down from http://allwaysync.com/ to give it a try.

Photo sharing sites

I love to take pictures. I am an official photo junkie - the guy at the party who has the camera and says smile :) while you're trying to finish your drink. At any rate, when you take a lot of photos, you need a way to share them. I looked at all the free sites I could find and I could not find anything I was happy with. I wanted something that would let me customize and personalize. I also wanted to be able to lock down collections and share others.

To skip to the punchline, I found smugmug and never looked back. I still use a few free services for other things but I love my smugmug account. The pure hackability (good word, eh?)of the service is amazing and the community around the service is superb. It's worth a visit if you do any online photo sharing.

Hack your blog

While working on one of my other blogs, I have been playing around with blog hacks and tools. Basically what I've found is that blogspot is very similar to my favorite photo host (smugmug) in that is it highly customizable and uses standard naming conventions, styles and variables for templates.

Taking this into account, there is a growing community of "blog hackers" that have ready made widgets to drop into the blogs and it is fairly straight forward to make your own. I'm going to build a list of these hacks and make a link list as a starting point. Look for more content over time on this subject.