So I finally hooked up my blog again
June 15, 2012, 6:03 pm

I finally got around to hooking up my blog to my webpage again.

It's been a while since I've had a weblog fed into my website, and now I do. I've made a redesign to the site, it's got the sexiest html and css I can muster, while the design is still pretty simple. If you look into the code, you should find that I have an all CSS drop down navigation bar up there, and if you look further you should notice that my CSS is so sexy, I don't need no stinking classes or ids to select anything. Of course... this site looks like absolute balls on anything before IE9, but on a modern browser, it should be working just fine.

I made a couple of these videos of my art, and I'm thinking of making more soon. I already have a couple drawings recorded, just have to get around to dubbing them. Maybe this weekend, but no promises.

Also, I finally passed my CTT+ exams, and I am now an official ACI. What does this mean? CTT+ is the universal exam for technical trainers, and an ACI is an Adobe Certified Instructor, which means that I am ACE (Adobe Certified Expert) in all things Adobe, along with being a recognized Trainer. It's really exciting. And if you ever had a question about an Adobe product, I can probably answer it. So ask me anything, I dare you.

[edit] Worth mentioning about Wordpress. If you have a problem where strange characters are showing up from your xml rss feed, there are going to be a lot of silly plugins and other such things thrown at you to fix the problem. The problem was much simpler than that for me, I just needed a meta tag in my head to define the encoding for the site to UTF-8.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8"/>

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fonts and such
December 30, 2011, 3:47 am

I've always had a mild fascination with fonts. After my old boss came to me and had me create a font for him I've gotten into making fonts for myself. I've always had a mind for organization and I find font making to be a very monotonous task in a good way.

I've made myself about 6 fonts since then, and I love doing it. I will have more to say later.

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coding is hard
August 16, 2011, 11:31 am

There is nothing more frustrating than coding a lot of things, and then realizing that in order to move forward with a project, you must now recode all those things. You must check for new redundancies. You must correct new errors, while improving old hacks. It's annoying as all get out, and I have to do it CONSTANTLY.

maybe I'm a bad programmer.

I'd be willing to concede that. I believe I am an excellent problem solver. But being a good programmer means being more than just a good problem solver. It involves perceiving problems long before they raise their head, and readying your hammer beforehand. I often write code days ahead of time in anticipation of a problem. I'm always amazed when I write a function only to be reviewing my code later and realizing that I had already written in a contingency function for the very problem I was now fixing. It's like beating a burglar to death with a bat, because you forgot you had placed a gun in your cabinet weeks earlier.

It's frustrating, and at the same time, every time it happens i think to myself "Damn, self. You scary smart." I probably do a lot more congratulating of mediocrity than I should. But when you live in the middle it can be difficult to see what's more appropriate.

I drew a friend today for his anniversary.

I would like to do more quick caricatures like this. It makes me happy, but more than 5 of them in a row starts feeling like a job.

Maybe just 2 or 3 every day. That would be nice.

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Jquery problem with cached images having height and width of 0
July 8, 2011, 3:17 pm

So I managed to solve a major problem in jquery, an issue that apparently plagues many people.

When dynamically adding a new image, if the image is already cached, the browser has a habit of kicking back a value of zero when .width() and .height() are called on it. This can be especially annoying if the programmer is trying to resize the image dynamically, since no assessment of the image's real width and height can be ascertained.

My current script grabs all image links and all embedded image urls from the current dom, and makes an array of them. Links are no problem usually, since the image hasn't been loaded yet, but i found that after testing my chrome extension on a single page multiple times, I would eventually run into a point when the browser would decide the image was already cached, and would give me the problem that all embedded images already had. It would load, but with a width and height of 0. Terribly annoying.

I tried making a .load() function and that worked sometimes, but eventually there would be a problem again. and then I came upon the solution, I had to add a timestamp to the end of the image to grab a new image. But of course if the timestamp is added dynamically every time, then the images are never cached at all in a good or bad way. Then I figured it out. Since my script creates a large image list object, I added a timestamp when the image was added to the list. I couldn't add it to the link itself, because then matches couldn't easily be made on the links. By separating the timestamp, and adding it at time of load, it allows me to make sure my cache is dynamic, but i still get a local cache.

This solved my problem and hopefully it can solve someone else's.

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the death of the music video
May 28, 2011, 6:00 am

Have you ever heard the song "video killed the radio star"? Well I believe the opposite has happened now. The MP3 has killed the video star. It's possible that this is based merely on my own perception, but I haven't watched a music video on purpose in years. I have no doubt that they're still being produced, but the machine that was present in the 90's pushing videos on teens just isn't there anymore.

The flipside of being able to produce and distribute product for cheap on the internet is that consumers no longer rely on one outlet for their product and news. It is now on the consumer to seek out their own information, and so there is no where to focus the media push like there was when it was just MTV and VH1.

An argument could be made that youtube is the current Big Media playground, but even that is so fragmented. Each record label has their own channel and even if youtube has an ad on their main page, that is a page you never have to visit.

The era of Big Media push is coming to an end. We are on the cusp. I for one can't wait.

Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

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jquery just saved me a year
May 26, 2011, 6:32 pm

well... maybe not a WHOLE year. it's amazing what you can do when you don't have to write the code to loop through a bunch of somethings, or do checks on anything...

jquery just does it. i mean... i just didn't get into it because i didn't want to be depending on loading a code, but christ, it makes everything so much easier. I am a convert. welcome to the church of jquery, this is my first sermon. Worship this shit. I stand at the altar of jquery and say to you that it is good.

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work getting done
May 16, 2011, 11:53 pm


I have been doing a lot of working on my portfolio.  And when i say work on my portfolio, i mean that i have been working on the code that runs my portfolio.  Some of you might not know this, but i love coding.  It makes me quite happy.  If you go to hamiltondraws.com/portfolio, you can see the very work that i have been doing.  Mainly i've been working on the lightbox for the thumbnail mode.  I'm sure that I will eventually add this to the directory mode, but for now it seemed most appropriate for the thumb mode.

So I wrote the php portion of the default index script quite a while ago.  It's a small script in a single php file with just a simple but added to a .htaccess file that directs any folder without an index file to point at this default index. 

I've used the greased lightbox script from shifting pixel for a long time, which was based on the original lightbox gallery script, and I've always wanted to add this functionality to my own galleries, but I never like to use other people's scripts.  So I have finally made my own.  Even the images used in this script are just base64 text so that this script can be implemented on a system quickly and efficiently.

There is more i would like to do with this and it has features that I always wanted Joe to add to greased lightbox, but for now I think I might leave it alone for a bit.

Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

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