Alex Le’s Blog

I just received the Ubuntu CDs that I requested … 2 months ago when they just announced about ubuntu6. I popped the CD in and try out the LiveCD.

The boot up part is very smoothly. Ubuntu correctly detects my video card (x300). I had fullscreen 1248x 1024 resolution immediately! However, GNome is not as slick as KDE - based on my brief experience with SUSE 10.5 running KDE. But it doesn’t matter, both KDE and GNome would beatthe upcoming Vista big time perfomancewise and that is for sure. Quite nicely the Ubuntu LiveCD picks up my built-in NIC-card and I had live internet! The bundle Firefox is of version 1.5.0.3, good enough! I started IMing my friend over Meebo, checked out my stripedesigner.com and things look great!
The only problem that I encountered was that Ubuntu coudln’t pick up my soundcard, Creative SoundBlaster Live! something. I don’t blame on Ubuntu as this thing is 5, 6 years old already. However, I’d expect there’s a default driver for sound-cards made by Creative or other popular makes. So I couldn’t test out the sample OGG videos as the player said that it couldn’t connect to the sound server. I think if I actually install Ubuntu and use it, I would spend sometime downloading the correct driver and update the system as I believe that someone in the Ubuntu community will have the solution.

I would give Ubuntu a thumb up for its smooth performance under LiveCD mode. The slow CD-access time doesn’t slow Ubuntu down too much. OpenOffice 2.0 loads quite fast and the sample presentations look awesome too! Firefox works great as always. Taking screenshot is easy with the Printscreen button and the output dialog asking me where to save the file. I wish Windows has that feature built-in so I don’t have to use other 3rd-party software.

Anyway, I do like Ubuntu and would seriously give it a try later on. But Suse10.5 is actually my first choice if I ever do Linux.

Tutorial with video is coming soon.

This post serves as a temporary place-holder for the tutorial on how to use Stripe Desinger with Photoshop.

- Alex

I was working on Stripe Designer and this nasty bug of null object kept on bugging me in IE. In Firefox, the code works so well (both FireBug and the invaluable Web Developer bar did not give any warning/ error) but in IE, the thing just crash.

After much cursing and banging on my keyboard, I have found the little nasty bug… But first, let’s me give you original the code snippet from SitePoint that enables simple inheritance in Javascript

function copyPrototype(descendant, parent) {
var sConstructor = parent.toString();
var aMatch = sConstructor.match( /\s*function (.*)\(/ );
if ( aMatch != null ) { descendant.prototype[aMatch[1]] = parent; }
for (var m in parent.prototype) {
descendant.prototype[m] = parent.prototype[m];
}
};
[[http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2006/01/17/javascript-inheritance|From SitePoint Blogs » Javascript Inheritance]]

The code fails in IE as the regexp that is used to match the contrucstor will also match anything after “function ” (one space after function) and the left paranthesis. This means if I write …

function Dog ( ...

then the result of the match is “Dog “. In Firefox, this works fine. However, in IE, things just stop working without any good hints on why and where the broken point is. ScriptDebugger didn’t work too well either. Anyway, the solution is simply trimming the spaces after and before the match. To do that, modify descendant.prototype[aMatch[1]] = parent; to descendant.prototype[aMatch[1].replace(/^\s*|\s*$/g,"")] = parent;

For your convenience, here is the readily available code for you to use…

function copyPrototype(descendant, parent) {
var sConstructor = parent.toString();
var aMatch = sConstructor.match( /\s*function (.*)\s*\(/ );

var sConstructor = parent.toString();
var aMatch = sConstructor.match( /\s*function (.*)\(/ );
if ( aMatch != null ) { descendant.prototype[aMatch[1].replace(/^\s*|\s*$/g,"")] = parent; }
descendant.prototype[ aMatch[1] ] = parent;
for (var m in parent.prototype)
descendant.prototype[m] = parent.prototype[m];
}

I was signing up an account on Adbrite for my newest experiment Stripe Designer (www.stripedesigner.com) and this is what I’ve got for validation. Should I sue these guys at AdBrite for insulting the user? Maybe I should … Just kidding but this is an example of too much science and cautiousness can go wrong. Or is this just a quick joke from Pud, the famous AdBrite guy who also runs mobog.com (warning: adult-related contents)?

This is amazing… I just realized that ExpertsExchange is another Expert-Sex-Change service by provding instant nerdiness enhancement in form of tech questions and answers.

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