i have many memories of computers and they all revolve around apple, including that one PC i had that i immediately wished i had saved for a mac. my first real computer? an apple IIe. i played oregon trail on it constantly (we did have a TI-86 before the IIe but i couldn't really do anything on it but a few lines of BASIC.) my high school graduation present? an apple performa 450 (the last bunch of computers before steve jobs came back and rescued apple from the brink.) then there was the flirtation with windows that lasted all of 6 months and then i got one of the first imacs and it was all over. i was hooked forever. i even managed to hook some friends.

so yeah, i've wanted an iphone since there were rumors of its development.. and finally i have one!

it's here!

can you see the excitement? i'm taking it slow and savoring every moment! but i already sat down today and sewed up two cozies for it (the first one didn't work out so well.)

this is the winner (the loser is here.) one seam to lessen bulkiness. tight but not too tight. the lining is flannel to protect the screen (i have a screen covering protector on its way.)

the lining

can you believe that i actually have two different skull and cross bones prints in my stash? how fortuitous of me! here's the quick stats in case you want to make one.

two pieces of fabric, 6" tall by 6.75" wide. the lining should be cut with pinking shears to 5" tall (it will not be seamed on the bottom. seam up both the outer fabric and the lining on the shorter side the rectangles using a 0.5" seam allowance. pink off the excess fabric on the seams and press them open with the seam in the back. sew across the bottom of the outer lining with a 0.5" seam. put the lining inside the outer fabric, right sides together, and seam up the top opening at 0.5" seam allowance. press open that seam and turn right side out. tuck the lining in and press again. done.

works great.

and here's some other crafty news. i started the frock camisole! (ravelry) i'm using the artfibers zodiac (now called zoe) that i bought in san francisco last year. so far i'm chugging along. i didn't do a gauge swatch but i think that it's going to work out ok based on what i've already knit.

and i also have a knitted toy in progress (ravelry). this one is for sharon's newly birthed bean.

it's coming along SLOWLY. all those limbs are becoming tiresome. i'm thinking about making it a cat instead of a bunny. smaller ears and a tail! will be cute, me thinks.

and remember this?

this is going to be my summer olympics project (ravelry). gods help me, i'm going to finish it, i swear.

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so, as i was saying in my last post, i was chilling with lisa and virginia at the point and the topic of flickr came up. lisa mentioned that she wished there was an easier way to save her photos in iphoto, edit them in photoshop, and upload them to flickr without having to export the photos to her desktop over and over. i said, WHAT? why would you do such a thing? then i thought, wow, i must have the secret touch when it comes to streamlining. i'm always looking for the easiest approach to a problem whereas some people may look for any kind of answer at all and continue to do it even though it's not easy.

well, here's a quick tutorial on how to make getting your photos into flickr easy peasy. i'm including steps if you have iphoto, though, i'm sure there's some software on a PC that will do it as well. i wouldn't know. skip down to step 8 if you want to just blog your images once they are in flickr. (full tutorial in the extended entry)

continue reading -»

it's a good thing that i'm not doing any christmas knitting this year because i know that i would have no time in which to do it! it's already the 13th of december and i cringe at the thought of 2008 approaching and i've done little to no knitting in 2007. i was just looking at my ravelry and i'm surprised by how few projects are in there! i could have sworn that i knit more than that. it's an illusion in my mind, i guess.

i've started something new and i think that this time, it's going to take. poor KP. i think that i've started and frogged about 3,278,763 socks for him at this point. either i choose the wrong pattern or the wrong yarn or a combination of both. this time, though, i feel the mojo, but time is limited around here. i'm not getting much done. a round here and there.

creeping along

i'm calling them "ode to argyle" socks. just a simple diamond pattern i drew up on some graph paper. i did my very first tubular cast-on (via ysolda) for them! i hope to knit on these and finish them before the end of the year. KP has off between christmas and new year's and i want to knit knit knit during that time!

recently, i dressed up the peanut and i took pictures of her looking cute for christmas cards. we had one spill but otherwise she sat for them nicely. i wish i had a more professional camera and lighting setup. she kept moving and making everything all blurry. i eventually had to cave and use the flash. the final photo was very cute but here's an outtake.

goo!

i had to give her curious george in order to make her happy enough to sit for 5 minutes at a time! those babies. short attention spans.

her aunt cheryl gave her a walker for christmas and it is the hottest thing around here. she still hates being on her stomach so now that she knows how to roll in both directions, she just rolls onto her back whenever we put her on her tummy. my guess is she won't be crawling for quite some time. but she wants to be MOBILE! she wants to follow us around! this walker is great for it. our apartment is a bit small for it but what little mobility it gives her makes her happy.

mobile nut

in other news, if you read subwayknitter then you know that i'm hard at work over here geeking out (another reason why i don't have a lot of knitting time.) i'm updating her movabletype and templates.. giving her a NY subway feel. we're not going kitchy (and besides i happen to know that the MTA hates it when you parody the subway) but instead minimalist with a hint of subway. i think that you'll like it when it's done. i'll give my geek review of MT4 when all is said and done.

p.s. i already know that my new year's resolution is going to be to post once per week. let's hope that i can do that starting in 2008!

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google announced a new feature today: code search. this is just brilliant for the programmers out there (this includes me, if you don't know that already) because now we can search the code of sites to find out how other people implemented certain functions that we may want to try.

but the beauty of google is that it can always be used to waste time and get a good laugh.

http://google.com/codesearch?q=f***ing&btnG=Search+Code

sorry for the profanity (actually i'm not. i've got nothing really against it.) but after clicking on this link, it'll become apparent just how many coders hate IE (and netscape and sun OS and adobe svg... the list goes on and on.) all i can do is laugh and say, i feel your pain brothers and sisters. thank you for commenting your code.

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as some of you may have guessed by now, my day job does not (sadly) consist of knitting. by day, i'm a web coder/programmer for a large media/entertainment company in midtown manhattan. i basically spend all day sitting in front of a computer making websites or going to meetings and making decisions on how those websites are designed and should perform. it's a rewarding job and at the end of my day i have a website i can point to and say "i built that." i've recently hit a very tiny amount of downtime at work so i'm spending my days learning ruby (and ruby on rails) and conjuring up all types of code for gleek.net and for my friends' sites. it's the kind of downtime i really enjoy because i feel like i'm really accomplishing something instead of sitting around and staring at the walls (which is equally nice every once in a while but not every day for two weeks..)

recently, i became really annoyed with something.. you see, i have this great piece of software installed on firefox called adblock. it stops all of those annoying flash ads and image ads from showing up on websites. really, it's quite fantastic and i highly recommend installing it. it takes a bit of time to customize it but after a while, you don't notice the blank spaces on websites where ads are supposed to be. brilliant!

i digress..

anyway, so adblock puts these little tabs on top of flash files on sites so that you can easily *click* and hide away the pesky little things. the tabs, though, are annoying when they're applied to totally legitimate flash elements of a page. where i notice them the most is on knitblogs that use that handy little progress bar for keeping readers up-to-date on the status of a project (40% done, 60%, 100% etc.) what knitbloggers may not know is that not all browsers come with flash, especially if people are using their sidekick or mobile device to access your site, so they don't see them. that gave me an idea! "i'll use PHP to dynamically create progress bar images!"

and here you have it:

GLEEK.NET DYNAMIC PROGRESS BAR IMAGE v1.0

here are a few examples:

if you host your own blog or have the ability to upload files to your blog, this will probably work for you. your blog must be hosted on a server that runs PHP and has the GD library installed. i've included a test file in this zip that you can upload and find out if your server is capable or not. as for the progress bar itself, you can specify the colors (background, bar color, and text color) but the image size is set to 120 pixels wide by 20 pixels tall. all the information that you'll need to use this is in the README file.

i'm using the progress bars on my projects in progress [backpack] page ETA: i am currently not using these anywhere on the website except here on this entry since i became such a ravelry addict. if you want to take a look! i love them, of course. the outputted GIF file is much easier to manipulate than an SWF file. i can apply styles to it (put a border around the bar) and/or link it to another page because it's just an image!

download and enjoy! if you use it, please link to me and tell people where you got it. it's not necessary but it's the only credit i get for doing things like this :)

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if you've recently upgraded your movabletype installation to 3.2 and also upgraded your templates to the new code then you've probably noticed a slight problem with the comment form in firefox. it doesn't remember anymore!! i've noticed several other blogs online that are having the same issue and it drives me a little batty to have to retype in my information every time that i visit. this can be remedied though.

after playing around with the code for a bit, i realized that the javascript implementation for the new MT default templates is incorrect. the old templates used to have a remember me module that inserted the javascript into the top head tag and a small bit of code (outside of the module) that was inserted underneath the form on the individual archive template. as of version 3.2, the remember me module is gone and now all javascripts live in the mt-site.js file. unfortunately, the way that a browser parses an HTML page is from the top of the page to the bottom so by putting the javascript that changes the form at the top of the page and the actual form at the bottom, the javascript doesn't work. the pre-3.2 version did.

so, here is the small bit of javascript code that should go on the page BELOW the comment form like it was on the default templates before version 3.2.

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
<!--
document.comments_form.email.value = getCookie("mtcmtmail");
document.comments_form.author.value = getCookie("mtcmtauth");
document.comments_form.url.value = getCookie("mtcmthome");
if (getCookie("mtcmtauth")) {
document.comments_form.bakecookie[0].checked = true;
} else {
document.comments_form.bakecookie[1].checked = true;
}
//-->
</script>

FYI, this code is also in the mt-site.js file that is attached to the individual archive page and you can delete it from the javascript file or leave it. this should fix the form and allow people to use the remember me function. hoorah!

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when i work on flash applications/animations for freelance clients, i usually go about it the robust way. meaning, i import every possible thing that i could possibly use into the fla file, complete the project, then go through the library at the end and delete anything that wasn't used.. clean things up a bit. so the other night, i hit that stage on an animation that i was working on and seleted a lot of files in the library to delete.

are you sure you want to delete these files?
yes.

are you really sure that you want to delete 38 files?
uuuuuuh... yeah.

since when do applications second guess their users?

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