Soon, as Canadian weather goes to hell, I will get back to the workbench and play around my little projects — one of them being the new skin I’ve silently pushed on this blog.

In all honesty, I have not really tested it in older Explorer versions because all my main computers have all sinuously been converted to Macs. Because I’m using CSS shadows, rounded corners and transparency statements that aren’t supported in Internet Explorer 7 and down, I can bet many things look odd. Consider this a work in progress!

This skin was one of the first designs I’ve completed apart from the ones I do at work. Mostly because I can’t come up with something I find worthy of The Music Tank, but also because I’ve let myself being boxed in corporate guidelines, I’ve been banging my head consistently against a wall for a while now in website designs.

I like how this one turned out though and it had the thumbs up from friends, which is a big plus it has for itself.

Of the new features introduced with the skin is a page displaying my lifestream. I tried using wordpress plugins at first, but it didn’t quite do what I wanted so I ended up regrouping all my web feeds in Yahoo Pipes and then displaying what they generated with jQuery.

Stay tuned for updates on projects and new posts on the blog in the near future. I have a few drafts waiting for me to finish up and publish.

I’m out!

Installation did not go smoothly mostly because of the disappointing internal error reporting capabilities implanted in TorrentFlux. The logs and error messages should be more precise like the ones printed in the Apache logs. From the searches I did on the interwebs, I seem to have bumped in an easy to fix, though still much too common, issue.

If QManager is not running (PID: ‘nothing’ in the admin logs) or if the torrents do not download, make sure all the paths in TorrentFlux’s configuration do not have spaces in them. That goes for the download directory and for the paths to the multiple BitTornado files. Obviously, make sure you installed the prerequisites like Python and Curl and double check your php configuration file also.

If you had already added torrents to the queue, you may have to delete and add them back using the web interface. This is because the path will have changed without TorrentFlux noticing.

My friend has a iPod that stopped playing the mp3s it holds. The proprietary Mac and Microsoft software he normally uses, like the obvious iTunes or other iPod rippers of sorts, did not recognize his iPod either.

I had a hunch Ubuntu would have something to offer to save his music collection. While I was expecting to have to do a few console tricks, turns out the included media software read and fetched the mp3s off his iPod without any problems.

The only thing we haven’t tried yet was to actually try and ‘reset’ the iPod using the open source platform. My guess is that while I could get his mp3s back, we were going to have to return the songs to the iPod using iTunes in the end.

Because the process of saving the files on my Ubuntu box, sending them over to my Mac and re-include them to the freshly wipe iPod through iTunes would have been too lengthy, my friend wanted to try a few other things first. At least now we have a back up solution, though.

Feels good to be a nerd with social skills.

You do have to let it go at some point though: just like one chooses to trust your Mom & Pop’s local merchants won’t duplicate your credit card while scanning them under the counter, you have to expect websites to treat your private information respectfully.

Amazon just sent me an alert saying another user tried to make purchases with my credit card, which they had previously linked with my account over there. I didn’t expect them to actually make proactive checks like these and was pleasantly surprised.

I have yet to understand when my card information was harvested and if transactions were made on other websites, but at least Amazon’s suspicion will be noticed by my credit card provider.

Totally awesome.

Now, I know I could be posting this news because there’s still 2 hours left before the show starts… but I know people don’t care about what I need to report so I just won’t be doing anything about it.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo

I had the preconceived notion that BootCamp would spoof Microsoft’s installer into thinking there is only one hard-drive using up the manually allocated space. I also expected BootCamp to somehow protect OSX’s files using special user file rights or methods that would protect it from the Microsoft installer. Windows Setup found 3 partitions (wtf?) that I went on deleting carelessly. Just for the record, I really think this is my fault in a obvious lack of paying attention to what I was doing.

Fortunately, I’m the happy owner of Time Capsule and Leopard so my whole Mac was backed up to the minute. Thing is, in all the excitement that comes with mistakenly wiping off your drive, I had forgot I could use that backup.

In a nice implementation of their solution, Apple noticed I had a Time Capsule running during Leopard’s installation process and asked me to use the backup it had found. Things went very smoothly afterwards. After a long wait, all my stuff was back where it had been before my mistake. I only had to change the file system from NTFS to whatever Mac uses previously in the process.

Apart for the wireless not working easily with my Xbox 360 (which in the end is Microsoft’s fault) and sometimes having connection hiccups I really only have good words for my Time Capsule.

While the Kravitz show didn’t really spark any kind of interest, I did spend a few minutes around the video streaming service looking around for stuff I would actually enjoy.

For something obviously “Microsoft” and actively targeting a wide audience, they kind of have a nice choice of mainstream artists.

Notably, you can stream the Smashing Pumpkins and Chris Cornell — which mostly does Soundgarden songs — among established artists like Elton John.

Services like these are nice because things are neatly grouped and bow-tied, but unfortunately it’s not making any effort of posting content that would allow for musical discovery. It’s a service that brings them money first and foremost and the showcased artists are filtered accordingly… and that will always seem inevitable for giant portal websites like MSN.

Cant move focus to the control because its invisible , not enabled, or a type that does not accept the focus.

In that case don’t waste time trying to understand it, odds are you have conflicting ids in your document. Also, remember IE 7 and the previous versions are alone to think a name attribute should be treated like an id.

If that’s not it, then it’s because your html object is not considered active and visible on the page. It could be because the innerHTML is not done inserting, because the browser has not refreshed the DOM or because Orion is in Sagittarius’ house, but you have to find a way to slow your code’s execution.