[schuchlenz.com] » Tech Stuff

GimpShop & Photoshop Shortcut File

Stefan Schuchlenz — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 13:08:41 +0000

For all of you who need/want to do graphics work on Linux, the Gimp is praised as an alternative to Photoshop. Well, I tend to use CS4 for the more complex work since Gimp simply isn’t that powerful and comfortable… wait. There’s GimpShop!

What’s that?

GimpShop (http://plasticbugs.com/?page_id=294) is a hack for Gimp to change the menu structure and tools to a Photoshop layout (which it seems to do quite neatly). Combined with Photoshop shortcuts for Gimp (found here: http://epierce.freeshell.org/gimp/gimp_ps.php) the Gimp starts to really make sense for people like me who try to do a switchover from Adobe’s overpriced solutions to free alternatives but who don’t want to miss out on Photoshop’s massive and innovative features.

EDIT: In case you don’t like GimpShop in German either (it was because of my general DE locale that Linux decided a german Gimp would be good for me):

I hacked together a quick Perl script, just put it somewhere, give it 755 perms and add a symlink to the file to your /usr/local/bin.

Step 1:

Create a file (I called it gimp_en.pl) and add the following:

#!/usr/bin/perl
system("LANG=EN gimp")

Step 2:

Create a symlink (after chmod 755 on gimp_en.pl) in /usr/local/bin:

sudo ln -s /path/to/gimp_en.pl gimp_en

Step 3:

Put a launcher on your desktop (or wherever you like it) pointing to “gimp_en”

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Doing UPDATE with Doctrine and a String as Parameter

Stefan Schuchlenz — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 10:55:13 +0000

Today I had to extend a few Doctrine queries and one of these modifications consisted of changing the parameter of an UPDATE query from integer to string – and whoops! It didn’t work anymore…

When using $query->getSql(); I noticed that it wanted to do something like this:

UPDATE data SET date = 2009-12-14 WHERE ...

and of course mySQL doesn’t like passing date strings without proper quotes…

The query looked like this:

$query->UPDATE('Data')->set('date', $myNewDate)->where(...)

which I had to subsitute with

$query->UPDATE('Data')->set('date', '?', $myNewDate)->where(...)

Note the '?' in the middle – now it works

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IRC server & channels added!

Stefan Schuchlenz — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:11:24 +0000

Since the start of this week, there is an own IRC server running at irc.droom.at (webchat or connect directly with your favourite IRC client) which offers support for:

Rails
jQuery
symfony
HAML / SASS

and sports some fun channels. Check it out and populate the server

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How HAML changed my (XHTML) life

Stefan Schuchlenz — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 08:00:00 +0000

Using HAML and SASS have streamlined my template and XHTML building in a way I couldn’t imagine. I’ve tried some markup/markdown like textile but HAML is so well integrated into Ruby on Rails, it’s plain amazing. Come on, take a look, I promise you will like that one

But what is HAML?
HAML (HTML Abstract Markup Language) is a markup language that changes the way you write XHTML. Let me give you a small example:

a test




some headline


link1 link2 link3




some text in a paragraph

This is standard XHTML code (OK quick and dirty). With HAML, you can shorten that to

!!! %html %head %title a test %style{:type => "text/css", :href => "style.css"}/ %body #header %h1 some headline #menu link1 link2 link3 #content %p some text in a paragraph

As you can see, there are no ending tags anymore, all the structuring is done via python-style indenting. This not only gives you a cleaner code but – once you are used to it – provides amazing speed and structure, especially when used in conjunction with Ruby code. The trick is you can add Ruby code directly into the {} and () of the XHTML tags. One more example which makes things a bit more clear (I hope):

<% for m in getMenuItems('mainMenu') %> <% if m.is_active == false or m.is_active == "" %> <% next %> <% end %> <%= link_to m.name.to_s, '/somecontroller/' + m.id.to_s %> <% end %>

With HAML, it looks like:

- for m in getMenuItems('mainMenu') - if m.is_active == false or m.is_active == "" - next = link_to m.name.to_s, '/somecontroller/' + m.id.to_s

As this is just a very basic loop with only one condition and no surrounding XHTML stuff I can only show you how HAML makes the code readable and shortens it (since you don’t need those pesky <% end %> statements anymore, once you utilize it in your layouts and views you will see how powerful it is.

OK, how can I get it to run with my Rails app?
Just install the gem via

sudo gem install haml

and add

config.gem 'haml'

to your config/environment.rb. Then install and unpack the gem with

rake gems:install rake gems:unpack

and you’re set. Now you need to rename the desired views from .html.erb to .html.haml (e.g. app/views/layouts/application.html.haml) and start changing the code from ERBish style to HAML. Try it! Take a view file, rename it and start changing it to HAML and you will see how cool it is once you have worked with it.

Be sure to check out the documentation @ http://haml-lang.com/ it is very useful and the tutorials on the official site are too!

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How to process multiple checkboxes with jQuery

Stefan Schuchlenz — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:32:07 +0000

The functionality isn’t new: you have a list of stuff and want checkboxes before the elements so you can mass-process them. In my case, I wanted to set a number of list elements to a certain state (which in this case means a status flag in the database) so the need arose to fetch all selected elements (where the checkbox is checked), stuff them into an AJAX function and deselect the items afterwards.

For this example, my list looks like:

checkbox" value="1" name="check[]" /> 1 checkbox" value="2" name="check[]" /> 2 checkbox" value="3" name="check[]" /> 3 checkbox" value="4" name="check[]" /> 4

Now I want to get alle checked checkboxes with jQuery and process them with AJAX. For this task, I employ jQuery’s each() functionality:

$('button').click(function(){ $(':checkbox:checked').each(function(){ $.post('process.php', { checkbox: $(this).attr('value') }); }); });

Now what does that do?

$(':checkbox:checked').each(function(){

tells jQuery to get all checked checkboxes and via each() do something (function()…)

$.post('process.php', { checkbox: $(this).attr('value') });

For each value that we get, we want to send an AJAX call to process.php and pass the current value as parameter “checkbox”, which we can pick up with PHP. If you like, you can also add a callback function to the AJAX call (e.g. an alert which says “Thanks I’ve used your data” or something alike).

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Analytics Desktop Reporting with Polaris

Stefan Schuchlenz — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:59:22 +0000

Yesterday I’ve found a nice Adobe AIR application named “Polaris” (find it here) which provides a desktop interface to the most important Google Analytics reports. It comes as a free version which limits you to one Analytics account but you can also go premium and pay for it to have multiple Analytics accounts displayed at once.

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Mailer HOWTO for Rails

Stefan Schuchlenz — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:10:01 +0000

Since sending mails via Rails is – at first sight – a bit tricky, I want to provide you with a quick heads up on how to do that.

Fortunately Rails provides us with a mailer generator to set up the basics:

ruby script/generate mailer MyMailer

You can of course call it as you like it to fit your application. But for this HOWTO let’s stick to MyMailer. As you have noticed, Rails created some files for us:

exists app/models/ create app/views/my_mailer exists test/unit/ create test/fixtures/my_mailer create app/models/my_mailer.rb create test/unit/my_mailer_test.rb

At first, we need to edit app/models/my_mailer.rb and add the following code:

def mail(recipient, subject, bodyText) from "no-reply@mydomain.com" recipients recipient subject subject body :bodyText => bodyText end

Notice: make sure you don’t use @from or @body – you maybe won’t get any error but it simply won’t work!
This is the function that will be called when we want to send a mail. You can also use default values (like for the from address) for subject and body if you like. But we want to provide our application with a form to enter subject and body and to select some recipients (so we have a mass mailer, basically). Let’s edit the mail template – this is the body of our mail message. It resides in app/views/my_mailer and we call it mail.html.erb (we have to create that). Then we put in:

<%= @bodyText %>

At the moment, the body text is sufficient, but you can also add a salutation, footer line or whatever you want to be sent alongside the stuff the user puts in the body field in the mail sending form. Here is the code you have to put in the controller which is supposed to send the mails (I used admin):

def sendEmail params[:recipients].each do |r| MyMailer::deliver_mail(r, params[:subject], params[:body]) end

The each-loop allows for stuffing multiple recipients into our mail sending function. But we need a form to select these users and provide a subject and body field. So you have to create a view (e.g. admin/sendMyMail.html.erb) and put in something like that:

<% form_tag '/admin/sendEmail' do %> Subject: Recipients: <select name="recipients[]" multiple> <% Recipient.find(:all).each do |r| %> <% end %> select> Message: send 'em" /> <% end %>

I used a model Recipient here, you can of course use any model you want, extract the (rather ugly) database querying and put it in a helper etc.

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Subscribe2: too much MIME prevents mails being sent…

Stefan Schuchlenz — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:46:03 +0000

Today I added the subscribe2 plugin to this blog, which in fact is very nice (hey you – are you subscribed yet?) to notify users of new posts. But when I took the first dry run trying to subscribe and confirm my account, no mail has been sent. Well, in fact the logfiles of my mailserver proved me wrong: the mail was rejected because of a BAD HEADER error since the MIME version was noted twice and therefore my mailserver decided to dump it.

Due to the fact that that many sysadmins have hardened their security because of spam and virus waves, it is a good idea to check on the error, which in fact resides in wp-content/plugins/subscribe2/subscribe2.php. Just comment out the line

$headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0\n";

and you’re safe.

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Changing selected option in a SELECT

Stefan Schuchlenz — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:35:31 +0000

In Symfony, nothing is as easy as it might seem. So I ran into the problem to change which element of an autogenerated SELECT is selected. jQuery came in handy to accomplish that.

In this case, my SELECT looks like:

Now, I want to have my option no# 2 selected instead of 1:

jQuery("select#mySelect option[selected]").removeAttr("selected"); jQuery("select#mySelect option[value=2]").attr("selected", "selected");

And here we go. Courtesy to Will Strohl (http://www.willstrohl.com) for this tip!

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SVN: A quick HOWTO

Stefan Schuchlenz — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:20:45 +0000

If you do a lot of coding, you will experience the need for versioning your code. I have used CVS before switching to SVN and I can only recommend SVN to you – once you get the hang of it, you will love it. I even use SVN for keeping track of complex HTML templates.

When using SVN for the first time, I followed a tutorial on the net but it was quite misleading and thus I had quite some trouble with checking in and out.

Let’s say we have an application that resides under /var/www/myApp/ and we have a SVN repository over at www.mydomain.com/svn/myAPP (you can create that via svnadmin create myAPP in the svn/ directory).

OK, at first, we have to check out the empty repo to a directory (I use /home/joe/myAPP here):

svn co http://www.mydomain.com/svn/myAPP /home/joe/myAPP

Then, we jump into our temporary repo and create the necessary directories:

cd /home/joe/myAPP mkdir tags branches

Done? Good. Let’s copy our application to the trunk/ directory:

cp /var/www/myAPP trunk -a

Now we can add our 3 folders to the SVN repository (in fact, we only mark them for addition, they are added once we commit our changes by checking in):

svn add trunk branches tags

trunk, branches and tags directories are now registered as part of our SVN repo. But hey! Let’s assume we have two folders (private and logs) which we don’t want to be updated when checking in changes to our repository. We can now set ignore rules to avoid them being checked in:

svn propedit svn:ignore .

An editor will open – this can be VIM, nano or whatever you have set as your shells default editor. Enter the following lines and save+close:

trunk/private trunk/logs

You can also set single files or wildcard specs to be ignored:

trunk/log/*.log trunk/private/* trunk/private/myDocument.txt

Once you’re done, let’s check in our changes to the repo:

svn ci

Now you can enter a message (for the first time I use “initial commit”), save+close and you will notice that SVN works on your changes and gives back a revision number. This is your current version.

Once you’re done, I’d suggest making an update, removing our repo checkout and checking out only trunk/ since you won’t need tags and branches when working locally:

svn up cd .. rm -rf myAPP svn co http://www.mydomain.com/svn/myAPP/trunk myAPP

Now you’re set!

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[schuchlenz.com] » Tech Stuff

GimpShop & Photoshop Shortcut File

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