Fighting Rabbits » General

Better Fonts in Safari for Windows

Richard Cooper — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:21:12 +0000

I have been experimenting with the fonts available from typekit for web design, and was really disapointed with their rendering on Windows.

Safari Font Rendering

Firefox Font Rendering

After a bit of digging in the settings of my Typekit browser of choice (Currently Safari 4 as my day-to-day browser Chrome 4 is not supported by the Typekit admin yet!) I found the following font settings within Safari.

Safari Font Settings

There are 5 possible settings for font smoothing, and I recommend you try them all for yourself as the results depend on your screen (and eyes!)

Standard Smoothing

Light Smoothing

Medium Smoothing

That’s Better!…

Now why can’t Chrome and Firefox implement something like this?

WebFaction Easy-Install useage.

Richard Cooper — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 11:37:40 +0000

I’m posting this here so that I can remember it :)

If you need a Python library to be available to *all* of your Python apps, then install it in the $HOME/lib/python2.5 directory. A shorter version of the command is:
Code:

1	easy_install-2.5 -s $HOME/bin -d $HOME/lib/python2.5 the_module_name

If you need a Python library to be available to *one* of your Python apps, then install it in the $HOME/webapps//lib/python2.5 directory for that app. You must preface the easy_install command with the PYTHONPATH variable, like so:
Code:

1	PYTHONPATH=$HOME/webapps/<appname>/lib/python2.5 easy_install-2.5 -s $HOME/webapps/<appname>/bin -d $HOME/webapps/<appname>/lib/python2.5 the_module_name

StoutLabs MooTools Slider

Richard Cooper — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 10:51:59 +0000

Daniel over at StoutLabs has produced a really nice MooTools based image slider, with code that is really easy to understand even for a MooTools beginner like me.

We needed to use something similar for a new project at FrozenSkys, which required a few tweaks (like adding fading) to the slider class, and Daniel has been kind enough to include these back into his project.

You can find the code and a demo over at his site.

PuTTY in my Hands.

Richard Cooper — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 20:41:01 +0000

Just when I am ready to dump my Nokia N95 along comes a killer app that I can’t live without and suddenly makes the Nokia indispensable (at least until I get an iPhone) – PuTTY for Symbian S60! You can get it here if you want it. Hint – if you don’t know what PuTTY is then you don’t need it :)

Fully Carsonified

Richard Cooper — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 20:36:33 +0000

I know it’s a little late but I thought I would post a picture of the goodies that Carsonified gave away to attendees at the FOWA Expo 2008 in London. The care and attention that this company puts into their swag bag puts most others to shame, and as this is carried into the rest of their work they put on some of the best events ever. As you can see from the photo, a journal, a bag of truly wonderful retro sweets, and a hand written card (I feel sorry for the gang that had to write all those hundreds of messages!) were all contained in a beautiful hemp bag with very subtle Carsonified branding.

The FOWA London 2008 Goodies

The only thing that I think could improve this bag was if instead of all the paper handouts at the event they did something similar to the Gnome event (GUADEC) and put all the promotional material from sponsors onto a USB thumb drive, thus sparing the environment a little more, and giving the attendees another little something more to show off when they got back home.

The best thing about the whole of FOWA for me was the fact that from the moment we received our bags, and proceeded into the expo, we were made to feel part of a community rather than the feeling of having “paid to be pitched to” that I get from many events here in the UK.

Carphone Warehouse contract hassles (again!)

Richard Cooper — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 22:28:48 +0000

Have you ever tried to cancel a phone contract with the Carphone Warehouse? We have and let me tell you it’s not easy. They offer you a “Free year” that ends up being very costly indeed! I have a feeling that this may be an onging fight and I will post more as @lollylu and myself get more information, and once I have cooled down from the phone call to their customer “service” centre. I will tell you this right now however – If you have any choice at all do NOT go anywhere near a contract of any sort from the Carphone Warehouse or you will regret it…

Thanks @lollylu

Richard Cooper — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 23:17:37 +0000

I’d just like to thank @lollylu for taking time out from designing her new wordpress blog over at lollylulive.com to pimp the header image for fightingrabbits.

Thanks Honey… :-)

Web Hosting

Richard Cooper — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 21:09:34 +0000

We recently spent some time trying to decide on a new web host, we had been using Fasthosts recently for our .NET hosting, but now we needed a Linux based host who supported Django. After a long search we finally settled on WebFaction and I have to say it’s some of the best hosting we have ever used. These guy’s really know their stuff and so far every question I have had has been answered in the FAQ or in the Forums without having to log a support ticket, you also get SSH, SFTP, and one click installs for things like wordpress, Django, Rails, etc.

In short what I’m really trying to say is that “WebFaction Rock!” and if you are in the market for hosting you should try these guys out.

And yes this blog is hosted on WebFaction and paid for by Frozenskys Software