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Removing index.html with mod_rewrite in .htaccess

It's quite easy to remove index.html from a URL with mod_rewrite. Let's say we want to redirect www.dense13.com/index.html to www.dense13.com:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ / [R=301,L]

Here's a brief explanation, if you're not familiar with .htaccess syntax: Read the full text...

Let's talk about Empathy

So, what do we know about Empathy? How does it relate to our lives? How does it connect with other areas like health, friendship, science, love?

Here's a few links to get us all started:

I'm sure there's heaps more (and more interesting) info on the web. Let's share our opinions, questions and curiosity, and see where this leads, shall we? Welcome to the Empathy discussion!

Thunderbird drag-and-drop problem in Ubuntu

For a while I couldn't drag emails to other folders in Thunderbird, which was very frustrating and made organizing my email very slow. I had to right-click on the message and use the 'Move to' option. Which is especially annoying if you organize your email in a nested folder structure.

It turns out the problem was AllTray, an Ubuntu application that lets you minimize any application to the system tray. So until I find a compatible solution, good-bye to Thunderbird in the system tray.

Converting a string to slug with JavaScript

Recently I've been working on implementing slugs in my CMS to be able to generate nicer URLs. In order to do so I've created a little JavaScript function that converts a string to a slug. I'll first give you the code and then explain it a bit. [update: 2.07.10 Fixed IE issue][update: 18.09.10 Minor improvements] Read the full text...

How to access AWStats from outside cPanel

Sometimes it's interesting to be able to access awstats from outside cPanel, for example if you're hosting a client's website and you want them to be able to check awstats, but without giving them access to cPanel. You'd think that this would be an option provided by cPanel itself, but as far as I know it's not.

I've been doing some research and although various pages offer methods to achieve this, none of them fully worked for me (which tends to be the case when you don't really know what you're doing). Finally I've managed to get it working by mixing bits and pieces from different sources, so I've decided to post my solution here, in case it helps anyone else. Read the full text...

mod_rewrite changes url to lower-case in Windows

Using mod_rewrite to ensure canonical URL's in my CMS, I run across a strange behavior (bug?) of mod_rewrite. It seems that in Windows and under certain circumstances, it changes the case of the URL to lowercase. While this normally won't be a problem (Windows URL's are case insensitive) it can have undesirable effects if you need process the URL with PHP, for example. Read the full text...

Reboot Whole-Play

In the last months the development of Whole-Play has slowed down a lot. Partly because of the lack of time, but mostly because the code has been getting messier and I've been feeling more and more stuck as I tried to fix bugs and implement new behavior. So as I knew I would have to do, it's now time to stop, rethink and restructure Whole-Play.

A friend recommended a book that should help a lot with some of the issues I've been dealing with: "Interactive Music Systems", by Robert Rowe. I think it's out of print, I got it second hand from Amazon. It's really interesting, and it does address many of the problems I've faced (so far) with Whole-Play. Perfect timing then: this book will definitely help with the redesig of Whole-Play, and hopefully will allow me to move faster through the technical issues, and get sooner to the creative phase of Whole-Play. Thanks Lorien for all the help and advice!

Internet Explorer and innerHTML in PRE elements

While I was working on modifying SHJS (a JavaScript syntax highlighter), I came across a very frustrating (and initially extremely puzzling) IE bug. Well, it might not be a bug, but it's a very strange and illogical behaviour. In short: IE performs text normalization when setting innerHTML. Sebastian Redl explains it in The Internet Explorer innerHTML Quirk. Read the full text...

Whole-Play update

Still working on Milestone 2. The more I work on Whole-Play, the more I see the need to 'redesign': stop and re-plan the whole thing, and improve the code a lot. Because it keeps growing and growing, and in a rather disorganized fashion, which in turn causes lots of bugs to pop up all over the place.

But sometimes I'm Mr.Stubborn: I have to finish this milestone, and I will! Today I've continued to work on the Harmonizer - the name sounds cool! :) Now W-P can harmonize melodies using different harmonies (e.g. diatonic, pentatonic, whole-tone...). At this stage the harmonizations are rather simple, but I believe they establish a good basis for more sophisticated ones in the future.

Anyway, I'm definitely realizing that either I find much more time to work on W-P or I relax a lot about my expectations to get it ready soon. Or both!

Pure CSS rounded corners for good browsers

After exploring the possibility to add multiple background images to an element, I realized it was possible to use that technique to create boxes with rounded corners in a very clean, CSS-only way. In particular:

  • No need to add any extra markup.
  • No need to know the dimensions of the element. In fact the element can be resized freely, which makes it perfect for fluid layouts.
  • Pure CSS solution.

The catch is: this technique relies on the use of generated content, so it doesn't work in IE6 or IE7. Which makes it pretty much useless for real projects, unless for some reason you can ignore IE. Read the full text...

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