A while back there was a neat little styling script being passed around that tuned the Ubuntu Forums to match the new official designs a little more closely. While its not official and no where near a perfect solution, it does dramatically improve the appearance of the forums overall.
Before
After
To use this, all you have to do is download and install the Stylesheet or UserJS file and configure it in your browser! I’m using the UserJS version, but you may prefer the other. Either way, enjoy!
This is just a little hack I’ve used so I can subscribe to the “Specials” that are periodically released and published on the Steam website.
If you’re interested in letting your Feed client simplify your life by bringing the Steam updates directly to you then I suggest you subscribe to the feed that I’ve setup (via a great free service call Feed For Free).
The Steam News – Specials feed:
The Steam News – Announcements feed:
When I searched for a feed for these Specials I came across one forum post after another asking the same thing. We all know how annoying that can be, so to remedy the situation I decided to post a solution myself. 
As you can see below, these pages don’t have feeds of their own, but the very awesome Feed For Free site will let you pull the updates straight into your feed reader with ease. See my Google Reader pictured below.
Hope everyone had a great Halloween this year! If you missed visiting my blog, then you also missed my Halloween theme!
Thats about as far as my Halloween decorations went (other than dressing up as a pirate) this year, but I saw a lot of great looking jack-o’-lanterns this year and some really great costumes at Moogfest! Had a blast!
Here’s a quick video of this random guy dancing during Massive Attack. 
We got to see MGMT, Dan Deacon, Girl Talk, Thievery Corporation, Massive Attack, Shiongle, Disco Biscuits and a few others. Overall, it was a pretty amazing Halloween weekend! If only they were all that way…
Recently I was looking through the Ubuntu 10.10 banners and really liked the simplistic design of one by Anthony Scarth.
Curious about adding it to my blog (as you should now see in the right column), I fired him an email. Unfortunately he didn’t have a script prepared, but still offered up the images!
Taking a little time, I grabbed the old script for an Ubuntu 10.04 Banner, made a few modifications (and corrections) and got the banner up and ticking in no time!
If you’re interested in using one of these two banners on your site then you’ll be happy to know I’m posting easily linkable scripts to these two right here!
Orange
<script type='text/javascript' src='http://www.kyleabaker.com/fun/ubuntu1010banner/orange.js'></script>
Purple
<script type='text/javascript' src='http://www.kyleabaker.com/fun/ubuntu1010banner/purple.js'></script>
Copy and paste the style that you’d like to use into your blog or web site. If you have any problems just let me know.
Be sure to give Anthony a shout out and thanks if you like his design as well! You can find his email listed on the Ubuntu banners page linked above.
Just for laughs I threw together this quick page that gives you a new movie or show suggestion in a humorous way each time you load the page.
Screenshot of the WTFSIW page in action..
The idea for this type of site is not my own and was inspired by site like What The F*** Should I Make For Dinner, F***ing Movie Reviews, The F***ing Weather and others.
The page works off of three very short files and the code is minimal, so if anyone’s wanting to make something similar just let me know if you’re curious about my implementation of this.
Hopefully you find this both useful as well as funny! Comments, retweets and other shares are always appreciated!
Today, The Chromium Blog has officially released their ECMAScript 3 conformance test suite in a form that is more friendly to test in your browser. The test contains over 5,000 tests (currently 5,246) and continues to grow!
The Chromium Blog has also posted some initial results among the top web browsers for Windows (emphasis is mine).
In this example, when running Sputnik on a Windows machine, we saw the following results: Opera 10.50: 78 failures, Safari 4: 159 failures, Chrome 4: 218 failures, Firefox 3.6: 259 failures and Internet Explorer 8: 463 failures.
An experimental plot to illustrate how the latest stable browsers compare.
Putting that into terms of 100% conformance rates: Opera 10.50: 98.5% successful, Safari 4: 97.0% successful, Chrome 4: 95.9% successful, Firefox 3.6: 95.1% successful and Internet Explorer 8: 91.2% successful.
Running the test myself in the latest Opera 10.50 snapshot for Linux (Build 6242) I’m seeing a solid 77, proof that Opera 10.50 is progressing still!
As explained in their post, the goal of this test is not related to Javascript performance in terms of speed, but in terms of conformance to the spec. Ideally all browsers would be in the center of the bullseye, meaning they all conform and behave (nearly) identically.
The Sputnik tests have been released as an open source project, so if you’re interested in providing conformance test cases to improve the future web..now is a perfect chance to get involved.
To run the test yourself or learn more about it, visit: http://sputnik.googlelabs.com/
If you’ve for whatever reason noticed that your WordPress website is generating errors similar to the following then I may have a solution for you.
Warning: getimagesize(/home/.some-dir/example.com/folder/httpd.www/wp-content/uploads/some-image.jpg) [function.getimagesize]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/.some-dir/example.com/folder/httpd.www/wp-content/blah/blah/blah.php on line 123
I noticed that some pages that generated image information were printing errors out on my pages with private server file structures included. Generally you don’t want to see this printed out to the public.
I’m not guaranteeing a fix for you, but rather what worked for me.
If you are getting an error link the one that I’ve listed above, more specifically the “failed to open stream: No such file or directory,” then you may be about to fix it in only a few minor steps.
Things you will need:
Procedure
Single quotes must be the normal ascii quotes. Chances are, if you copy and paste from my blog, they will be the wrong type so double check that as it could give you problems.
<?php define('ABSPATH', dirname(__FILE__).'/'); echo ABSPATH; ?>/home/.some-dir/example.com/folder/httpd.www//home/example.com/folder/httpd.www/update TABLE_NAME set FIELD_NAME = replace(FIELD_NAME, ‘find this string’, ‘replace found string with this string’); If you had any problems with the above mentioned procedure, I would suggest restoring your database using your backup copy and either trying again, paying someone to do it for you or just forgetting about it.
If it works then great! If not then sorry you’ve wasted your time. It worked for me, so maybe it will work for you as well.
I’ve thrown together a quick script for Opera that you can use if you’d like to see rounded corners (aka border-radius). It seems that Twitter currently sends Opera a style sheet with empty settings for rounded corners…
…so, all I did was write a script that will insert a link to a style sheet that’s stored here at kyleabaker.com which overwrites these empty styles with the correct ones.
If you’ve never used scripts before then you should first learn how to setup UserJS. After you’ve setup Userjs, you may need to enable UserJS for secure pages (https) in Opera’s internal configuration page….”opera:config#UserPrefs|UserJavaScriptonHTTPS“. Just check/enable that option. Make sure to click save!
Lastly, save the “Twitter-Rounded” script to your UserJS folder that you setup in the steps above.
Now you have a more pleasant looking Twitter page in Opera 10.5.
I’ve just pushed a few updates to my WP-UserAgent and WP-TwitterBadge plugins. If you’re already using them then you should be able to update via your WordPress Admin area shortly.
If you’re not using them yet, feel free to browse around and check into them!
After taking some time to track down a bug that seems to only affect Internet Explorer 6 (why on earth did I bother?) I’ve finally released an update that fixes the error.
After getting several comments about users experiencing errors with this plugin while using IE6 I finally gave in and patched the little bug. Why are they still using IE6?
…well, it works fine now…as far as I know. I’ve had a few people test it with no errors as well as myself, so hopefully if you couldn’t use it before it will work fine now.
To find out more about this WordPress plugin, go to it’s main page. You will find all released versions there (past and present) as well as a link to the official WordPress Plugin page. Feel free to leave feedback!