My favorite jQuery plu­gin by far has to be the jQuery Cycle Plu­gin. It’s a generic slideshow plu­gin, but it’s ver­sa­tile enough that I’ve used it to build a slider, a port­fo­lio, and just recently, an iPhoto-like image flip­per. This was inspired from the CJ Image Flip­Box. Unfor­tu­nately, the way the plu­gin is designed, you can’t mesh it with Fan­cy­box because the plu­gin cre­ates an anchor and an image which inter­cept the mouseclicks pre­vent­ing the Fan­cy­box from acti­vat­ing. So to get around the prob­lem, I used the Cycle plu­gin to cre­ate my own.

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Flash assets like an FLV­Play­back skin will typ­i­cally be located in your pub­lic folder. How­ever, accord­ing to http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/608/608abffd.html, “in a load­ing sce­nario, the skin SWF for the FLV­Play­back com­po­nent must be rel­a­tive to the load­ing HTML file con­tain­ing the par­ent SWF on the server, not to the loca­tion of the loaded SWF.” This is bad, since when you load a page, the URL will typ­i­cally be /:controller/:action, which means the FLV­Play­back skin URL will be /:controller/myskin.swf even if your par­ent SWF is in /public. You can ver­ify this in Fire­bug on the Net tab. The prob­lem will man­i­fest itself with a loaded Flash movie with no con­trols. You can fix this by cre­at­ing a rewrite rule in your .htac­cess file.

RewriteRule ^.*/myskin.swf$ /pathto/myskin.swf

Any request end­ing in myskin.swf will be redi­rected to /pathto/myskin.swf under the pub­lic folder.

I tried inte­grat­ing XMonad using the “rec­om­mended” way of set­ting up a gdm desk­top pro­file to call a cus­tom xmonad.start script which man­u­ally loads Gnome and then starts XMonad. I didn’t get very far. Here’s what finally worked.

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I read an arti­cle titled, “Mod­ern CSS Typog­ra­phy and Font Styling Exam­ples”, and though mis­takes and omis­sions weren’t major, I felt com­pelled to com­ment on them. My com­ment got so long, I fig­ured a quick blog post would be bet­ter than a long-winded comment.

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