MirroredWhite

From 1 project comes 2 more

andrew@mirroredwhite.com (Andrew Fricke) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:55:00 +0000

So, one of the things that’s been driving me nuts for a while is trying to work on a project’s color palette with the various existing color sharing apps around. I know I have mostly my self to blame as I’m trying to use a tool for something it wasn’t designed to be used for, but despite my searching, I’ve been unable to find something better. So I decided to make something.

Palette

My something was Palette.

Palette is basically just me giving myself a ton of room to play around with colors, surrounded by a handful of features to make the common tasks of working with a project’s color palette less of a chore.

The biggest of those 2 features being the button in the top right of every color to quickly copy it’s hex value to clipboard and, close and refresh protection. I don’t know how many times I’ve accidentally refreshed or closed the wrong tab and lost all of my colors. Palette stores all of the palette’s data in a cookie and automatically restores the palette to it’s last state.

For a more thorough run down of Palette’s features, you can check out the project page or just play around with it yourself.

Two more

While working on Palette I ended up creating two more projects.

jQuery Palette

The first of which being jQuery Palette, a color picker plugin for jQuery v1.7+. Just as with about everything else I make, this plugin got made because I couldn’t find any others that suited my needs. Those needs namely being, firing callbacks in a sane manner, remembering the hue and saturation regardless of value (brightness), and looking nice.

parse-color.js

The second of which being parse-color.js, a simple utility JavaScript function for parsing colors in a variety of formats. The function simply accepts a variety of color representations and spits back out an object with the color’s hex, HSL, HSV, luma, and RGB values.

Open source

All 3 are open source, BSD licensed, and can be found on GitHub.

I almost upped my posts per year to 3 and a mynty fresh start to 2012

andrew@mirroredwhite.com (Andrew Fricke) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 20:26:00 +0000

My new year’s resolution: make more than 2 posts this year :s On another note, mynt is now up on pypi and development on it has been going well. Lastly, at some point this month I’m going to try and get a couple of top <a number as high as 10> of 2011 lists together.

My static blog generator

So mynt has progressed to a point where I think someone other than me could get some use out of it, so it now has some documentation and is up on pypi. The source is also up on GitHub. Feel free to fork it and do with it as you please.

I’d also like to create a solid community around it, so if that interests you, or you just have some questions you can hop in our IRC channel #mynt on irc.freenode.net.

My takeaways from 2011

With 2011 now over, I’d like to compile some top <a number as high as 10> of 2011 lists. There will be at least one for music and one for video games. Not sure if there will be another for anything else. There might also be a few random best ofs. You can look for that hopefully sometime this month.

I spend too much time thinking about post titles

andrew@mirroredwhite.com (Andrew Fricke) — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 00:21:00 +0000

And not enough time writing posts. I still spend plenty of time messing around with code though and as such have been working on a couple of projects. One of which being the side project I mentioned in my previous post and the other being related to me finally getting around to overhauling this site.

Getting my feet wet in Python

I’ve been on Linux for a while now and one thing I had wanted since was a PF or DA for Linux customization. It was always a hassle trying to keep up with and search through dozens of threads and numerous repos and so the goal was to create a place that facilitated the sharing and discovery of Linux config files.

Out of that came DotShare and my first real project in Python. Using pip, virtualenv, and coding DotShare on Flask, were all much more enjoyable experiences than the ones I had with their Ruby counterparts, gems, RVM, and Rails. I’d have to say I’m quite the fan and look forward to playing around with Python some more in the future.

Another static site generator you say

While managing the temporary site I had up on GitHub pages, I ran into a lot of annoyances with jekyll (the generator that powers GitHub pages), most of which being with Liquid (the template engine jekyll uses).

My problem with most template engines is how polarizing they are about the concepts supporting their existence. They make no distinction between business and presentation logic and are either logic-less or see the situation as the more logic the better.

With Liquid, I was constantly running into situations where it just wouldn’t do what I needed. This was often partially due to the way jekyll was handing me data. Such things as wanting a list of tags ordered by usage or posts being organized by year and month should not be monumental tasks to accomplish.

For the same reason most wheels get reinvented, that being they don’t do what you want how you want them to, I created mynt.

Until next time

With the site now setup in a manner I’m happier with, I’m hoping to up my rate of 2 posts a year to something a bit more lively. I’m still working on the last few touches on mynt and have some refactoring to do, but that should be done pretty soon and so that’ll be 3 posts for the year at the least!

So this blogging thing

andrew@mirroredwhite.com (Andrew Fricke) — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 00:14:00 +0000

Been awhile and subsequently a bunch of stuff has happened. I got a bunch of work done on Erebus, pumped out a bunch of LiteStep and TextMate themes, and messed around some more on Arch. Aside from that, I’m getting psyched about an upcoming game release that’s part of a franchise I’m crazy nostalgic about and music wise I’ve found a few gems to listen to in an otherwise slow going year.

MirroredWhite and Erebus

I’ve gotten a ton of awesome work done on Erebus! Looking back on all the changes that the back end of my site has gone through is quite mind blowing. If I could somehow compile a time-lapse of all the years this site’s code has seen it’d be crazy. I promise it will see the light of day soon. No, really! I do!

Desk custo scene, where have you gone

Next on the list, custo stuff. Lately I’ve been pretty jaded and frustrated with where the custo scene has gone. I miss the days of killer stuff showing up every month. Now-a-days it’s dwindled to a thing or two a year if we’re lucky. I think it’s time for me to move on and just stick to playing around with stuff on my own time for myself.

There are a few things that have been finished for a while that I’d like to show off though that I failed to post about here. I finished the LiteStep theme I posted about back in August, Erebus.

I also knocked out another LiteStep theme after that, Monolith.

Lastly, my adventures on Arch with Subtle have been amazing.

Death to the bloated IDE

I feel the need to try and spread the word about Sublime Text again. Sublime Text 2 is the upcoming rewrite of Sublime Text that is cross-platform and currently in alpha. Rather than just being the TextMate clone for Windows, it is now TextMate for everyone, done amazingly. Even in it’s alpha state it’s in use as my full-time editor. Nothing comes even close to competing with it for me. If you despise bloated IDEs and are looking for an editor that gives you functionality without getting in the way, I highly recommend checking it out.

Now, I’d like to quickly showoff the handful of themes I’ve made for Sublime (that also work in TextMate), Monokai Dark, Erebus, and Erebus Light (I really need to get more creative when it comes to naming things…).

What I’m looking forward to playing

On to video games shall we? My Xbox 360 is about to get some serious love soon. Mortal. Kombat. That is all. I am SO stoked for the new MK. It looks absolutely amazing. MK 2 and 3 on the Genesis were the last fighting games I played and enjoyed and I’ve missed the franchise like crazy. I am expecting a crazy adventure of nostalgia and awesome.

What I’ve been listening to

Music wise, not sure if I’ve just not been looking as hard or if things have just been slow. Probably a combination of the two. 2011 has gotten off to a slow start.

The few things that have dropped though have been absolute fire. The most recent being Meyhem Lauren - Self Induced Illness. 41 tracks of absolute insanity. Easily tops of the year so far for me. Out of 41 tracks you’d think there’d be nothing but filler and 1 min tracks, but you’d be DEAD wrong. I’ve had the entire thing on repeat for at least a week now and there’s no sign of it getting old anytime soon.

Other releases I’ve dug so far this year: Reks - R.E.K.S., Saigon - The Greatest Story Never Told (thank god it wasn’t another disappointment a billion years in the making *cough* The Seventh Seal *cough*), and Strong Arm Steady - Arms and Hammers. All saw significant playtime from me and are worth copping.

The wrap up

Think that about does it. Oh wait, how could I forget! If you run into Rails, can you please ask him nicely to die in a fire? Thanks.

Ugh, what a horrible excursion that was.

I might have something to talk about side project wise soon. I’m getting excited about it. Thinking about messing with Python this go around. Planning on avoiding the obvious Django route though and am going to play with Flask instead. Hopefully that will be a more pleasant experience than that nightmare that goes by the name of Rails. *shudders*

Messing around with Irssi and LiteStep

andrew@mirroredwhite.com (Andrew Fricke) — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 00:06:00 +0000

Lately I’ve finally gone further customizing my desktop than I had ever bothered with before. Previously the most I had ever done was find a visual style, a theme for whichever media player I was using at the time, and a wallpaper. However, for the past month or so now, I’ve been messing around with LiteStep (more on this in a later post), which has really given me the freedom I’ve always been looking for when it comes to customizing my desktop.

LiteStep has been completely amazing and has been such a breath of fresh air for me when it comes to messing with my desktop. I have always been pretty annoyed with XP visual styles. They have always felt so limited, not to mention I’ve always found it pretty hard to find styles that I love every part of (I have been using Ashen for the past several years). Finally with LiteStep I can toss together a mock-up and turn it into a working theme with relative ease. (If only I had gotten around to messing with LiteStep years ago!)

So now that I was messing around with LiteStep and trying to figure out it’s inner workings, IRC became a pretty good resource for getting help and some feedback on the theme I was working on. In the past I had never used any other IRC client besides mIRC (which I was never really a fan of). The major drawback of mIRC for me was it’s interface for configuring the client was a complete and utter mess. 90% of the time wanting to change one option would lead to 10 minutes of digging through windows, menu entries, and other areas trying to remember where you could change that one option.

Now feeling how nice it could be having relatively full control over the look of my desktop, off on my journey I went looking for a new IRC client. I actually ended up being quite surprised with how small pool of options was. The three I came to find were mIRC, X-Chat, and Irssi. X-Chat seemed to be just another mIRC so here I was hoping that Irssi was what I was looking for and indeed it was, with one small catch. I was on XP and Irssi was a UNIX IRC client. I had already been using cygwin for my git needs, so I figured it was worth a shot to check if Irssi was available there. It just so happened that it was.

I now have Irssi setup and working wonderfully. I’d also like to quickly mention that the terminal emulator being used in the shot above is mintty, which has made my experience with cygwin a much better one. My experience with Irssi so far has been great! Easily hundreds of times better than those with mIRC. I love it’s simplicity. I love it’s ability to be customized and it’s functionality extended. The only major annoyance that I’ve encountered is how convoluted and annoying the theming system is.

Irssi themes are made up of defined templates which contain the styling information and formats which define the formats for all the events, messages, and such. Where it gets convoluted is how the templates are nested so deeply. When you’re trying to change one bit, you end up running through these enormous chains of templates trying to find the one you want to change. Where it gets annoying is how the formats are only viewable by typing /format. Non obvious names are also common across formats and templates, so a lot of time is spent trying to find the format for what you want to change and then the appropriate template or sub-template.

Overall Irssi has turned out to be a much better IRC client for me even with it’s convoluted and clunky theming system.