I went to Florida for my Christ­mas hol­i­day. In order to not stress out the cat too much, the cat stayed home rather than go to a ken­nel. No pro­fes­sional pet sit­ter was avail­able where I live. So I opted to cre­ate a home sur­veil­lance sys­tem from hard­ware I had lying around and free software.

Read the rest of this entry »

I launched my new port­fo­lio to show­case some of the work I have accom­plished over the past year. I tech­ni­cally launched it at the begin­ning of the week, but didn’t add the last item until today. I put it on a sep­a­rate domain so that I can brand myself and have a site focused on my work, plus any vis­i­tors would not be dis­tracted by my blog posts.

It’s built using Word­Press, but you wouldn’t know it by look­ing at it. This way I can add and remove sam­ples eas­ily. I opted to go with a (mostly) single-page site. There’s a sec­ond page for a con­tact form. jQuery and var­i­ous plu­g­ins han­dle the dynamic fea­tures. I def­i­nitely pre­fer this over what I had before.

Feel free to check it out by click­ing the Port­fo­lio link above.

Do you like typog­ra­phy? Are you tired of ragged right text? Do you have a Word­Press blog? Go here now! wp-Typography is the merger of wp-Typogrify and, more impor­tantly, wp-Hyphenate. I do LaTeX type­set­ting, and as a result, I’ve acquired an appre­ci­a­tion for prop­erly for­mat­ted text. If you ever tried using the CSS prop­erty text-align, you inevitably are dis­ap­pointed with the results because it resem­bles noth­ing like what LaTeX can pro­duce. You often have to make your text eye-jarringly wide to make it use­able, and that doesn’t always work. This is because the browser lacks built-in sup­port for hyphen­ation. This plu­gin makes up for this browser defi­ciency by insert­ing hyphen­ation hints, known as soft-hyphens, which the browser does under­stand. The algo­rithm is based on the one used in TeX to boot! Brilliant!

This post is a bit over­due con­sid­er­ing the project for which I did this was com­pleted months ago. I finally got around to doc­u­ment­ing it. Magento’s prod­uct list view lets cus­tomers add prod­ucts to the shop­ping cart one at a time. The client wanted cus­tomers to be able to add mul­ti­ple prod­ucts to the shop­ping cart simul­ta­ne­ously. Given the time con­straints for the projects, I cre­ated an ad hoc AJAX method to accom­plish this fea­ture request.

Read the rest of this entry »