I thought I would share how I got Laravel 4 up and running on Dreamhost's shared hosting enviroment.

I'm currently working on a holiday inspired website for a client that has to support old versions of Internet Explorer.  The site's background has several div tags that use a custom font to represent snowflakes.  When you click a snowflake a box appears with a gift inside.  I got this to work everywhere except Chrome, which would occasionally have a several pixel wide gap in the box's background image.  I was using CSS3 to transform the box's size and position and good old CSS1 top & left to position the snowflakes.  That got me thinking.  Perhaps Chrome was using hardware acceleration for the CSS3 transform and just the regular CPU for the snowflakes.  And if there were two different rendering modes then maybe they had issues compositing their images.  I had seen this plenty of times with Flash and HTML.  You would have to set wmode transparent to get Flash rendered in the same z-index as HMTL.  To test my theory I wrote a little code to remove any webkit-transform after I was done scaling and repositioning it.  Much to my surprise it worked.

Its bugs like these that drive developers insane.  The funny thing is if I didn't have to support IE 7 & 8, I would of been using a different technique for moving my snowflakes and probably never would of run into this issue.  Lesson learned and time to add another random fact to the back of my brain.

CVS, SVN, Git, or whatever you use for source control are tremendiously useful for any serious developer. But the reason why I like Git is because of the awesome site GitHub. I've begun slowly adding some of my open source projects onto GitHub and thought it would be great to have a link from my site to my public GitHub repositories.  In order to do that I wrote an ExpressionEngine plugin that ties into the GitHub API to return the list of repos from any user.  Its pretty solid now so give it a whirl.

Uh oh! I just realized I haven't posted anything this year.

You may of noticed a nice coat of paint on this blog.  I've been working on a new look for a while and finally got impatient and just launched it without finishing it.  So if you see any weirdness its cause I'm still working on it.  I haven't implemented a responsive layout yet because I'm researching a bunch of frameworks and techniques.  I feel you need to do it by hand first then you can easily see the strengths and weakness of frameworks.

A few weeks ago I attended SXSW.  Maybe its because I've been before there before, but this year didn't feel as cool as last year.  I attended more technical sessions, but that's mainly because I did see as many inspirational sessions.  The parties were crowded and if you weren't a VIP then you pretty much had to wait to get in.  I'm not sure I would go again.  Maybe I just need to find a super geeky conference instead.

Once again I travelled without a laptop and only my iPad.  Its just an awesome device for attending conferences and travelling with.  Sure if I needed to do a lot of work there it would of been a pain, but that's not why you go to conferences.  Besides I found a decent code editor in Textastic, it's far from free, but it has a DropBox and FTP support.

I almost switched to Chrome earlier in the year, but I still get hung up on its quirks.  Not to say Firefox doesn't have its fair share, but I'm used to them.  If anyone knows how to give Developer Tools a shortcut or a toolbar icon and how to map command-enter to add www. and .com to url instead of control-enter please let me know.  I'm willing to give it another try, although I still think Firefox has a better bookmark and history setup.

Other than that I've been slowly experimenting with new HTML5 technologies.  Hopefully some of them will make it up on this blog soon.