Weevil Genius

Recent juggling of multiple projects has created a need to track what I’ve been doing day by day, as well as keep some notes on what I want to be doing. I have thus revived a system I created long ago to edit a weekly log file in my favorite editor (vim) via a keyboard shortcut. As I’m currently working mostly in OS X, this required some modifications from the Linux version I used in the past. The desired action is relatively simple. I press a hotkey combination and a text editor window opens with the current week’s log file, which has been created on the fly if it didn’t already exist.

This is another weekly summary of the live video class HTML 5 Mobile Web Development. I have already written a summary of week 2. This week we are going to use ajax to request live Twitter updates, use some CSS3 transitions, and explore web fonts.

I am currently attending a live video class HTML 5 Mobile Web Development, and am summarizing the second lesson here in order to digest the material better and help some friends who got a late start. If you want to follow along, go to the class download page linked at the end and download the code.

This week starts our construction of “Tweetstr”, a mobile web twitter client. We create and edit the basic HTML and CSS files to display the home screen while exploring some new HTML 5 and CSS 3 tags as well as some settings specific to Apple devices such as the iPhone.

Working in a cross-platform environment, I sometimes find it necessary to deal with DMG files (Apple disk images). Instead of finding a coworker with a Mac, I have found it easier to equip my linux machine to be able to read, write, and create these images (uncompressed only) natively.

The key is the fact that a DMG image is merely a HFS+ filesystem in a single file (similar to the way a .iso file is a CDROM filesystem in a single file). While I’m not sure how the extra DMG options (such as encryption, compression, or being “internet enabled”) work under OS X, I have verified that it is easy to create simple, uncompressed DMG images from scratch in linux. Here’s what works for me under Ubuntu Dapper & Feisty.