WebKit 3D CSS Transforms

by Ryan Parman • July 14, 2009 • Apple, Browsers, Software • No comments

I came across the following demos of the new 3D CSS Transform functionality in the latest WebKit builds. These will be making their way into Safari, Google Chrome, iPhone, and Android sometime soon. Snow Stacks (Can’t see the video? Watch it directly.) Image Fly (Can’t see the video? Watch it directly.)

Installing PHP 5.3 with mysqlnd on Mac OS X with MacPorts

by Ryan Parman • July 11, 2009 • Code, Software, Tutorials • 10 comments

Historically, I’ve always preferred to use Apple’s built-in Apache 2.2 and PHP 5.x that comes with Leopard. However, after trying to compile PHP 5.3 from scratch and connect it with Apache, I decided to just use the MacPorts installer instead. That did mean giving up control of a finely-tuned Apache installation, but in the end, I think I’ve ended up with a better localhost system.

Run Internet Explorer 6 (or IE7, or IE8) images in VirtualBox on Mac OS X

by Ryan Parman • June 30, 2009 • Software, Tutorials • 1 comments

These days I’m looking to save money anywhere I can. How about you? Whereas VMWare Fusion (as awesome as it is) runs around $80 USD per copy, Sun’s VirtualBox is a free, open-source product for virtualization that runs on Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows.

If you’ve not yet read the related post, “Run Internet Explorer 6 (or IE7, or IE8) images in VMWare Fusion on Mac OS X,” you should. This is a follow up on how to take those virtual machines (which we’ve already done a lot of work on), and convert them for use VirtualBox.

Run Internet Explorer 6 (or IE7, or IE8) images in VMware Fusion on Mac OS X

by Ryan Parman • January 7, 2009 • Browsers, Software, Tutorials • 21 comments

By now, most front-end web developers have heard of the Standalone Internet Explorers (Wikipedia article). Although these are incredibly useful, they’ve always been hacky at best.

Because of that, we need to go the long way. We’ll download the “officially sanctioned” VirtualPC images containing a time-limited version of Windows XP SP3 and Internet Explorer 6.0, and then we’ll convert these images to the kind that work with VMware Fusion (which works on Mac OS X). This should only need to be done every 3 or 4 months when the images expire.

Installing FFMPEG and FFMPEG-PHP in Fedora 8 running on Amazon EC2

by Ryan Parman • June 28, 2008 • Code, Software, Tutorials • 4 comments

I’ve spent a bit of time working with Amazon EC2 recently. One of the things I’ve been working on is getting a stable build of FFMPEG and FFMPEG-PHP running on a Fedora 8 image in Amazon EC2. This is essentially going to be a tutorial to get things up and running. Of course, your milage [...]

My thoughts on Twitter

by Ryan Parman • April 9, 2008 • Design, Software, Technology • 1 comments

Twitter has tweaked their design as of this morning, and they added a link titled “Tell us your story,” in which they ask about your thoughts as a Twitter user. Here’s what I had to say. I’m an information junkie with a limited attention span. Twitter has all of the interesting links and thoughts of [...]

Hide a Boot Camp NTFS Volume (Drive) under Tiger or Leopard

by Ryan Parman • November 23, 2007 • Apple, Software • No comments

I was trying to figure out how to hide my Boot Camp NTFS drive icon from my desktop, and after some searching I discovered a relatively simple 4-step process. If your Boot Camp drive is FAT32, you can skip the first 2 steps, and begin with step 3. Install MacFUSE. This is a Google project [...]

Google Toolbar Awesomeness!

by Ryan Parman • June 20, 2006 • Browsers, Software • 1 comments

My wife works for a bank, and she forwarded me a phishing scam for Washington Mutual bank. Besides misspelling the word “customer” as “costomer”, it was pretty convincing for those who don’t know any better. When she sent it to me, I took a look at the page, and this is what Firefox+Google toolbar presented [...]