Tutorial

Just finished debugging a problem where I had text boxes whose performance was terrible. There was a noticeable lag between input and display and it was not usable.

After looking around it turned out the CSS3 box-shadow I had on the parent div which contained these text boxes was causing the performance hit. I assume that each time you type a letter, the browser has to re-render the box-shadow. I was using a box shadow of type inset for an inner gradient look so your results may differ with different box shadow types.

For the past few days I have been trying to debug a weird IE7 issue with regards to transparent PNGs. Everything on the internet was telling me that what was happing shouldn't happen so this was a pretty frustrating experience. I'm a mac user and use IETester for making sure websites work in IE. It's a solid app and hasn't failed me in the past.

This is just a quick post on vertically aligning a horizontal menu with CSS. There are many posts out there on how to do this, but on a current project, I found that none of the tutorials I found worked. I managed to stumble upon a way that worked. I know for many this will be common sense....this post is for everybody else.

Having a PS3 hooked up to an HDTV is great and all but if all your media is on your server you need a way to get the content to where it needs to be. This is where MediaTomb comes into play.

MediaTomb is an open source (GPL) UPnP MediaServer with a nice web user interface, it allows you to stream your digital media through your home network and listen to/watch it on a variety of UPnP compatible devices.

Your PS3 is a UPnP compatible device so MediaTomb is perfect for the job.

Setting up a Samba file share is the easiest method for connecting a media server to a variety of computers of differing operating systems. It also provides easy access to the server for adding and removing files; especially for those not familiar with the command line environment.

This tutorial assumes that you have basic knowledge of the command line environment and have a Ubuntu server already running with SSH installed.

Over the next few days I will be posting a series of tutorials on setting up a kick ass media server that is cheap, powerful, tiny and dead silent. For about $100 USD and an external hard drive you can set up a media server that streams to all the computers and gaming consoles in your house providing you with media wherever you are.