Ann Arbor Skatepark Public Meeting
Wednesday, April 2
6:30 - 8 pm
Abbott Elementary School
2670 Sequoia Parkway, Ann Arbor

Ann Arbor Parks Advisory Commission Meeting

Tuesday, December 18, 2007, 4:00 PM

The Ann Arbor Skatepark Action Committee will be presenting to the PAC Tuesday, December 18 at 4:00 PM. You can help by simply showing up and being seen. The PAC wants to know how many people are in support of this project before they act.

Please come to the PAC meeting to show your support. If you would like to speak at the meeting as well, please let us know.

The Parks Advisory Commission meets at City Hall, in Council Chambers.
City Hall: 100 N. 5th Ave, Ann Arbor

View Larger Map

Right now the process is in the early planning stages. The city has expressed interest in the project and we need to get as many skaters, parents, and supporters involved in the group as possible. So tell as many people as you can. We need to get the word out.

1. It feels snappier, except…
2. It starts up super slowly. The window draws and then takes around 30 seconds to be responsive on my Dual 2 GHz G5. Could be something with my configuration, but it’s annoying. Kind of makes me want to switch back to Safari 2. This was an issue with my preferences, specifically the IncludeDebugMenu item. With the debug menu, startup is painful; without th preference set, it starts up right away.
3. Input Managers no longer work, so no Inquisitor (Inquisitor works just fine), no Safari Stand (Safari Stand seems to work for the most part—no syntax coloring, though), no Safari Tidy. In fact having those Input Managers prevents Safari from starting up altogether.
4. View Source shows a blank window. This was an issue with SafariSource. Disabled and everything works great, just no syntax coloring.
5. Replaces the dock, so I’ve got the annoying white background back. Hopefully Transparent Dock will be updated for this, but I won’t hold my breath.
6. Inspect Element is nice, but I think that this is only available with the debug menu available and since this is a huge performance hit…
7. Reorderable tabs are great, but there’s no way to move tabs between windows other than moving to a new window.
8. I was disappointed to see it still uses brushed metal.
9. Oh and it’s available for Windows. Hmmm…
10. Oh Yeah Labels work properly now!

There’s the obvious (but somehow unmentioned elsewhere) reference to the Godfather: the guy at the counter goes to the bathroom—to get the gun that’s hidden there.

There’s the conversion with Bobby at the beginning of the 2nd part of season 6 where Tony says something to the extent of, “You probably don’t even hear it,” referring to being shot. With just enough time for the guy to emerge from the bathroom, the screen goes black and the sound goes out. You don’t even hear it. Don’t stop? Hardly.

Is there room for alternate interpretations? I suppose, but I don’t believe it. We saw Tony’s life going on in the last few scenes before the very end. Pauly tans his face with the reflector at Satriale’s; Tony rakes the leaves—you can see he wishes that the ducks would return;

Onion rings, circular, the circle of life…

var doc = app.activeDocument;
if (doc.modified)
   {
   var path = doc.fullName;
   doc.close (SaveOptions.no);
   doc = app.open (path);
   }

It requires a document to be open and active, then checks if it’s modified. If so, it grabs the path, closes without saving and reopens it referenced by the original variable.

That way if you didn’t print a copy of your return from last year like I didn’t and need to reference it like I do, you can.

Swish-e

Swish-e is a spider and search engine written in C, so indexing is really fast . It writes the indexes in flat files, rather than in a database.

Pros

• Fast
• Apparently still in active development. Code has been checked in within the last week.
• Can index formats other than HTML/XML/plain text such as PDF, gzip, etc.
• Can exclude parts of pages from index

Cons

• Perl API—no real PHP support (not the biggest deal, but it’s nice to use as few languages on one website as possible…)
• Indexing couldn’t be completed on the first run against my development site due to, I think, non-ASCII characters
• Converts UTF-8 charcter sets to Latin 1
• Can’t remove parts of index—must completely re-index

PhpDig

A PHP version of ht://Dig that uses MySQL to store the index.

Pros

• Written in PHP so it will play nicely with a php site
• Fairly flexible in terms of controlling what is indexed on a given site—can isolate certain directories, control how many levels down it goes, etc.
• Pretty good reporting on search terms, common words, etc.

Cons

• Indexing is painfully slow and uses tons of CPU & memory
• Last release is from November 2005
• Admin interface is confusing at first and has a fairly steep learning curve

The Search Engine Project

Another PHP/MySQL based search engine and spider

Pros

• Very configurable
• Fast
• Written in PHP

Cons

• Very complicated admin—so many options it takes a lot of effort to figure out what they all do
• Latest version needs code modifications right out of the box for indexing to work
• Getting it to actually spider your site can be tricky and more time consuming.
• Last release was September 2005, no commits for more than 10 months

The problem: when trying to add and commit new empty (filesize is 0 bytes) files, the commit fails with the following error:

Transmitting file data …svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: Can’t copy ‘/Volumes/path/to/.svn/tmp/text-base/filename.ext’ to ‘/Volumes/path/to/filename.ext.svn-base.5.tmp’: Input/output error

The solution: simply add some text to the files, even 1 character. The commit will succeed.

• If you’re planning on generating XML to automate layout in InDesign, first design a discrete unit and then drag it over into the Structure pane and export the XML. This will save you many excruciating moments trying to figure out what InDesign actually wants.

• When using tables in XML, you must use the Table and Cell elements. To have them show up as tables, you also need to namespace them and add the correct attributes, including the number of rows and columns. For example:

  <Table xmlns:aid="http://ns.adobe.com/AdobeInDesign/4.0/" aid:table="table" aid:trows="2" aid:tcols="3">
  <Cell aid:table="cell" aid:theader="" aid:crows="1" aid:ccols="1">Header Text</Cell>
  <Cell aid:table="cell" aid:theader="" aid:crows="1" aid:ccols="1">Header Text</Cell>
  <Cell aid:table="cell" aid:theader="" aid:crows="1" aid:ccols="1">Header Text</Cell>
  <Cell aid:table="cell" aid:crows="1" aid:ccols="1">Cell Text</Cell>
  <Cell aid:table="cell" aid:crows="1" aid:ccols="1">Cell Text</Cell>
  <Cell aid:table="cell" aid:crows="1" aid:ccols="1">Cell Text</Cell>
  <Cell aid:table="cell" aid:crows="1" aid:ccols="1">Cell Text</Cell>
  <Cell aid:table="cell" aid:crows="1" aid:ccols="1">Cell Text</Cell>
  <Cell aid:table="cell" aid:crows="1" aid:ccols="1">Cell Text</Cell>
  </Table>
  

• You can’t directly access a TextFrame’s tables when they’re placed by XML. Instead, you need to use the associated xml element as such: [xmlElement].parentStory.tables.item (0)

• The item “attribute” appears to act like a method rather than an array—you have to use parentheses when using it rather than brackets. item (0) NOT item[0].

• When applying an object style to a TextFrame, you also need to apply the paragraph style associated with the object style to the xml element’s parentStory as such: [xmlElement].parentStory.appliedParagraphStyle = [objectParagraphStyle];

• Scripts seem to run much faster with InDesign hidden, at least when you’re running them from Adobe’s ExtendScript Toolkit

• To use images in XML, you must use <Image> as the tag. Then use the href attribute to specify where your linked image file is coming from. You must use the file protocol, as such: <Image href="file://images/image.tif">. You can use either relative or absolute URLs to specify the location. It seems best to use relative, especially if you’re handing off the file to someone else. You can use either the single tag form: <Image /> or the two tag form: <Image></Image>, but if you have any text between the open and closing tags, the linked image will be replace with the text.

• Update 4/17/07: The solution to my most annoying problem: getting all the textFrame settings to match what you’ve specified in the Object Style, particularly vertical alignment:

  for (var i in [textFrame].textFramePreferences)
     {
     if ([textFrame].appliedObjectStyle.textFramePreferences[i] && i != 'parent')
        {
        [textFrame].textFramePreferences[i] = [textFrame].appliedObjectStyle.textFramePreferences[i];
        }
  }
  

• Update 4/30/07: When a textFrame is placed outside of the page boundaries, it isn’t possible to access it via a page reference as such [document].[page].textframes. Instead, use a spread, as such [document].spreads.lastItem().textframes.
• Update 8/14/07: If the first image in the XML can’t be found, you’ll be prompted to select every image. It’s pretty annoying. If there are missing images later on in your XML, you’ll be prompted to selected them, but it will only occur for missing images.

For instructions on setting up virtual hosts, see mezzoblue’s “Virtual Hosts for Dummies”. One caveat with the article though; see below.

Yesterday, I needed to test such a site in IE running in VirtualPC. (For various reasons, I didn’t want to set it up on a public server to do the testing.) I followed the expected procedure of editing the hosts file on the Virtual PC (located in C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts), using my Mac’s IP address as the destination IP. No go. Everything worked perfectly outside of VirtualPC, but attempting to access the site from Virtual PC resulted in a 404 error. This meant that it connected, but the server couldn’t find the file. I checked the Apache error log and discovered that Apache was looking for the file in the main webroot (/Library/WebServer/Documents/). Accessing the development url without a subdirectory or filename gave me the apache install page.

After pulling out my hair for quite some time (and incorrectly assuming that Windows was sending the request incorrectly), I finally discovered the problem. When I set up my virtual hosts, I had made my VirtualHost directives as described in the mezzoblue article:

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1>
ServerName dev.local
...
</VirtualHost>

This is wrong! It works fine when the request is coming from localhost, ie. the same machine, but when the request comes from another machine (or a virtual machine), Apache treats the request as if it were requesting the first virtual host defined with 127.0.0.1. So my request was directed to the first virtual host defined, which happened to be localhost.

The solution: use * (or *:80 to specify port 80) instead of 127.0.0.1 in the VirtualHost directive as such:

<VirtualHost *>
ServerName dev.local
...
</VirtualHost>