SQUAD BLOG

Cattle Brands

Jordan Dobson — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:56:00 -0700

During my road trip across the United States we took a short rest
somewhere in the middle of Montana and I saw this interesting display
of local cattle brands.

My favorite is the “Lazy P Swinging 9”. I think I see the beginings of
the Weezer =W= in there too!

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How To Unlearn Dictionary Words in Firefox OSX

Phil Tapia — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Recently I was composing a Basecamp message and in the process of right clicking to perform a spell check in Firefox I accidentally selected the ‘Add to dictionary’ option. Immediately I didn’t know how to undo this action and thought it would be fun to figure out how to edit this accidental add.

Here is the process I went through to edit the dictionary file where this word was added.

Open Terminal

sudo su

cd ./Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles

ls (to find out the name of your xxxxxxx.default directory)

cd xxxxxxx.default

cat persdict.dat (this will echo on screen the contents of the file)

pico persdict.dat (to edit the file)

cat persdict.dat (do this again to make sure that your file edit saved ok)

exit and reopen Firefox and verify the edit

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T-shirts! T-shirts! T-shirts!

Brandon Herbel — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Over the last couple of months I have been designing a lot of t-shirts for bands like Boys Like Girls, We The Kings, Metro Station, The Maine, and Panic At The Disco. I figured I would give everyone a sneak peek of what I’ve been working on.

Using HTML Special Characters in CSS & JavaScript

Jordan Dobson — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

I found this very handy and thorough resource for adding HTML special characters with CSS to your page with the “content” property using the :before pseudoclass. This page has info for using these in Javascript too with some simple examples.

Internet Explorer 6 & 7 doesn’t support the :before pseudoclass so, use this method as a progressive enhancement and not for adding critical content. Good news though… IE 8 should support the entire CSS2.1 spec which includes the ”:before” pseudoclass.

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Summer Interns

Van Peterson — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

The Buckshire Seven are arriving this week in Cle Elum, Washington for permanent assignment. Associated with Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington the Buckshire Seven represent years of research and are ready to “Party All The Time!”.

Six girls and one guy should balance the Squad odds. Negra, Jody, Jamie, Foxie, Missy, Annie and Burrito have the education and experience Squad Studios needs.

They have the same personal habits as Van, the same diet as Andy, are really into T-Shirts like Brandon, are serious code monkeys like Brian, like hanging out in a cage like Aaron and act a lot like Phil and Jordan.

You can get more details at Chimp Sanctuary Northwest ~ moving van.

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Glue Tip: Add Your Feed To Facebook

Brandon Herbel — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Glue lets you easily publish your web or mobile content across multiple sites such as a blog, Myspace, Friendster, Livejournal, and now Facebook.

Here are a few simple ways to publish your Glue feed to your Facebook profile using the Notes application or Gigya’s My Stuff Application.

Publishing your content using the Facebook Notes application.

1) Select Publish from the Overview menu.

AJAX Internet Explorer 6 Error

Brian Harper — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

The following line of code breaks Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) on certain machines. (setRequestHeader(“Connection”, “close”))

While testing a site out, AJAX calls were taking several minutes in IE6 for most machines. After hours of research and testing, the error continue to happen. After all that I started trying to comment out everything not needed. One of the first things I commented out was the Connection Header. This fixed the issue in all tested IE6 machines and the AJAX called started working immediately.

Here is a snippet of the code


contentOBJ.open("post", cURL, true);contentOBJ.setRequestHeader("Content-type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded");contentOBJ.setRequestHeader("Content-length", params.length);/*
IE 6 BREAKS
contentOBJ.setRequestHeader("Connection", "close");*/    
contentOBJ.onreadystatechange = ResponseFunction;contentOBJ.send(params);

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Website Optimization

Van Peterson — Tue, 27 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Statistics was not my favorite class.

“Just the facts, Mam” ~ Joe Friday…is more my style.

Well WebSiteOptimization.com has the goods.

If you are an online store front, of course you can justify tons of images.

But, maybe your site targets the 56K user?

Anyway, enjoy and try your best to reduce page pollution.
~moving van

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Turn Your iPhone Into A Remote

Brandon Herbel — Thu, 22 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

I recently bought an iPhone and was trying to find some cool web apps when I came across Remote Buddy. It allows you to control your iTunes, keyboard, and over 95 other applications all through your iPhone web browser. The website has a 30 day free trial and similar applications that work for your Apple and Wii remote. I definitely recommend checking it out!

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Public Access Media

Andrew Kelly — Thu, 08 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Daniel Johnston played an amazing show at Neumos a few weeks ago and before the show my friends at Public Access Media had the pleasure of interviewing him. Check out the interview along with a sloo of other interviews on the Public Access Media site. Also, If you haven’t had a chance to see the documentary “The Devil and Daniel Johnston” then go out and rent it so you and your mom can watch it together this Mothers Day.

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Amputees Rejoice!

Jordan Dobson — Mon, 05 May 2008 21:39:00 -0700

You can make tacos with pure energy, no arms are needed!

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Snowboarding on Quatro De Mayo

Jordan Dobson — Mon, 05 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

This winter the Pacific Northwest received much more snow than usual and it’s still sticking around up in the Snoqualmie Pass mountains, so I thought I’d get in one more day before it was all over.

Apparently May 4th or “Quatro de Mayo” is a day of celebration up at Alpental (my mountain of choice) as when I arrived I’d seen things I hadn’t seen up there before.

It felt like the last day of high school up there… bands were playing, people drinking beer on the lifts, crazy costumes and costume contests. It was a great day for people watching, good riding and the weather was awesome too!

I saw a lot of great costumes up on the mountain like:

Oompa Loompas

Devil Dog

Superman

The Flash

Cowboys & Indians

Batman

Plenty of Mexicans

Business Men

Girls in Bikinis

And tons more I can’t recall

Here’s a few photos I snapped from my iPhone to share with you.

The Mexicans

Best Practices for Form Design

Jordan Dobson — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Last year, I was able to see Luke Wroblewski’s presentation at An Event Apart in Chicago. His presentation is something I always think about when designing forms for the web.

I finally found the “Best Practices for Form Design” PDF he uses in many of his presentations! It’s packed with visual examples, heat maps, and simple explanations that make sense.

Give it a read and learn a lot in no time at all.

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Flushing DNS Cache in OSX

Phil Tapia — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

In website and server testing you will need to sometimes clear your DNS cache. This is the local table of hostnames and corresponding IP addresses. As you use your machine, addresses & DNS lookups are cached to speed up seek/load times. This is often ok, but sometimes you may need to clear/flush your cache if something has changed or updated and you still have the old lookup value cached. To do this, open Terminal and at the prompt type the command: lookupd -flushcache

If its successful it won’t error and will return you to a prompt. To test, go to the address you thought was cached and see if the lookup discovers the new IP address. I bet it will!

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Editing the /etc/hosts file in OSX

Phil Tapia — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Pretty often at Squad we need to configure our machines for testing websites. Recently I ran into a scenario where I needed to edit my local hosts file because the DNS for a site in development had not been taken live yet. By editing my hosts file, I can trick my system into thinking the domain name resolves to an IP address, even though it really doesn’t. To do this, follow these steps.

Open Terminal

Type command: sudo su

Enter your admin password and hit enter

Now you are at root and have the permissions to edit the hosts file. To do this type: nano /etc/hosts and hit enter.

Add the IP address of the system you want the domain name to point to, then hit Tab and type the domain name. You will have to do www if you also want that to work with the domain name.

When finished editing, hit CTRL O to save then CTRL X to exit.

Finished.

Open your web browser and open the domain name you input into your hosts file. It should be pointed at the IP you entered. If it is not, you may need to flush your DNS. If you don’t know how to do that, I’m planning to write about that in a few days.

Remember to re-edit your hosts file once the real DNS has been taken live. You don’t want to be hitting the dev server in the future when the production site is really up! That can cause some very confusing troubleshooting. Believe me!

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Checking Folder Sizes in OSX

Phil Tapia — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Recently I was trying to figure out where all my hard drive space had gone on my macbook. After a little digging around and some help from Brian I found the following command to be really helpful in terminal to figure this out.


du -hd 1

du means disk usage

h* means *human readable

d* means *depth (like layers deep)

1 means one layer of depth

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Squad Would Like To Welcome...

Jordan Dobson — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

We’d like to “officially” welcome Brandon Herbel and Van Peterson to The Squad!

Brandon Herbel left Omaha, Nebraska to design for Squad here in Seattle and we’re very happy to have him. I’ve known Brandon for quite some time now and it’s great to finally have an opportunity to work with him on some projects! He’s proven to be a great member of our team.

Van Peterson is leading the development of Glue and all things Ruby on Rails. Van has a TON of development and programming experience and we’re very excited to work with him on many of the upcoming projects here at Squad. He’s currently getting up to speed on everything Glue so expect to see some updates to Glue soon!

We’re lucky to have such talented people added to our small team. Send your love and and welcome them to our team!

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Caffeine

Andrew Kelly — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

A few weeks ago from the 6th floor of Squad’s luxury penthouse in the sky, I noticed from our window that the Dr Seuss billboard had been replaced with a frothy mug of espresso. It wasn’t till a week later the final additions were made to the billboard adding a McDonalds logo and “Now Serving Espresso” text. I swear I had seen this concept before but gave the thought little attention until a week later when I was moving our books and magazines into boxes. I noticed a National Geographic circa January 2005 with an article about caffeine with the image I had originally attempted to recollect. Needless to say, It was disappointing to see such a clever concept acquired, repackaged and dispensed by McDonalds… The worlds wealthiest most glutinous fast food giant.

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A Cool Game for Attractive People

Jordan Dobson — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Okay... Alright! It looks like I’ve found a Wii game that I’m excited about more than Mario Kart! It’s called “Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People” and its scheduled to be released in June 2008 on Nintendo’s WiiWare and for the PC.

I wrote about WiiWare nearly a year ago and haven’t heard much about it since but, I was glad to hear SBCG4AP was on the horizon. It looks like there will be five episodes for sale via digital distribution at about $9 each or $35 for all episodes. I can’t wait!

Here’s the Trailer for the game!

This video requires Flash.
You can watch this video if your device supports YouTube.

You can check out screen shots from the game and learn more at Telltale’s Strong Bad game page.

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Switching to Time Capsule

Jordan Dobson — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

We’re finally moved into our new office and we decided to make the switch to fully wireless in our new place. We decided to go with Apple’s 1 terabyte Time Capsule for our wireless access point and for our data backup. So far it’s been working great!

We’re mostly mac users, so this seemed like an easy win for us to use for wireless access and to back up our data. You can’t do auto backups with Windows but access to the storage device hasn’t been a problem for our Windows users. The setup was super easy and the wi-fi range seems to be very good. We’re split up across a three story house, with the Time Capsule on the second floor, and we haven’t had any problems yet. I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

It’s only our first day using it, so there is plenty of opportunities for good or bad things to happen, so I’ll keep you updated with how well it pans out. I still have to do my first Time Machine backup.

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