Doc does battle with a bull ant and emerges the victor

Last night Doc got stung (a bunch of times I think) on the face by a bullant. First I knew, her face was all swollen and she was breathing heavily. I actually thought she’d been stung by a bee! Not cool man! After a late night trip to the vet (and $155 thanks) she was feeling better. But holy cow, I had no idea a bull ant could do so much damage.

owncloud is pretty hot right now

I had a look at owncloud about 6 months ago, but moved on after deciding that the platform and / or client seemed all round unstable. (Ok.. so that’s really just heresay, I didn’t record my experience, nor did I lodge any bugs reports) In any case, I’ve seen the name in a few places lately and it seems to have come a very long way in that short time.

  • The interface has had a facelift… very tidy.
  • There’s a debian package for it now, (love that)
  • I haven’t run into a single dropped connection in the few days I’ve been playing with it.
  • AND … there’s a boatload of easily installable apps

I’ll be trying out a few of the more high end features over the next few weeks.. so I’ll keep you posted!

lesscss mixins make css easy

Lesscss is awesome, there’s no doubt. But while variables and nested rules are great, mixins are what really make the language shine. Of course, you can make your own project specific mixins, but I think the portability of mixins is their best feature.

Instead of banging out compatibility rules like so:

div {
  -webkit-border-radius: @radius;
  -moz-border-radius:    @radius;
  border-radius:         @radius;
}

You include a mixin, ala:

.border-radius (@radius: 5px) {
  -webkit-border-radius: @radius;
  -moz-border-radius:    @radius;
  border-radius:         @radius;
}

And you’re ready to rock:

div {
  .border-radius
}

Of course, this is just a quick and dirty example, there’s plenty more great mixins floating around you can leverage for fun and profit:

  • Less Elements is quite complete, maintained by the community, and available to fork on github. Of course, you’re going to want to trim out the mixins you don’t use prior to production
  • css-tricks has a nice list of mixins you can cut and paste from.
  • And of course there’s interstella elements – a shameless agglomeration of mixins I’ve stolen from elsewhere (and a few of my own).

As with most libraries, it’s great to lean on someone else when you’re getting started, but before you know it you’ll be whipping up your own!