Dirk.Net

Impressed by fellow Chiang Mai expat’s site gt-rider.com I was looking for an gallery/slideshow javascript similar to JonDesign’s SmoothGallery (jdgallery), but working with jQuery rather than mootols. jdgallery combines slideshow, image title overlay and many different transitions in an aesthetically appealing package.

The search led me to the conclusion that the transitions (slideshow functionality) should be handled by a different script than the actual image display. For the former there is the excellent jQuery Cycle plugin.

So how do we get text displayed over the image?

One solution might be to use a jQuery gallery plugin that can do titles over images. fancybox is such a package. For an impressive mashup of fancybox and cycle you might check out this site and look at the source code, js and css. You just need the two plugins (fancybox and cycle) and then call

$(’#your_element_collection’).cycle();

I found all this a bit thick and heavy for my needs, but certainly useful to keep in mind and add to the toolset. Then there was the recent image title demo by Chris Coyier from css-tricks.com which demonstrates a simple technique to display a text title on top of the image via a custom jQuery plugin, which improves on the common h2 + spans technique. In the comments David Chambers posted a pure-css image title solution, using a an html definition list. This is arguably a more semantic markup than the commonly used h2 tag.

Anyway, I mashed this up with the cycle plugin and created a small demo app which you can check out from github. or watch the demo. This might be a powerful and easy to implement way of getting text overlays over images, and then animating a slide show with the extremely powerful and versatile jQuery cycle plugin. YMMV.

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The messages “Folder org already exists in …” and “Too many open files” when using Netbeans are likely related. The underlying error might be that Linux runs out of file descriptors, which can happen rather quickly when you open many projects at once. Here’s the solution.

The file descriptors can be set at the system level and at the shell level:

Check how many your system allows:

cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max

This value can be set to a high number, probably to several 100k without major issues. For now you might try:

echo “65536″ >/proc/sys/fs/file-max

You could also add

fs.file-max = 65536

to

/etc/sysctl.conf

then run

sysctl -p

to reload sysctl.conf

For the shell type

ulimit -n

to get the number of file descriptors.

You can set for example

* soft nofile 8192
* hard nofile 8192

in

/etc/security/limits.conf

to increase the number.

After increasing these values I have not had any issues with Netbeans as described above for several months now. Hope it helps.

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Always looking for a better blog editor for Linux, I just installed Bilbo (recently rename Blogilo for copyright issues). I had some trouble following the process here and getting the Ubuntu packages installed on Linux Mint 6, which you might run into on Ubuntu Intrepid. Manually installing according to this guide also failed. I got ‘class BilboPost’ has no member named ‘setSlug’ upun build among other issues.

So I proceeded like this:

Install dependencies:

sudo apt-get install kdelibs5-dev kdepimlibs5-dev libboost-dev libqt4-sql-sqlite

Get the source from http://www.ohloh.net/p/bilbo/download?filename=bilbo-1.0-src.tar.gz&projects_id=bilbo

Unpack,

sudo tar -xzvf bilbo-1.0-src.tar.gz

Then just follow the steps from the readme:

cd bilbo

mkdir build

cd build

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=`kde4-config –prefix` ..

make

sudo make install OR su -c ‘make install’

Then I had to manually install the bilbo.desktop file for some reason, so in the directory where you unpacked bilbo:

sudo desktop-file-install bilbo.desktop

Not sure yet whether bilbo/blogilo is really the ultimate blog client for Linux, but so far it seems stable and feature rich and I’ll retire my Blogjet app for now, the HTML it created was somewhat horrible, with FONT tags and such.

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Just a little tip, as the syntax of less (less css) is so similar to css, just add a new file type in Netbeans > Tools > Options > Miscellaneous > Files like so:

Btw, setting an image size in Bilbo after adding the image crashes Bilbo, but only after the post was saved locally. So add your images first, then “Save Locally” before this bug is fixed.

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