This really is nothing fancy: it’s just a convenient way of adding an <a> tag plus an event-handler to a page to print it. Using it is as simple as, well, using File -> Print. But you can’t style the File menu with CSS so this is much more fun

Windows 7 printer test page

Ubuntu 9.10 printer test page

I know which one I find more useful and informative

import System

def is_assembly_debug_build(filename):
	"""Returns true if filename appears to have been built in debug mode"""
	result = False
	dll = System.Reflection.Assembly.LoadFile(filename)
	customAttribs = dll.GetCustomAttributes(False)
	for att in customAttribs:
		if att.GetType() == System.Type.GetType("System.Diagnostics.DebuggableAttribute"):
			result = att.IsJITTrackingEnabled
	return result

I saved this in a file called diagnostics.py. So using it (you’ll need to be in the same directory as diagnostics.py or have added diagnostics.py to your path – more info can be found here: http://docs.python.org/tutorial/modules.html#the-module-search-path) is simply a matter of doing something like this:

from diagnostics import is_assembly_debug_build
is_assembly_debug_build([absolute_path_to_your_dll])

If you’re interested you can grab a copy of diagnostics.py from http://gist.github.com/206177

Have fun

So the next time anyone moans about their site’s lack of a keywords meta tag, you know where to send them

Error installing gemcutter:
gemcutter requires RubyGems version >= 1.3.5

The Synaptic Package Manager reported everything as being up-to-date but only to version 1.3.1. As it turns out, there is another way to update rubygems on Ubuntu, which worked a treat! The rest of the installation was a breeze

If you are interested more info on Jekyll can be found on GitHub.

Anyway, I thought it might be fun to hook it up to a HTML 5 form to let you customise how many paragraphs of Lipsum you want each time you click it. So that’s what I went and did:

Lorem Ipsum Bookmarklet Generator

Hopefully it’ll save you a few mouse clicks next time you’re testing some forms.

(Please note that the form used in the generator uses the <input type="range" /> HTML 5 tag which currently works best in the latest version of Opera. YMMV when using other browsers).

One nice UX feature that I like on this site was the way in which they highlight where to find your credit card CVV/security number depending on which credit card you are using:

Visa card with CVV number highlighted

The image above shows the security number highlighted on the signature strip when you select Visa from the credit card type drop-down list. Compare that with the screenshot below showing the security number highlighted on the front of the card when American Express is selected:

AMEX card with the CVV number highlighted

It’s a simple feature really, but nicely implemented.

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