An article on Tom’s Hardware that I helped with was posted yesterday. It’s about Wi-Fi, it’s problems, why your Wi-Fi sucks and what can be done about it. If you’re interested go ahead and read it. Please suffer through the format as it’s actually a pretty good read, but if you glaze over tech stuff just go look at the images I did for the article. I’m quite pleased with a couple of them. There’s 27 pages in the article, each with a picture (see why I said to suffer through the format?). Specifically, I did the images for pages 1, 21, and 23-26. tip: most have a “zoom” option if you hover over the image

Page 1 and 26 I think are my favorites. Page 1 (shown above) because of how it turned out and page 26 is an homage to XKCD. Page 21 has been dubbed the FrankenAP. I’m not thrilled with page 25 (the two iPads in different orientations) but there were time constraints and limitations in the room setup, and that was even the second time I shot that particular concept. Funny behind-the-scenes note about page 25. I was using a mini-bagel between the stand and the iPad to keep the iPad from leaning back and catching a glare from the overhead fluorescent lights.

Turns out it was because in my original install of the prefpane I had used the “ports” version of a required ruby file, per instructions, since I was using the MacPort version of Apache. The easy fix is to just reinstall the prefpane. All of my sites now show up in the site listing and I can add the new site I’m currently developing.

I uploaded this through

After doing so, I noticed that the context menu on my desktop was way screwed up. All the text had shifted over to the right and was unreadable.

See? WTF? The “MagicRotation” spam branding is pushing the text to the side. Luckily the solution was already on the web. Thank you megacorp search engine starting with a “G”

Turns out if you are running TortoiseGit and/or TortoiseSVN then you need to turn off the icons by adding some registry keys. These are safe additions but as always, backup your registry before attempting to mess with it.

Just add a DWORD entry at either “HKCU\Software\Tort​oiseSVN\ ShowContextMenuIcons” or “HKCU\Software\Tort​oiseGit\ ShowContextMenuIcons” depending on the programs you are using. It should have a hex or decimal value, doesn’t matter which, of “0″ (zero).

After that, just wait a few seconds and your context menu should be readable again, but without the icons for those programs. A small, and IMHO welcome, compromise that I can live with

I uploaded this through

Chris Coyier over at CSS Tricks uses the following code in his .htaccess file to block visitors.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} !^71\.225\.113\.171
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} !^71\.185\.239\.212
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} !^69\.253\.223\.254
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/comingsoon\.html$
RewriteRule .* /comingsoon.html [R=302,L]


What he’s doing there is checking for specific IP addresses that are allowed to see the website but everyone else is sent to the “comingsoon.html” webpage. This is great for people who have specific IP addresses but if you’re behind a proxy like I am at work then everyone else with you behind that proxy can still see the site.

I find it much easier to redirect everyone but check for a custom cookie that I can set using the Webdeveloper Firefox extension. That way I can check to make sure that the redirect to the maintenance page is actually working. Here’s the relevant code that I use (taken from a RoR tutorial of old)

RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/maintenance.html -f
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !maintenance.html
RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !^.*access_cookie=1.*$
RewriteRule ^.*$ /maintenance.html [L]


where the text “access_cookie” (sans quotes) would be whatever cookie name you want to use. I just create a “session cookie” set to a value of “1″ (or whatever you want to make it) and check for it’s existence.

That gets around the problem of DHCP granted or spoofed IP addresses. Sure a cookie is easy to add but if you make the name and/or value sufficiently difficult to guess, no one is getting in.

Now just add your cookie.

Note in the image that I have set it to be a “session cookie”. This helps when you forget to delete the cookie. Just close your tab (FF) or browser (IE), reopen it and the cookie will be gone.

Oh yeah. The other thing that my .htaccess code does is, on the first line, check for the existence of the “maintenance.html” file. I don’t want to have to add and remove this code everytime I want to take the site down. It’s much easier to just have this code permanently in my .htaccess file and then upload the file that people will see when the site is down. I then delete it when the site is ready to be reopened. This is all performed using a custom Capistrano command that I run when I’m ready to deploy a new version.