We’re in San Jose for a few days.

If you’re looking for a classy place to get online and take care of business, I’ve found the Cohiba Cigar Lounge: http://www.cohibacigarlounge.com/

What?  You don’t like cigars?  Too bad.  There’s always Starbucks.

Leonardo da Vinci – needs no introduction, right?  At one time, however, he did. Here’s a short note he wrote to drum up new work.  Enjoy:

“Most Illustrious Lord, Having now sufficiently considered the specimens of all those who proclaim themselves skilled contrivers of instruments of war, and that the invention and operation of the said instruments are nothing different from those in common use: I shall endeavor, without prejudice to any one else, to explain myself to your Excellency, showing your Lordship my secret, and then offering them to your best pleasure and approbation to work with effect at opportune moments on all those things which, in part, shall be briefly noted below.

And if any of the above-named things seem to anyone to be impossible or not feasible, I am most ready to make the experiment in your park, or in whatever place may please your Excellency – to whom I comment myself with the utmost humility, etc.”

Text shamelessly snitched from TheLadders.com – http://www.theladders.com/career-newsletters/leonardo-da-vinci-resume

Welcome to 1979 – Disco Noël

The thing I hate about the holiday season here in these United States of America is the background music.  Not that I hate the individual tunes, what raises the bile to the back of my throat is hearing the same six songs over and over again, everywhere you go, all day long.  I don’t mind novel and unusual mixes of popular songs.  It’s the repetition of the same ol’ that gets me.

Maybe you feel the same?

Well, aren’t you lucky?  Of course you are, because I have for you today Disco Noël – an mp3 version of an LP from 1979.  Yes, she is hanging disco balls on that christmas tree, because this is the most Disco of holiday tunes you and your leisure suit will ever sweat to.

On one hand these versions are cheesy and frightening.  On the other hand they are bouncy, energetic and inventive. On the continuum between bad–bad music and good–bad music, I personally place this under “good–bad”.  It appears to not be available for purchase new.  Download, share and enjoy.

Once more – Click Here to Download Disco Noël

You want a taste?  Disco Jingle Bells:

Since you’ve been so good this year I’ve located some tunes from The Year Without A Santa Claus:

The Heat Miser Song!
download Heat Miser

Snow Miser!
download Snow Miser

Devil Chef in Action

We’d like to welcome Illustrator Jack Pollock to our client family.  Portlanders will recognize Jack’s style from his work in The Portland Mercury, The Stranger and other publications.  Jack’s also the man behind that lovable devil, Devil Chef (seen to the right).  Did I mention Dark Horse Comics?  I could, but that’d be stealing the thunder from Jack’s own site which you can (and should) visit here.

What is it that we’re working on?  We’re not yet at liberty to say Mr. Bond, but Tiki:Mojo is assisting Jack with business consulting, coaching and Web development to bring a new product to market.  When we’re ready to unveil it, you’ll be reading about it here.  Stay tuned…

Helene and Trees

Today we assisted East West Floral Arts prep for a corporate holiday event happening this weekend.  Normally trees grow in the forest.  Today they were assembled from curly willow.

With another day’s worth of work all 31 will be spray painted, be-ribboned, decorated and ready to hit the banquet tables.

Next time you need flowers and decorations for an event, call up our friends at East West!

Let’s say you’ve got a Wordpress site on one server, and you need to move it to an entirely different server that’s going to have a different URL than the current one?

C.K. Sample has some helpful instructions here.  These are very useful, but they assume the new server has the same URL as the old one.  After you restore the database, you’ve just broken your new site because the settings refer to the address of the old site.  Not so hot, but not too hard to fix.

Here’s the trick.  You follow C.K.’s instructions through Step 7.  That’s the step where you restore the database.  Once you’ve done that your new site is broken.  If you’re a lucky person (and many of you are) you’ll have access to a GUI database on your web server.  phpMyAdmin is very common, there are others or you could edit your database from the command line – which is guaranteed to impress the chicks.  I’m not going to teach you how to edit your database in this post, but I’ll tell you where to go.

Once you’re editing the database your Wordpress installation is using open the table called “wp-options“.  Inside there is a field called “siteurl“.  Edit that field and put in the correct URL for your site.

Now go to wp-admin and log in as admin.  Go to Settings -> General.  Make sure that the “Blog Address” entry is correct.  Once you’ve got that right your site should just work!

The settings for WP-DBManager are probably also wrong, as they point to wherever things were on your old server.  You’ll want to go and update those now too.  One more thing to check.  Go Settings -> Miscellaneous.  You’ll want to make sure that the “Store uploads in this folder” setting points to the right place on your new server.  If it doesn’t anytime you try to add an image (or any file) to your site you’ll get an error message about not being able to create the directory.

Now you’re done!  Good work!

This just in – Tiki:Mojo Creative Services has been chosen to help Vermont-based bike retailer Bike29 move from osCommerce to Magento.

Nestled up next to the mountains Bike29 provides excellent service and support for the serious mountain biker.  They specialize in serious big wheel bikes, 29″ wheels to be specific.  Bike29 services customers across the whole US of A (and the world) so a fully-functional and attractive site and shopping experience is critical to their success.

While osCommerce has served them well over the years, but they have come to feel they need more than their current online shopping engine can offer.  Bike29 chose Tiki:Mojo because they know we have the skills to make this complicated transition painless and straightforward.

Don’t you hate when you can’t get something to work right on a web site?  That’s how the fine folks at TNT Graphics felt about getting the navigation menus on a client site in shape.

That’s where Steve comes in.  A bit of CSS and HTML fiddling later and the hundreds of pages in the client’s site were updated and working fine.

Anyhow, for your designers out there – don’t feel like learning all the techie stuff?  Let us take care of that and you can focus on what you’re best at – making things look dang good.

This is for you Mac OS X heads out there.  The GUI Disk Utility app is perfectly fine for most situations where you’re formatting and working with hard drives, volumes and partitions.  But what about if you’ve managed to give your drive some kind of terribly unspeakable formatting damage and Disk Utility and other GUI tools can’t seem to fix it.  You’re pretty sure there’s nothing physically wrong with the device.  This happened to me recently.
I’d found a way to bend the rules and get a FAT32 and an HFS+ partition on a drive in such a way that I could use it just fine in OS X and Windows XP.  Hooray, right?  Well, it seemed clever until it stopped working and nothing would fix the disk.  So fine, I wanted to reformat it, but the OS X tools didn’t like the MBR (Master Boot Record) I’d squeezed on there.

Enter diskutil.  This is a UNIX command line tool you run from the terminal.  From the command line you can do a bunch of things you can’t do from GUI.  Here’s a good run down of how to use it:

http://ss64.com/osx/diskutil.html

diskutil eraseDisk HFS+ mydiskfixed disk3

…and my hard drive was usable again.

While you’re at it, you can also create and edit partitions from the command line as well using pdisk:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20021119053614569

I have not personally needed to use pdisk yet, but the day will come.

Video clips on your site can be pretty great.  In the old days you were stuck with either putting up your video in several different formats (QuickTime, Windows Media, Real, etc…) or facing the reality that only a percentage of your site visitors would actually be able to watch it.

Then the clever people behind Flash fixed that by making it relatively easy to play video through the Flash player and some 99% of all web-connected computers can see the same video file.  Hooray!  Now, how do you actually do it?

(Streaming is another topic, I’m going to cover progressive download)

You need to start with your video.  Flash needs the video format to be in either MPEG4 (aka H.264), FLV or F4V.  A quick google search indicates there’s web sites which will do this for you, but I generally use Quicktime Pro to monkey with video formats which will get you to your MPEG4 version.  If you have the Adobe suite you may also have Adobe Media Encoder which will get you to your .flv.

A quick google search indicates there are plentiful options for doing all these video conversions on the web or through other software you can buy.  Since I haven’t tried those, I’m not going to talk about them.  If you’ve found something that works for you, please feel free to talk it up in the comments of this post.

If you have the Adobe Flash authoring tool it’s fairly straightforward to produce your clip for the web.  That said, there’s a couple of stumbling blocks I’ve found.

I’m using CS4 in this example.  So… you start a new Flash project.  Go File -> import -> import video.  Select “load external video with external playback component”.  Click “continue”.  The next window will ask you to select a skin for the video to play in.  This gives you the overlay with the video controls.  The ones with the name “over” in the title will put the controls on top of your video.  “Under” will place them right underneath.

Now you can preview it and see how it plays.  If you play it and you don’t see the controls you selected, that probably means the dimensions of your video are larger than your stage – you’ve pushed them off the screen!  You can either go back to Quicktime Pro and size your movie smaller or make the stage larger by going Modify -> Document.

Here’s a trick the help doesn’t tell you.  If you just select the video from your computer hard drive it will “preview” fine, but won’t play when you upload it to your server and you’ll tear your hair out wondering what’s wrong.  However, if you type in the path to where it’s going to live on your server in the import video window, it will fail to preview on our computer, but play fine when it’s published to your site.  If you know a smarter way around this, let me know!

When it’s the way you want it go File -> Publish and Flash will create the files you need.  You’ll get an HTML file, a .swf and you’ll have your video clip.  All three need to be uploaded to your web server.  You can also paste the HTML into any of your other pages if you want.

Questions?
The online docs from Adobe can be read here.