Boris Masis

If you export from Fireworks into clickable HTML prototypes, you’ll find that your exports are always left-aligned – even if you select center alignment during the export. This seems like a bug to me, luckily there is a fairly painless workaround. Note: Tested in Fireworks CS5 on Mac, but should work approximately the same in […]

If you haven’t heard of Animata, take a look at it now. Its amazing animation software that you can control with your body. Back in 2009 we threw a party where guests could control a projected, animated musician by moving their arms and body. I corresponded with Bence, the Animata developer to get this working […]

One of the things that’s not immediately obvious about Amazon EC2 instances is that they could fail, in fact Amazon says: It’s inevitable that EC2 instances will fail, and you need to plan for it. An instance failure isn’t a problem if your application is designed to handle it. The EC2 forum posts are littered […]

Git pulls are a fairly easy way to deploy your code, and we’re doing just that at my new event promotion startup. We wanted to take our release process just one small step further by tagging our releases so that we know exactly what is running in production and when it got there. Instead of […]

I have returned after 11 1/2 months abroad. My travels (mostly sans words) are documented at http://go.borism.net. The journey took me to 16 countries and over 40,000 miles (see travel map).

We recently released a feature that allows our users receive a text message if a bus they are awaiting is running late. It’s all pretty simple, we take the output of this form and run a little excel macro to convert the entered data into email addresses. We then email the affected parties and they […]

A common web development concern is the www subdomain. Do you host at http://www.site.com or http://site.com? Which ever you choose you want to be sure that visitors who type in the other get re-directed properly. If you use IIS you can setup a new website to do such a permanent redirect, but that solution doesn’t […]

We sure love our wufoo around here, and one thing we’ve been using more and more is smart routing for our entries. For example, when someone fills out a lead form we want to route the entry to the appropriate sales person based on the state of the inquiry. Wufoo doesn’t natively provide “smart” routing […]

We recently completed work on AuPairVideos.com. The site went from concept to launch in just over a month, in part thanks to its lightweight single-page design. We ended up writing ~150 lines of code in each layer: 152 lines of HTML 165 lines of CSS 159 lines of JavaScript 147 lines of PHP 88 lines […]

Tools such as Quick Ribbon are great for generating simple and effective ribbons such as this one: A small problem though is the potential to block content underneath the ribbon transparency area. For example, that “About Us” link is obscured by the large square ribbon image. A simple workaround is to split the ribbon image […]