Daniel Koskinen

  • Size does matter

    Big Science needs big names. Here are some of the names of existing and planned telescopes: There’s the Very Large Telescope and Very Large Array, the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), the now scrapped plan for an Overwhelmingly Large Telescope (OWL) and of course El Gran Telescopio in the Canary Islands.

    Some of those might be renamed
    later, but I like to think at some point they’ll have to become more imaginative with adjectives. Where are the Ridiculously Large Telescope (RLT) or the It’s So Big It’s Almost Embarrassing Telescope (ISBIAET)? I bet they’d get loads of funding.

  • Downtown canoeing, part 2

    This weekend my wife and I took a kayaking course at the Varala Sports Institute here in Tampere (Varalan urheiluopisto).

    The highlight of the course was definitely paddling into the center of town for a cup of coffee on Saturday morning. We couldn’t have asked for better weather!
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  • SASS, LESS and nesting overload

    Both SASS and LESS are really nice tools for CSS developers. Both have the ability to nest selectors like this:

    
#header {
   h1 { font-size: 3em }
   p { font-size: 1.2em }
}

    …which compiles to 

    
#wrapper h1 { font-size: 3em }
#wrapper p { font-size: 1.2em }

    Nesting is really useful, just don’t go more than 2-3 levels deep. I’m currently wading through a bunch of code which was generated from LESS files, and the (huge) stylesheet is full of selectors like this:


    html body #wrapper #header #access div.menu-header ul.menu li.menu-item-home.current-page-item a:link { ... }

    You have been warned!

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  • Essential Sublime Text Plugins for WordPress Development

    Despite the recent Coda 2 update, I find myself doing almost all of my web coding in Sublime Text 2, an excellent and extensible editor for Mac, Windows and Linux.

    Specifically for WordPress development, I’ve found at least three tools worth installing. (If you’re new to Sublime Text, I recommend installing the Sublime Package Control extension first).

    1. WordPress Package, based on the TextMate bundle. Provides useful autocompletions for functions and some snippets. This one is a huge time saver, and along with the ZenCoding Emmet plugin, couldn’t imagine going without it.
    2. Search WordPress Codex. Does what it says, especially useful for directly looking up a function definition.
    3. SublimePhpTidy, helps format PHP code to conform to WordPress Coding Standards.

    Nettuts provides more great tips on using Sublime Text.

    I’d be glad to hear of any other useful plugins/hints!
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  • Venus Transit

    This morning was the last chance for over a century to witness Venus transiting the Sun.

    I got up at 4:00 to make sure I got at least a few good shots. After cycling to a nearby golf course to get an unrestricted view of the Sun, which had just risen, I got a few good snaps there. I ended up getting the best photos in our front yard though, after the clouds had cleared.

    Lessons learned: buy a better camera before December 2117. Here are a few photos of the 2012 Venus transit taken from Tampere, Finland with a Canon G7, using some AstroSolar film to filter sunlight.

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  • Fix WordPress Syntax Mode for Coda 2

    NOTE: Apparently my version no longer works for Coda > 2.0.2. Try the newer versions made available by Matthew and deryckoe. Thanks guys!

    If you’ve updated to Coda 2 and have been using the excellent WordPress Syntax Mode by Thorsten, you need to copy it (and any other modes you’ve been using) over to ~/Library/Application Support/Coda 2/Modes/. It works just fine, but syntax highlighting is broken. To fix this (and avoid wading through too much code), I simply made a copy of the SyntaxDefinition.xml file in /Applications/Coda 2.app/Contents/Resources/PHP-HTML.mode/Contents/Resources/ and copied over the contents of the <keywords id="PHP4 Functions"> ... </keywords> node from Thorsten’s version.

    Finally replace all instances of PHP-HTML in the file with PHP-HTML-WP, save the file as SyntaxDefinition.xml in ~/Library/Application Support/Coda 2/Modes/PHP-HTML-WP.mode/Contents/Resources (replacing the old one) and restart Coda 2.

    For convenience, here’s the whole updated mode package: PHP-HTML-WP.mode. Unzip and drop into ~/Library/Application Support/Coda 2/Modes/.

    NB: This is just a quick hack until Thorsten updates the original. I cannot guarantee this will work perfectly for everyone.
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  • Downtown canoeing

    20120311-115916.jpg
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  • Everybody Loves Eye Tracking

    Eye tracking can be a terribly useful and important tool. Still, this tweet by Jared Spool struck a chord. It also reminds me of some research I was involved in once. I won’t say which one.

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  • Flood and Ark by Stephen Baxter

    I seem to have read a lot of apocalyptic literature recently. After finishing The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood (highly recommended), I continued on the same theme with Stephen Baxter’s sci-fi novels Flood and Ark.

    Being a big fan of Arthur C. Clarke, I became acquainted with Baxter’s writing though his collaboration with Clarke in Light of Other Days and the Time Odyssey trilogy. This was the first time I’ve read any of his own work though.

    Flood describes mankind’s struggle to survive in an imaginary near future, where the oceans of the world start rising at an exponential pace. When available land starts to run out, things get interesting as people and nations develop different coping strategies. Or in some cases, don’t. A good read, although obviously at times just a bit depressing.

    As you probably guessed, Ark is the sequel to Flood. A story about a desperate effort to send the remnants of humankind into space, it’s not as coherent as Flood. If you can look past the US manage to scrape together a mission to Jupiter and invent a warp drive in the middle of a civil war in a world with vastly depleted resources, it’s a fun and mostly believable read. Then again, necessity is the mother of all inventions, so why not.
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  • New Job!

    On Monday I became the third employee of H1, a small, family owned web agency based in Helsinki, Finland. Aki and his wife Jaana are both very experienced web professionals, and I’m proud to be working with them. Looking forward to an interesting time!

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