Q: I have created a new skins folder beside my default theme’s skin folder, and placed some images that I want to override into an images sub folder. I have changed the ‘Skin (Images / CSS)’ setting in System -> Configuration -> Design -> Themes to point to my new skins, I have cleared the magento cache about 10 million times, but magento still won’t use my new images, it keeps using the originals…. what do I do?

A: This has caught me out once or twice and I have always forgotten about it by the time it happens again! The problem stems from the fact that the theme css file calls in images using a relative path, e.g.:

So because the css file that uses your images remains in its original location it will still use your original images, to get it to use your overridden images you must create a css folder in your new skin folder and copy any css files that reference the images into there and clear the cache a further 20 times – hopefully magento will then use your new images!

Have a look here for some more details:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/2445/

Here is an interesting article about Dries’ vision for Drupal 8:

http://www.cio.com.au/article/411440/dries_vision_drupal_8/

I like the focus on the editorial experience to help people mange content on-line, drupal is great CMS but it can sometimes be quite difficult for non webbies & techies to effectively manage the content on their drupal websites – in fact this really could have been given more attention in d7 (oh well)!

What is also interesting is the recognition that drupal has become more of a web platform than just a CMS alone – that’s how we use it!

Recent denials by Nokia that they are about to be taken over by Microsoft brings this line from Yes Minster to my mind:

James Hacker: First rule in politics: never believe anything until it’s officially denied.

I am happy to report that I have had a reasonably easy run of using OpenCV from a .NET C++/CLI project, I was initially worried that the two might not play well together, but so far – so good! I am wrapping some machine vision code that uses OpenCV in a C++/CLI assembly so that I can call it from C# code. I have kept the rather creepy CLI stuff to a minimum it just implements the interface, everything else is vanilla C++ using the standard library.

The only thing I had to do to get rid of build errors was to make sure that each _proper_ C++ file in the project had the following value for the ‘Common Language RunTime Support’ build setting -> ‘No Common Language RunTime Support’!

So if you are toying with the idea of developing some OpenCV based software from within C++/CLI, I say give it twirl it makes interacting with .NET much easier than (say) using COM or similar!

Just catching up with things after Christmas, one thing that escaped my notice in December was that Google released version 1.6.1 of their Cloud App Engine SDK on 13th. of December. There’s not a huge amount of interest really in this release, but two items did catch my eye:

You can now select how much CPU power and memory is available for your fronted instances, you can select this from a small set of presets in the app dashboard – however google warns that selecting a higher preset will incur extra cost! We sometimes run into soft memory limit problems on our frontends so this may be of great use to us, but I do worry about the $$ !

Google have also released a new experimental document conversion API which they say contains OCR functionality – I look forward to testing this and will be very interested to see how well the OCR preforms as it can be a very tricky thing to get right! I suppose that this is an API to the same OCR functionality that they have in google docs….

Oh and they have added an API for programmatically reading the application logs, this may come in handy for automated testing!

More details about the release can be found here:

http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/12/app-engine-161-released.html

Some time ago I posted that some of Pride Design’s websites had got through to the finals of Irish Web Awards but I haven’t posted since to let you know how we got on…..

Well the really good news is that Cheffactor won in the ‘Best Microsite’ category – so we are very happy indeed! Here’s a picture of ‘Webby’ having a well earned pint and tasty nibble at the award ceremony, he can’t half throw ‘em back!

Congratulations to our favourite Mobile App Localization company Tethras who won the Dublin round of the seedcorn competition. Best of luck for the finals!

Good news! Four of Pride Design‘s websites have got through to the finalists list in the Irish Web Awards 2011, my favourite – The Cork News has got through to the finals in two categories – Most Beautiful Website in Ireland & Best Online Publication Categories.

Pride Design are also in the finals in the Web Agency of the Year category, so here’s hoping we bring home some gold!

cheffactor.ie – Best Microsite Category.
hautemama.ie – Best eCommerce / Services Website Category.
cinnamoncottage.ie – Best SME/Small Business Website.
The Cork News -Most Beautiful Website in Ireland & Best Online Publication.

More details can be found here: http://webawards.ie/2011-finalists/

Good luck to all the finalists!

Yesterday Google released v1.5.5 of their App Engine SDK. There are loads of nice changes in this release including the easing of some previously annoying limits, the one I am especially happy about is the doubling of the frontend request deadline from 30s to 60s, this will make our life a lot easier!

More details can be found here:

http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/10/app-engine-155-sdk-release.html

Cully&Sully’s Chef Factor is Back! The first prize is a 12 week cookery course in Ballymaloe worth €12,000, so if you fancy your hand at cooking up a storm check out all of the details along with the current entries here: http://www.cheffactor.ie/