You’ve just found my résumé and blog.  I’ve learned that there’s nothing greater I can do but to pass on the wealth of knowledge which God has provided me.  I hope to have the time in the near future to begin posting tutorials on how to do the everything from programming to photography to graphic design!

I love photography because it’s my way of “capturing God’s beauty”; programming is my way of taking a VERY small step into God’s shoes — and seeing what it’s like to create something that serves a purpose;  and graphic design allows me to express the beauty that God’s placed in my mind and make it available for others to see.

I’ve had a blessed life and God’s been right here with me every step of the way.  I’m married to the woman of my dreams and am the father of the most precious little boy — named Toma.  This is truly the most exciting time of my life and I can’t wait to see what God has in store for my family and I in the future.

I’m sure you’re eager to find out more so go on, click one of the links above to see my résumé and portfolio or see below for things I’ve blogging about.

I occasionally run into the issue of needing to place something on top of a YouTube or in the case of a project I’m currently working on, Vimeo.  The embed code is an iframe and trying what I’d tried for Youtube doesn’t work ( append to the url ?wmode=transparent or if there are already parameters being passed, &wmode=transparent ).

The solution turned out to be very close, adding a parameter to the iframe tag itself wmode=”opaque” and then *important:* make the parent element as well as the element that needs to be above the video “position: relative;”

without the position: relative; the wmode won’t work so make sure you add that!

p.s. — it turns out that wmode=”opaque” is the default for vimeo so all you need to do is the position: relative; bit.

I’ve been having crazy problems with Chrome hanging on my Virtualbox build.  I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why Chrome was causing Ubuntu’s rendering to crash.  All of a sudden when visiting a random site such as https://chrome.google.com/webstore, the virtual machine would turn all black or all white or rendering would be all sorts of crazy where I can’t click on anything ( objects are there, I can move windows around and what not, but they wouldn’t render as they really are ). I am at that point forced to hit alt+f2 and sudo poweroff as a sudo reboot would sometimes bring Ubuntu back up with the same rendering issues.

After much digging, I came across http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1974800 with a suggestion of starting Chrome with the following command:

google-chrome --blacklist-accelerated-compositing

I’ve come to find out that this may have resolved my rending issue!  It seems to be more related to Virtualbox and how it’s handling 3D acceleration.

To update the desktop/launcher icons you can run:

locate google-chrome.desktop

Which will probably give you the following:

/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome.desktop
/usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop

Really, the only one you need to edit is the one in your /usr/share/applications/.  You can also copy that file to ~/.local/share/applications/ and add –blacklist-accelerated-compositing to the end of any “Exec=” line ( should be three — one for first opening Chrome, one for new tab and last for opening incognito mode.

By golly, I’ve finally done it!  I love bash completion and must have it on any shell-based device I own.  I’ve written countless numbers of scripts but for the most part, they’re fairly self-contained — with the exception of the “perms” script.  This script is nice and quick on a one-site box where I can just run “perms” and my permissions for a set get reset to “production”.  I use this so that when doing WordPress updates for example, I can chmod -R 777 then run perms after all my updates — nice and quick!

Servers running multiple sites require a more complex perms script which accepts a $1 variable of the domain.  From there, I run the specific chowns and chmods and what not for that particular site using a case as well as some defaults that affect all the sites.

I’ve found it annoying to have to type “perms beshoy.girgis.us” or “perms odslabs.com” so I made a quick script to take care of the domain part for me.  This script gets dropped in /etc/bash_completion.d/perms

# bash completion for perms

_perms()
{
	  cur=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}
	  COMPREPLY=( $( compgen -W "$(ls /vhosts/)" -- $cur ) )
}
complete -o default -o nospace -F _perms perms