Weekly Roundup - February 25th 2008
Posted February 25th, 2008 in Weekly Roundup
This is my weekly roundup for the week of February 18th to 24th 2008, where I look back at the posts I made over the past week as well as useful and interesting articles on other websites and blogs that I might have read.
Articles posted on my blog
I had a sick child to look after on Thursday, we went away for the weekend and I ran out of time to get enough posts ready ahead of time for while we were away. So there were only three new posts in the last week. As a result I've posted this a little earlier than today - normally I get new posts to appear at 2pm but this one today is 11am.
Tuesday: Showing running queries in MySQL
Wednesday: md5sum: only one argument may be specified when using --check
Thursday: Saving time and bandwidth by creating a DVD image from CD ISO files
Interesting articles found offsite
Adobe Photoshop
CNet's News.com reported that Google is funding CodeWeavers to add better support for Adobe Photoshop to Wine so that it will run better on Linux. There is a discussion about this at Slashdot.
ASP.Net
Mike Bosch's Blog posted how to submit an AJAX form using jQuery to the ASP.Net MVC Framework.
CSS
David Walsh at CSS Zone posted "My CSS Wishlist" to look at things he would like to see in CSS.
Dave Woods posted a CSS reset method. CSS resetting is basically removing all padding and margins etc from elements and then assigning them all manually where appropriate so layouts etc appear much more similar across browsers and operating systems.
Smashing Magazine posted links to 50 sites/pages with useful and powerful CSS techniques
Domain Names
ArsTechnica reported about the ICANN panel questioning Network Solutions on their policy of automatically registering domains for every search made on their site. The ICANN panel was not impressed with this practise. I posted about this on my blog in the article titled "Network Solutions Steals Domain Ideas" and then followed it up a couple of weeks later. The Register also had a dig at Network Solutions over this meeting a couple of days after Ars Technica.
Hardware
PCWorld New Zealand reviewed the NEC Powermate hybrid PC, a very cool looking semi-portable PC which is currently the top selling desktop in Japan.
HTML
Jeremy Keith at A List Apart wrote about the new version targeting system to be used in Internet Explorer 8 in his post "They Shoot Browsers, Don't They?" He comes to the conclusion that "version targeting is not a bad idea", but that Microsoft "demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the World Wide Web" in doing it.
Joomla
Joomla 1.0.15 was released, and addresses a security issue to do with remote file inclusion.
KDE
Linux
The Ubuntu Geek looked at how to install QEMU on Ubuntu. The instructions should work for any Ubuntu derived distribution. QEMU is an emulator/virtualization piece of software which allows you to run other operating systems within your current OS (simiar to VMWare).
And the Ubuntu Geek also posted about how to install the Nvidia drivers for Ubuntu Feisty and later version.
MySQL
Developer.com posted some useful tips when using the MySQL command line interface, including changing the command prompt, using shell aliases to execute common MySQL commands, and saving query results to a CSV file.
Floating Point posted about MySQL Scaling
PHP
Jaisen Mathai wrote a post titled "The smallest PHP framework you shouldn't code without" which looks at very basic routing with PHP to map URLs to classes and functions.
Akash Mehta at Developer Tutorials looked at the CodeIgniter framework, starting with a brief overview of MVC frameworks and then a specific look at CodeIgniter.
2tbsp.com posted a comparison between the Zend and CakePHP frameworks, and thislab compared the CodeIgniter and Kohana framworks.
usrportage.de posted about the new __DIR__ magic constant in PHP, which means you will no longer need to to dirname(__FILE__) and can just use __DIR__ instead.
Search Engines/Directories
Last week I had links to a couple of sites that had a list of free directories you can submit your site to, and this week Blogging Tips n Tricks posted 100 High PageRank Free Directories including the page rank of each next to them. This list is sorted from most page rank to least.
SQL Server
sqlblog.com looked at 5 different ways to return data from one table that doesn't exist in another, looking specifically at SQL Server, although some of these techniques should work in other database servers as well.
Windows
Ars Technica reported that Windows Server 2008 will ship with SP1 installed. Of course this means it's not really a service pack and most people will wait until the real first service pack (SP2) is available before installing it... The article has an explanation from Ian McDonald of Microsoft about the rationale behind calling it SP1 from launch.
Daily Bits posted 8 freeware alternatives to common Windows applications, including Avast Anti-Virus, Spybot Search and Destroy and Foxit PDF.
The Register reported that Microsoft is creating two versions of Windows 2008 Small Business Server: a "standard" package which will include one copy of Windows Server 2008, collaboration server, SharePoint Services 3.0, Exchange Server 2007, and Windows Live OneCare for Server; and a "premium" package with the above plus an extra copy of Windows Server 2008 for a separate seat, as well as a standard edition of SQL Server 2008.
PC Magazine reviewed the not-yet-released Windows Vista Service Pack 1.
WordPress
Noupe.com posted 10 WordPress security tips.
Other Stuff
Stefan Reuter compared gzip, bzips and 7-zip compression looking at how much smaller each compressed the original file, and speeds for compression and decompression. I was personally surprised at how little difference there is between bzip2 and gzip, while the time taken for processing with bzip2 is considerably more.
IT Wire had an article about the experience of an IT manager at a Melbourne, Australia school which switched from Windows to Linux and then back to Windows again.
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