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Weekly Roundup - March 3rd 2008

Posted March 3rd, 2008 in Weekly Roundup

This is my weekly roundup for the week of February 25th to March 2nd 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

Tuesday: Public key not installed error when installing from Dag RPM Repository

Wednesday: How to install jigo on CentOS and RHEL

Thursday: Create a file with a unique name with PHP

Friday: How to use jigdo-lite

Saturday: Monthly Roundup - February 2008

Sunday: Linux CD Mall Reskinned

Interesting articles found offsite

Blogging

the16art.com posted a list of 47 XML-RPC ping services which you can ping when adding new content to your blog. It also tells you how to add them to a WordPress blog.

BSD

DragonFly BSD 1.12 was released. Dragonfly BSD is a fork of FreeBSD from the 4.x branch created by Matt Dillon in June 2003. You can buy DragonFly BSD from the Linux CD Mall.

OnLamp.com looked at what's coming up in FreeBSD 7.0 and then FreeBSD 7.0 was released the next day. As with DragonFly BSD, you can buy FreeBSD from the Linux CD Mall.

Databases

Last year, 25hoursaday.com posted about "When not to normalize your SQL database", referring to a presentation by Pat Helland which was posted at Pat Helland's MSDN Blog, titled "Normalization Is for Sissies". Both make an interesting read.

Design

Smashing Magazine looked at navigation menus, trends and examples.

Domain Names

The Network Solutions system of temporarily registering all domain names searched on through its site has now led to is being sued in a class action, as reported by The Register and Ars Technica.

DailyBits looked at some of the crazy domain names people have registered.

Drupal

Drupal 6.1 was released, fixing some problems and security vulnerabilities. These CMS and blogging platforms sure do seem to have a lot of security issues...

HTML

Matt Snider posted about when and how you should using heading tags in HTML - those are the <h1> through <h6> tags.

Internet Explorer

Ars Technica reported that the first beta version of Internet Explorer 8 will be made available to a select group of testers soon.

Javascript

Azam Sharp posted about how to add drag and drop support using JQuery.

The Daily WTF posted about a site that tells you your last name is not valid after doing some Javascript validation on first and last names. Only they don't get it quite right, and it shows how too much validation can be a bad thing, especially when it's not coded correctly or tested enough.

Linux

techthrob.com looked at how to speed up your Linux system by installing "preload". The article looks at how to install it, some of the configuration options, and then some benchmarking to show its effectiveness.

PHP

Developer Tutorials had posts about how to create desktop applications with PHP using PHP-GTK, and ten ways to improve your PHP application's performance.

The Zend Framework 1.0.4 was released.

This post is three years old, but it details how to send a message to MSN Messenger with PHP, using a library supplied on the site. I haven't had a chance to try it out yet but will soon.

phpMyAdmin 2.11.5 was released. It's a bugfix-only version containing a security fix.

TalkPHP.com had posts on sending emails and database abstraction with the Zend Framework.

Web Cash looked at the headers necessary to tell a browser to cache images, which is important when dynamically resizing or creating images on the server side and not caching them server side. It also cuts down on bandwidth required and load time.

SQLite

SQLite is a database project with an embedded database engine. Adobe had become a sponsor of the project and it will be built into their newly released Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) software. Refer to The Register article for more details.

Unix

Michael Stutz at IBM.com posted 10 good UNIX usage habits for command line efficiency.

VMWare

The Register reported a critical vulnerability in VMWare virtualization tools which allows access to all files on the host's filesystem if the shared folders function is enabled. If you don't use the shared folders function then you should be safe.

EasyVMX.com has a function for creating VMWare virtual machines, which you can then run in the freely available VMWare Player, installing your operating system of choice from a CD or DVD ISO image.

PC World New Zealand reported that VMware is to embed virtualisation software in servers; Fujitsu-Siemens will be the first, and Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM will follow within 60 days.

Windows/Microsoft

New Zealand PC World reported that Microsoft has listed the applications that Vista's Service Pack 1 will break. From the few listed in the article, these seem to mainly be stuff like anti-virus and Internet security software. It's probably not really surprising that such applications will be broken because I would imagine they hook fairly deeply into the operating system.

Windows 2008 Server was officially released. It includes Hyper-V, the new virtualization platform, although it's still only in beta; IIS 7 which is a major upgrade to Microsoft's web server; and has a "server core" installation option which allows Server 2008 to be deployed in one of eight specific server roles.

Information Week had an interview with Steve Balmer, the CEO of Microsoft, and discussed virtualization, Windows Server 2008, Windows vs Linux, and so on.