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Weekly Roundup - March 10th 2008

Posted March 10th, 2008 in Weekly Roundup

This is my weekly roundup for the week of March 3rd to 10th 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

Monday: Weekly Roundup - March 3rd 2008
Tuesday: Slax 6.0.2 Released (with screenshots)
Wednesday: SUSE Linux 10.2 DVD Differing MD5SUMS
Thursday: Checksums do not match, image might be corrupted error with jigdo
Friday: Unknown partition table error
Saturday: Determine whether PHP is being run via HTTP or CLI
Sunday: Determine whether PHP is being run via HTTP or CLI - Follow Up

Interesting articles found offsite

CSS

WebCredible.co.uk posted some guidelines for planning out your CSS stylesheets, with sections on commenting, putting general rules and main classes at the top, order the CSS in the same order as the HTML, and so on.

CSS Tricks posted the results of their poll asking "What CSS Reset do you use?" Eric Meyer's CSS Reset came in top. Perishable Press also has a post titled "A Killer Collection of Global CSS Reset Styles" which looks at a variety of options, including a condensed version of Eric Meyer's. Although it's not metioned in the poll, Yahoo's YUI Reset CSS is also very popular.

Design

Smashing Magazine posted 35 (Really) Incredible Free Icon Sets

Hardware

The Register reported that the ASUS Eee PC is to come pre-installed with Windows XP as well as Linux in future editions. Presumably a the XP version will be more expensive. The also have an older article which demonstrates how to install Windows XP onto an Eee PC.

Internet Explorer

Microsoft has about-faced on its decision to make Internet Explorer 8 require a special tag to use standards compliant mode and will now default to being standards compliant instead. The Internet Explorer blog has more details, Ars Technica has a nice summary here, and there's discussions at Slashdot and Digg.

And they've made Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 available as a "developer preview", although there doesn't seem to be any restriction to download - you're not asked to register etc.

DZone's Ajax Zone looked at Javascript in Internet Explorer 8

KDE

KDE 4.0.2 was released - you can find a review by The Register here and download Kubuntu 8.04 Alpha 6, which includes KDE 4.0.2, to test it out.

PolishLinux.org has some screenshots of KDE 4.1 (development release 783000).

Linux

The KDE edition of Linux Mint 4.0 was released. You can buy Linux Mint from the Linux CD Mall.

Slax 6.0.2 was released, and Linux.com posted a review. You can buy Slax from the Linux CD Mall.

The Ubuntu Geek posted how to monitor real time user logins on Ubuntu using the whowatch command line tool, and includes screenshots.

MySQL

BigDBAHead.com looked at some common performance mistakes with MySQL.

PHP

The Register reported that Zend is to extend their Windows PHP work to make PHP work better with Windows and SQL Server.

Ajaxray.com posted a universal feed generator for PHP for RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom.

Symfony

Stefan Koopmanschap at the PHP Zone / DZone posted 5 useful tips for Symfony beginners. Symfony is a framework for PHP.

User Interfaces

Component House posted an interesting article "Ten UI Lessons from the Real World" which looks at mistakes made in real world signs (you're sure to have seen most of these in an email from a friend...) and how they relate to UI lessons.

Windows/Microsoft

Microsoft is to cut the price of Windows Vista when SP1 is released to retail by as much as 39% in New Zealand, 20% in the USA, and up to 49% on some versions in the UK and Europe, as reported by PC World New Zealand.