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Weekly Roundup - April 7th 2008

Posted April 7th, 2008 in Weekly Roundup

This is my weekly roundup for the week of March 31st to April 6th 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 31st 2008
Tuesday: Monthly Roundup - March 2008
Wednesday: Knoppix 5.3.1 Screenshots
Thursday: eBay "Internal error to the application" RSS feed error
Friday: genisoimage/mkisofs "Incorrectly encoded string" error
Saturday: Modifying the Linux Grub boot loader's options
Sunday: Didn't post anything. I wrote the week's posts all on Monday night but for some reason never bothered to write one for Sunday during the week, and didn't have time over the weekend...

Interesting articles found offsite

Adobe

Peter Griffin posted a review of Photoshop Express, Adobe's (currently beta) online free Photoshop like application.

Wipeout44.com posted how to create multiple page PDF documents with Adobe Photoshop.

CSS

Rick Strahl posted about how to do Absolute Positioning inside of a Relative Element with CSS, using the example of a delete button appearing in the top right corner of a photo album on hover.

Jens Meiret posted a useful CSS Properties List, containing a full list of CSS properties which will be updated, and showing which apply to each CSS standard. Jens also has an HTML elements list available on his site too, again showing which X/HTML standard they apply to.

Dave Woods posted how to create rounded corner CSS boxes with one image.

Hardware

Hot Hardware posted a preview of the Windows XP version of the ASUS Eee PC, with photos of the hardware itself, screenshots, and benchmarking. The ASUS Eee PC with Windows XP is due to be shipped this month. There is a discussion on Slashdot about this here, and Hot Hardware's Linux based ASUS Eee PC review from November can be found here.

Smashing Magazine posted photos of 22 laptops/notebooks with slick designs and concepts.

IIS

bia securities posted an article about How to enable pretty urls with Asp.Net MVC and IIS6, suggesting setting up a wildcard mapping, add an isapi mapping and have an extension (.mvc) use the asp.net runtime, or using Isapi_rewrite, concluding that Isapi_rewrite is the best and easiest. This allows you to create rewrite rules on IIS in the same way as with Apache.

Javascript

Ntt.cc posted 4 ways to dynamically load external Javascript with examples: using document.write, dynamically change the src property value, dynamically create <script> element, and using XMLHTTP and create a script object.

JQuery

There was a post on TalkPHP which looked at how to use JQuery's Ajax with PHP to add data to a MySQL database.

Nopue.com posted links to 51 JQuery examples, grouping them into categories such as sliding panels, menus, tabs, slideshows, transitions effects, lightbox and form validation.

LearningJquery.com posted a guide about how to work with events in jQuery; this is part 1 of a multi-part tutorial.

ProDevTips.com posted a tutorial about how to sort HTML tables with JQuery.

KDE

PolishLinux.org reviewed KDE 4 rev 790000 along with many screenshots, and concluded that it's much more stable than the previous releases and is looking forward to replacing KDE 3.5 with KDE 4.1 when it's released.

KDE 4.0.3 was released and the KDE development team also noted that KDE 4.1 will be released in July 2008. The KDE 4/4.1 schedules and feature plan can be found here.

Linux

Justin Washick posted a straight forward Introduction to Linux at TechwareLabs.com, clearly explaining things such as "What do you mean by open-source?", "Windows works fine. Why should I use something else?" and "How is it better? What makes it easier?".

The Ubuntu Geek posted about using the QGrubEditor, a visual tool for editing Grub menus. This is a lot easier for most people than editing the grub menu in a text editor.

DebianAdmin.com posted an overview of the Linux directory structure.

PHP

There was a post on TalkPHP about using the Zend DB database abstraction library. This is part of the Zend Framework.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney posted a tutorial about Login and Authentication with Zend Framework. The is a useful introduction to the Zend Framework showing how to use the Zend Form and Zend Controller.

RSS

Smashing Magazine posted some free RSS icons which have a different spin on the traditional RSS icon.

Search Engines

Google recently acquired DoubleClick and they have officially announced they are selling the SEO section of DoubleClick called Performics, because they can't maintain objectivity when being both the search engine and the SEO.

SQL Server

DevMuse.com posted how to reset the identity increment value in MS SQL, looking at three different ways to do it: DBCC CHECKIDENT, Drop and Add the column, and Drop and Create the table.

SSH

Debian Admin had a post about how to automatically restart SSH sessions and tunnels, using the autossh tool.

Windows

The How To Geek posted how to get rid of the annoying "use the web service to find the correct program" dialog and skip straight to the list of programs to select instead. This works in both Windows XP and Windows Vista.

WordPress

Nopue.com posted 78 WordPress plugins grouped into categories such as post related plugins, user related plugins, stats, contact forms and so on. There are links to download each plugin and some have links to live demos of them.