Weekly Roundup - June 23rd 2008Weekly Roundup - June 23rd 2008

Posted June 23rd, 2008 in Weekly Roundup

This is my weekly roundup for the week of June 16th to June 22nd 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 - June 16th 2008
Tuesday: Clearing the default value of text input with Javascript
Wednesday: Targeting specific versions of Internet Explorer and other browsers with conditional comments
Thursday: Command line arguments for the PHP CLI
Friday: VMWare Server - errors opening virtual machines from Workstation/Player
Saturday: The user is not associated with a trusted SQL Server connection
Sunday: Case Study: Cyetec Smart Alarms

Interesting articles found offsite

CSS

noupe.com listed 20 CSS fixes for common issues, such as IE bug fixes, centering block elements and CSS floats. The list has a brief description and then a link through to another website with more information about each item.

Smashing Magazine posted a list/review of CSS editors.

Firefox

Stuart Herbert listed 40 Firefox extensions for web developers, including ColorZilla (an eyedropper, colour picker, page zoomer etc), Firebug (a live DOM & CSS inspector) and Live HTTP Headers (which lets you view the HTTP headers of a page).

The final version of Mozilla Firefox 3 was released. The Firefox developers were attempting to break a world record for the most downloads in a day and achieved their goal. I am writing this part of this post on Mozilla Firefox 3 and a large number of visitors to this blog are using it just 4 days after it was released.

Hardware

The Register reviewed the ASUS 901, the new Linux edition of the ASUS subnotebook with a 1024x600 screen.

Linux

openSUSE 11.0 was released and comes with Gnome 2.22 and both KDE 3.5.9 and KDE 4.0.4. openSUSE is one of the most popular Linux distributions and was the all time most popular distributon on my Linux CD Mall website when I was selling Linux (but I am no longer selling Linux). Read a brief review here at Linux.com

Linux.com reviewed the recently release Linux Mint 5.0

LinuxHaxor.net posted 5 days to screencast your Linux desktop with the applications Instanbul, Wink, Xvidcap, vnc2swf and Recordmydesktop.

MySQL

Mike Bernat looked at MyISAM and InnoDB, two storage engines for MySQL, with a brief explanation of each, how they compare with one another and when you might use one over the other.

PHP

ProDevTips had a post about extending the Zend DB Table with a bunch of useful functions. Zend_DB_Table is a database table class in the Zend Framework.

Kevin van Zonneveld looked at how to ehance PHP session management in a cluster by storing session information on a memcahce server.

The Developer Zone posted how to cache PHP pages with output buffering.

Programming

DevTopics posted 21 laws of computer programming, including such gems as #1 Any given program, once deployed, is already obsolete, #5 Only ten percent of the code in any given program will ever execute and #13 Any code of your own that you haven't looked at in months might as well have been written by someone else.

Wine / Crossover Office

The 1.0 version of Wine was finally released after 15 years of development. Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X, OpenGL, and Unix. In more easy to understand terms, it allows you to run Windows applications on Linux. Read the release announcement here, and the discussion on Slashdot here.

And Codeweavers released version 7 of Crossover Office for Mac as posted by US PC World. Crossover Office is a commercial offering based on Wine which concentrates on supporting particular application versions such as Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop.