Weekly Roundup - July 14th 2008Weekly Roundup - July 14th 2008

Posted July 14th, 2008 in Weekly Roundup

This is my weekly roundup for the week of July 7th to July 13th 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 - July 7th 2008
Tuesday: iPhone 3G available in Australia, Italy, New Zealand and Portugal on July 11
Wednesday: Get an image size with PHP
Thursday: Get a list of all available classes with PHP
Friday: Why do they expect free support?
Saturday: Just Kids Website - as at 12 July 2008
Sunday: No post (first day I haven't had a post ready for a while)

Interesting articles found offsite

CSS

Noupe.com posted 20 demos, tutorials and best practices for CSS styled lists, including screenshots, the HTML itself and then links through to the full tutorial.

phpwned posted how to extend the background or border to 100% of the parent element. This is useful when you have floating divs next to each other which need to have backgrounds or borders that are the same height, regardless of whether each "column" is a different height.

Drupal

Drupal 6.3 and 5.8 were released, fixing problems reported using the bug tracking system and some security vulnerabilities. Druapl is an open source CMS and modular framework system written in PHP and using MySQL or Postgresql as the database backend.

iPhone

There are already many, many reviews of the iPhone 3G including this one at PC World. iFixit flew to New Zealand to be one of the first in the world to buy an iPhone 3G and then promptly disassembled one to see what's inside. Jonny Gladwell was first in line and the first in the world to buy an iPhone 3G (I thought he was nuts when they reported it on the news something like 50 hours before the launch). RagePank and Stuff have New Zealand perspectives on the iPhone.

Joomla!

Joomla! 1.5.4 was released, including a few low to moderate security issues, many bug fixes, and several very nice improvements. Joomla is an open source content management system written in PHP and using MySQL. It was forked from the Mambo CMS system.

jQuery

nettuts.com posted how to create keypress navigation with jQuery. This means you can assign keys on your keyboard to navigation items on your website.

The Web Resources Depot posted how to do image zooming with jQuery really easily using the jqZoom plugin. I'll be trying this out this week and will probably be adding it to the JK website.

KDE

SimpleHelp.net posted how to install KDE apps on Windows, including step by step instructions with screenshots. I've tried this myself on Windows Vista, only I keep getting "appname.exe has stopped working" error messages after closing apps down, most commonly with kioslave. Also it didn't appear to be able to install Konsole which is an app I'd really like to see running on Windows.

Linux

PC World reviewed openSUSE 11.0

Geoff Palmer at PC World NZ blogged how to modify ISO files on Linux using ISO Master.

Carlos Justiniano posted how to automate backups on Linux on the IBM developerWorks website. His solution is to tar up and gzip the files and then transfer them to a remote server. I personally use rsync to manage my automated backups.

The Ubuntu Geek posted how to install VirtualBox 1.6 in Ubuntu including USB support. VirtualBox lets you run other operating systems within your host operating system, similar to how VMWare works.

MySQL

Peter at the MySQL Performance blog posted how to log your MySQL Command Line Sessions, which includes all SQL queries executed and the results output from those.

PHP

Vikram Vaswani posted how to Integrate your PHP application with Google Calendar on the IBM developerWorks website.

akrabat.com posted some notes on using the Zend Cache. This is an excellent example of being able to follow Zend's philosophy of being able to just use the bits of the Zend Framework you need. In this case, Rob just needed to add database caching to his existing application so only used that part of the Zend Framework.

Search Engines

Roshan Bhattarai posted 5 useful Google search tips: finding the time of a city or country, currency conversion, unit conversion, calculator and a dictionary.

Web Development

Six Revisions posted offsite links to cheat sheets for front-end web developers: cheat sheets for HTML/XHTML, CSS, Javascript, mootools, jQuery, RGB colour codes, SEO and WordPress.

Windows

The How To Geek posted how to print to PDF files on Windows Vista by installing Ghostscript and the free CutePDF Writer or the free doPDF Converter.

Watching the Net posted 7 tricks to make working with the Windows command prompt easier, including drag and drop filenames, copy and paste, and changing the window title.

Other stuff

Free Wiz posted 10 free chart APIs, including Google chart (images returned via constructed URLs), Flot (a plotting library for jQuery), PHP/SWF (generates charts in Flash from PHP) and Visifire (uses Silverlight and can be used with pretty much any backend technology or just plain HTML).