Home | About Chris Hope | Contact Chris Hope | Search:

Weekly Roundup - September 15th 2008

Posted September 15th, 2008 in Weekly Roundup

This is my weekly roundup for the week of September 8th to 14th 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

After writing both a weekly and monthly roundup on Monday the previous week I decided to start writing two posts per day and continued this again this week for Monday to Wednesday. However I will be away for the weekend and Tuesday to Thursday next week so in order to ensure daily postings I dropped it back to one a day so I could write enough content before time before I go away.

Monday:
- Weekly Roundup - September 8th 2008
- Export data from SQL Server to a tab file with bcp

Tuesday:
- Show the exim mail queue
- Export selected data from SQL Server to a tab file with bcp

Wednesday:
- Safari / OS X Proxy Issues
- My new phone - Nokia 6121

Thursday:
- Google Chrome Stats

Friday:
- Website changes September 11th 2008

Saturday:
- Argument list too long when copying/deleting/moving files on Linux

Sunday:
- Google Chrome automatically update itself without asking

Interesting articles found offsite

Adobe Photoshop

Sharp Web Design posted 10 Photoshop Techniques You Can't Work Without which include one click selection, layer mask instead of eraser, and rasterize style layers.

CSS/Firefox

CSS-Tricks posted how to change the CSS for Firefox's "View Source" function.

Domain Names

Chris Guthrie posted a loophole in GoDaddy for getting private registrations for all your domains for free. I suspect this loophole will be fixed especially if anyone at GoDaddy gets wind of his post.

And I found this useful forum at NamePros which has various GoDaddy offer codes.

Firefox

Ars Technica posted Why Mozilla is committed to Gecko as WebKit popularity grows especially now that Googl eChrome has been launched which also uses Safari's webkit. Webkit is in turn based on the KHTML rendering engine used in the KDE browser Konqueror.

FreeBSD

The first beta relases of FreeBSD 6.4 and 7.1 were made available.

Google

In their continuing attempt to index all knowledge, Google have started to make old newspapers available online. Read more at the Official Google Blog and Ars Technica.

Google's Webmaster Central Blog posted "Demystifying the duplicate content penalty"

Google Chrome

Ars Technica reported a 7% share for Chrome on their own website. Given it's a technical website you would expect it to have a higher percentage than most. And this is confirmed by the high level of Firefox usage and low level of Internet Explorer usage on Ars.

The "Google Operating System" blog posted some useful tips for Chrome. I knew some of these already but there were some nice new ones I didn't know about.

Javascript

Smashing Magazine posted a list of 75 useful Javascript techniques with a brief description, a screenshot and link through to the tutorial website. Topics include textbox list auto-completion, syntax highlighting, AJAX auto suggest, SWFObject, fancy zooming and date picking.

Mind Tree posted 14 AJAX, JavaScript & DHTML Datagrids with a brief description, screenshots and links through to the respective websites.

Joomla

Joomla 1.5.7 was released containing security and bugfixes. The page linked to strongly recommendeds that users immediately upgrade.

jQuery

Shane's Ramblings posted how to scroll to the bottom of an element with jQuery.

Deep Liquid's JCrop is a jQuery plug-in for adding cropping functionality to your web application. View the demo to see how it works. As you make your selection on the image the top, right, bottom, left co-ordinates and width, height sizes are calculated and displayed in the demo.

"Random Acts of Coding" had a post about how to do form validation with jQuery, using the jQuery_Validation plugin.

Linux

Linux.com looked at the use of UUIDs in /etc/fstab to identify disks without the usual /dev/hd* or /dev/sd* style labels. This allows you to insert new hard drives into your computer in any order, which would normally mess up mounting. Using UUIDs means you can put the new hard drive onto any cable in any order and there are no mount issues.

Jun Auza posted a list of 5 Free and Open Source Real-Time Strategy Games for Linux with a brief summary of each and links through to the respective websites.

Linux Format posted 10 tips for lazy sysadmins, including caching your password with ssh-agent; using screen to avoid repeat logins and connect multiple users; and expanding the bash shell's auto completion.

CentOS 4.7 was released.

MySQL

The "Adventures in PHP / DHTML / CSS and MySQL" blog posted how to use memcache with MySQL and PHP.

The MySQL Performace Blog posted how to check for unused indexes in MySQL.

Nettuts posted 10 Principles of the PHP Masters, which include never trust your users, invest in PHP caching, speed up development with an IDE, and use (or don't use) a PHP framework.

SEO

Frinity posted a list of useful SEO tools.

Unix

John Fronckowiak at IBM's Developer Works posted "10 more good UNIX usage habits" which include file name completion, history expansion, reusing previous arguments to a command line application, and creating temporary files without a text editor.

Virtualization

Randall C. Kennedy at PC World compared VMWare Workstation with Sun's Virtualbox.

Web Stuff

frinity posted links to a whole bunch of cheatsheets, grouped by Apache and .htaccess, CSS, HTML/XHTML, Javascript, MySQL and PHP.

I found the "Simpletons Guide to Web Server Analysis" on the webalizer website which explains why web stats are so difficult to work calculate.

Six Revisions posted some useful cheat sheets for web developers, which include for Adobe Photoshop, colors, tpyography, CSS, HTML and more. There's a screenshot of each and then a link through to the respective websites to get the full cheat sheet.

WordPress

WordPress 2.6.2 was released. The linked to page notes that if you allow open registration on your blog, you should definitely upgrade, because with open registration enabled it is possible in WordPress versions 2.6.1 and earlier to craft a username such that it will allow resetting another user’s password to a randomly generated password.