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Weekly Roundup - December 1st 2008

Posted December 1st, 2008 in Weekly Roundup

This is my weekly roundup for the week of November 24th to 30th 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 - November 24th 2008

Tuesday:
- Validating numbers with PHP

Wednesday:
- Fedora 10 released

Thursday:
- Add the RPMForge custom repository to CentOS

Friday:
- Find the index of a string within a string with Javascript

Saturday:
- GoDaddy 99 cent .com domain coupon code

Sunday:
- Installing subversion on CentOS

Interesting articles found offsite

CSS

In the Woods posted 15 CSS tricks that must be learnt, including: absolute positioning inside a relative positioned element; IE double float margin bugs; alpha transparency PNG fixes for IE; CSS cross browser transparancy; CSS image sprites; and using sliding doors buttons.

Digital Cameras

Roman Loyola and Ben Long at PC World looked at Digital SLR Cameras, looking at some of the features of them and a list of their favourites.

Free fonts

Smashing Magazine posted another list of free fonts: "15 Beautiful High-Quality Free Fonts" With two exceptions they are all text fonts. Of the other two, one is the alphabet done with high heels (although it doesn't actually appear possible to download this one) and the other is a collection of rally symbols. Some of the free fonts require registration to download.

FreeBSD

FreeBSD 6.4 was released. Read the release announcement and release notes on the FreeBSD website and go to the ftp mirrors list to download it.

Free icons

Brian at Elite by Design posted 22 free icon sets, including some pretty cool iPhone and OSX looking icons. A screenshot of some grouped icons is displayed along with a link to the respective websites to get the icon sets. As with all free icons make sure to read the terms of use before using them in your projects.

Gmail Notifiers

Federico Kereki at Linux.com posted about some Linux Gmail Notifiers which notify you when mail arrives in your Gmail account. The notifiers reviewed are: KCheckGmail (a KDE app); CheckGmail (a GTK/Gnome app); Gmail Notifier (a GTK based Python script); and Mail Notification (oriented to Gnome but works in KDE and Xfce as well).

Google Chrome

Google Chrome version 0.4.154.25 was released containing a roll up of fixes that had previously been released to the Dev channel users. New features include a bookmark manager with import/export functions; a privacy section with options; and a new blocked pop-up notifier.

Google Search Wiki

Whether you love it or hate it, Google's SearchWiki is here. Here are some posts made over the last week looking at it:
- GoogleTutor: Google SearchWiki: Toy or Trash?
- TechCrunch: It Wasn't Broke & SearchWiki Is Back. Here’s How To Kill It For Good
- PC World NZ: Some question Google's 'rookie mistakes' with SearchWiki
- facesaerch blog: Turn Google SearchWiki on / off

Joomla

Joomla 1.5.8 was released, containing bug fixes and two moderate-level security fixes (com_content XSS vulnerability and com_weblinks XSS vulnerability).

jQuery

Nettuts had a post about the LiveQuery jQuery plugin which will continue to bind events and callbacks to new elements as they are added to the page. View the demo here and make sure you read the comments on that page as well.

David Walsh followed up his earlier posted about link nudging with MooTools by showing how to do link nudging with jQuery. This is an effect which adds padding to the left and can be seen in the footer navigation of his blog, athough his navigation is done with MooTools and not jQuery.

KDE

KDE 4.2 beta 1 was released. The KDE community is now in bugfixing mode in order to provide a smooth KDE 4.2.0 to end users in January 2009.

Linux

Fedora 10 was released. Read more at various websites:
- The Register: Rock-solid Fedora 10 brings salvation to Ubuntu weary
- Ars Technica: Fedora 10 released, brimming with new features
- Linux.com: Fedora 10 proves infrastructure matter

Varun Kashyap at makeuseof.com posted how to create a custom splashimage for GRUB using the GIMP image editor and editing the GRUB boot loader in a text editor.

Mobile Web

Gizmodo reviewed 8 phones to see how well they delivered the web, looking at page rendering and average bandwidth and download times over 3G and wifi. The iPhone 3G and Android GI came out on tops and the Samsung phones didn't fare too well.

MySQL

MySQL 5.1 has been released for general availability for production use. Read what's new in MySQL 5.1 and download it for your platform. However... a couple of days later Michael Widenius (aka Monty) basically said not to install MySQL 5.1 yet on his blog due to a large number of bugs which can cause MySQL to crash. So why did they release it as GA?!

Photography

Smashing Magazine posted a list of "50 Beautiful Winter Wonderland Photos"

PHP

Mike Bernat at DZone's Web Builder Zone posted his PHP best practices, which include developing with error reporting set at E_ALL and E_STRICT; utilizing 3rd party software; and to validate and sanitize your inputs.

phpMyAdmin

phpMyAdmin 3.1.0 was released. This version has a new setup mechanism and supports BLOBstreaming and the Swekey hardware authentication.

Python

Jeremy M Jones posted how to create a daemon process with Python.

UNIX

Zach Graeve posted a UNIX commands cheatsheet grouping the commands into: output, communication and help; environment status; environment control; process control; and file manipulation.

uTorrent

The first beta of uTorrent for the Mac was released. uTorrent is a lightweight bittorrent until now just for Windows. As stated on the Mac download page: "This is beta software, and may contain serious bugs. We think it's stable enough to share and hope your feedback will help us improve it."

VirtualBox

The Ubuntu Geek posted how to install Virtualbox 2.0.2 in Ubuntu 8.04. I would imagine the process is exactly the same for Ubuntu 8.10 which is the current version of Ubuntu at the time of this post.

Web Design

Additcott Web had a post looking at Sidebar Placement: Do You Lean to the Right or the Left? The post lists pros for each side and the author concludes with the reason they put their sidebar on the left. The comments are worth a read through as well.

Web Development

Yong Fook posted a list of 10 web development tricks including: SV checkout to the production website; wrap floats in a float to clear; and separating static and system files to keep the system files out of the web visible root.

WordPress

WordPress 2.6.5 was released and fixes one security problem (an XSS exploit that only affects IP-based virtual servers running on Apache 2.x) and three bugs. WordPress recommends everyone upgrade to this release.

Other Stuff

Steven Snell at Design Mag posted a list of 16 tips for freelancers, which include: weed out the tire kickers; charge up front; accurate record keeping is critical; taking every job is not a good decision; repeat clients are priceless; and getting professional tax advice is a good idea.