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Weekly Roundup - December 8th 2008

Posted December 8th, 2008 in Weekly Roundup (Updated December 9th, 2008)

This is my weekly roundup for the week of December 1st to 7th 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 - December 1st 2008
- Monthly Roundup - November 2008

Tuesday:
- List installed packages with YUM

Wednesday:
- Insert multiple records into MySQL with a single query

Thursday:
- Personalised Plates Website Changes December 3rd 2008

Friday:
- Nagios trends.cgi not found error

Saturday:
- Switch off autocomplete for an HTML form field

Sunday:
- Method chaining with PHP

Interesting articles found offsite

CodeIgniter

Ask About PHP posted about helpers, plugins and libraries in CodeIgniter, a PHP framework. The post explains what each is for using Google Graphs as an example, and then when you should use what.

Cron

Eric Wendelin posted a crontab tutorial, showing how to add/edit a crontab entry, the crontab scheduling format and a few example crontab entries.

Free Templates

Steven Snell at Smashing Magazine posted 100 Free High-Quality XHTML/CSS Templates. There's a screenshot of each and a link to each respective and direct download links. Some templates require registration first. As with all free stuff on the web always check with the originating website to see what restrictions are in place for these free templates before using them in your own project.

Gmail

Kevin Purdy at Life Hacker posted a list of 10 things you forgot Gmail can do, which include: changing the look with themes (as long as you are not a Google Apps user like me); back up your email to any system; and see all the places you're signed into and remotely sign yourself out, which is useful if you forgot to log out when using someone else's computer.

Google Chrome

Chip at Geeks are Sexy posted that Google Chrome is to get an extensions framework, which is something many have been critical about. The design goals make it important for extensions to load quickly, not crash or hang the browser as a whole, and not get in the way of updates to Chrome. These are all issues with the extensions implementation in Firefox.

Hardware

James Kendrick at Gigaom posted a list of 5 things to consider before buying a netbook: how are you going to use your device? How much screen to you need? How small of a keyboard will you tolerate? Do you need the (heavier) extended battery? Can you walk away from Windows? The last one isn't so relevent any more with the proliferation of netbooks and most have a Windows option, if not only a Windows option.

jQuery

AjaxLine posted a list of 10 useful jQuery plugins, including: virtual jQuery keyboard; date range picker; colour picker; and word counter. There's a screenshot of each plugin in action and a link through to each plugin's website.

KDE

Ryan Paul at Ars Technica reported about the first beta release of KDE 4.2, noting that "many aspects of the environment are starting to feel very smooth and polished. Although it still lacks stability and has some noticeable bugs, the new beta provides a much stronger desktop experience than 4.1." There are a few screenshots as well.

Ian McLean at Royal HeHe2-ness posted how to try out the beta version of KDE 4.2 in Ubuntu.

Linux

Mitch Frazier at Linux Journal posted how to run DOS apps on Linux with DOSBox.

The Ubuntu Geek posted how to set a static IP address in Ubuntu 8.10, which includes having to remove the Gnome Network Manager because if left installed this application will overwrite any changes you make to your configuration when the system is rebooted.

Bruce Byfield at Linux.com looked at three graphical mount managers for Linux which make mounting disks possible without having to use the command line. The three reviewed are Forlex Mount Manager (a fairly basic utility), PySDM (a more comprehensive Python GTK app), and MountManager (the most user friendly of the three and written with Qt 4).

MooTools

David Walsh posted an interesting idea of sending email notifications for broken images using MooTools Ajax. The emails are sent on the server-side after the Ajax request but you could just as easily log the failure to a file or database to save yourself from potentially receiving a heap of emails.

MySQL

RMB Scripting posted how to connect to a MySQL server with C#. The tutorial creates a form containing fields for the hostname, login name and password to establish a test connection.

Online Advertising

Steven Snell at Smashing Magazine looked at online advertising and its impact on web design, posting screenshots and commenting on the good and bad on various websites. The last section in the post ("Best Practices for Designers") covers designing to meet the needs of the clients; laying out the website so ads are a natural part of the design; considering future needs; and considering the impact on visitors.

Opera

The first alpha release of the Opera 10 web browser has been made available for download. Read some comments about it by Adam Minchinton on the Opera Desktop Team blog and download it from there if you wish to try it out. It's available for Windows, Mac and Unix. Also read Harry McCracken's comments over at Techologizer.

Photography

Jacob Gube at Smashing Magazine posted a list of 50 digital photography photoshop tutorials, grouping them into photo effects; image enhancement and correction; and photo manipulation and retouching.

PHP

PHP 5.3 alpha 3 and PHP 5.2.7 were released. Update later on in the day... PHP 5.2.7 was withdrawn due to a bug which affects configurations where magic_quotes_gpc is enabled, because it remains off even when set to on. In the meantime, use PHP 5.2.6 until PHP 5.2.8 is later released. Update 09 Dec: PHP 5.2.8 has been released.

Python

Python 3.0 (final) was released and is incompatible with the 2.x line of releases. The language is mostly the same, but many details, especially how built-in objects like dictionaries and strings work, have changed considerably, and a lot of deprecated features have finally been removed. Some useful links: Release notes, Documentation, What's new

Erica Sadun at Ars Technica compiled a list of 6 online resources for learning Python. These include the offical Python tutorial; Python Rocks; and the online books "A Bite of Python" and "Learning with Python (2nd edition).

Phil Hughes at Linux Journal wrote about dealing with command line options with Python using the OptionParser class.

Jens Alfke asked Python 3.0: What’s The Point? on his Thought Palace blog. The discussion in the comments section of the post is worth a good read through if you're a Python developer wondering the same thing.

Silverstripe

SilverStripe v2.3.0 release candidate 2 was made available. This release fixes a number of bugs and also updates documentation for installing SilverStripe on Microsoft Server 2008 with IIS 7.

Squid

Ben Martin at Linux.com posted how to Keeping an eye on your Web proxy usage with Squid Graph. Squid Graph is a Perl script that takes your Squid proxy server access.log file and generates a Web page showing you statistics about your proxy accesses and transfers, including the number of cache hits and the percentage of requests that were served by the cache alone.

Symfony

Symfony 1.2 was released. Note that Symfony 1.2 requires PHP 5.2 and "works best" with PHP 5.2.4 or above. Useful links: what's new; the Symfony cookbook; upgrading from 1.1 to 1.2. Symfony is a PHP MVC framework. I've never used it myself but it's used by a number of large projects including Yahoo Bookmarks.

Web Design

Steven Snell at Design Mag posted 11 ways to improve a blog theme without a complete re-design. These include: improving the look and usefullness of the sidebar; work on comment design; re-design the footer; improving the readability of posts; and adding something new.

Windows

T.J. Mininday at MakeUseOf.com posted a list of 7 Better Alternatives To Common Windows Apps. There's a description, screenshot and link through to each alternative app's website, as well as a list of other alternatives under each one. From the main list I've tried "Vista Start Menu" myself and didn't like it, and Notepad++ which I use every day.

Word Press

WordPress 2.7 Release Candidate 1 was released: "With the release of RC1, we’re in the final leg of development before the release of 2.7. 280 commits since beta 3 have polished the new admin UI (including new menu icons created by the winners of our icon design contest) and fixed all known blocker bugs."

Zend Framework

Lorna Jane Mitchell at iBuildings posted about the Zend_Paginator module which allow collections of data to be paginated. The post features a PHP code example and the result data output using Smarty.

Other Stuff

Jeff Chandler at Perfomancing posted 9 Reasons To Link Out from your blog or website, including: expanding knowledge; backing up your claims; and unselfish feeling.

Darren Rowse at ProBlogger posted 10 Reasons to Avoid mailto Links which include: revealing your email address to spam bots; unpredictable results when clicking the link; and it can reduce the volume of "pointless" queries.

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