Bytes

A scrapbook of bit and pieces.

Welcome

14 March 2007

_images/lab_glassware1.png

( Picture rendered using Maxwell rendering software from Next Limit )

Mootools

22 March 2007

MooTools is a compact, modular, Object-Oriented javascript framework designed to make writing extensible and compatible code easier and faster. MooTools lets you get the job done efficiently and effectively.

http://mootools.net

some samples at

http://www.chrisesler.com/mootools/index.html

Pixelpost

22 March 2007

php and mysql based photo-blogging s/ware

http://www.pixelpost.org/

PuTTY

22 March 2007

Terminal Emulator, PuTTY is

a free software SSH, Telnet, rlogin, and raw TCP client. It was originally available only for Windows, but is now also available on various Unix platforms, with work-in-progress ports to Classic Mac OS and Mac OS X. Other people have contributed unofficial ports to other platforms, such as Symbian powered mobile phones. It is beta software written and maintained primarily by Simon Tatham, and is open source, licensed under the MIT License.

Courtesy of wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PuTTY

Check out the PuTTY home page at:

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

bash

22 March 2007

bash is a Unix shell written for the GNU Project. The name of the actual executable is bash. Its name is an acronym for Bourne-again shell, a pun (‘Bourne again’ / ‘born again’) on the name of the Bourne shell (sh), an early and important Unix shell written by Stephen Bourne and distributed with Version 7 Unix circa 1978. Bash was created in 1987 by Brian Fox. In 1990 Chet Ramey became the primary maintainer.

Courtesy of wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash_(Unix_shell)

SSH (SecureSHell) - DreamHost

22 March 2007

SSH, or Secure SHell, is a secure alternative to telnet. SSH can be used to securely copy files, access CVS, cron jobs and other DreamHost services via standard unix command line also known as shell. All SSH traffic travels over a secured connection rather than in the plain text like in telnet. It is strongly recommended that you use SSH rather than telnet.

The DreamHost wiki entry:

https://help.dreamhost.com/hc/en-us/articles/216041267-SSH-overview

and How to setup SSH on Windows XP

http://www.phileplanet.com/archives/2006/08/how-to-setup-ssh-on-windows-xp/

MyHeadlines

23 March 2007

MyHeadlines is an RSS reader that caches content from many sources and provides Full Text search capabilities. The emergent behaviour is an efficient Current Events Search Engine.

Using MyHeadlines each user has the ability to subscribe to the news feeds that interest them the most. There’s screen scraping technology for building custom feeds, and for harvesting Stock Ticker data. Blogging, Link Dump, and Comments are features included in the standard download.

If you have a PHP and MySQL based web architecture then MyHeadlines is the Content Syndication Engine for You!

http://www.jmagar.com/index.php

The application itself works fine and does what it says on the tin. The only problem I found was the amount of news links that you got to wade through - perhaps this type of news aggregation is not for me.

Text Editors

12 August 2007

The text editors I use:

PFE

_images/pfe1.png

PFE (Programmers File Editor) the old diehard editor. This has been with me since the early 90’s and is still with me today (well occasionally at least). Simple editor with few frills - it does the job.

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/steveb/cpaap/pfe/

Notepad++

_images/notepad.png

Notepad++ is a free source code editor (and Notepad replacement), which supports several programming languages, running under the MS Windows environment.

This editor has fared me well over the last couple of years http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

Komodo Edit

_images/komodo.png

Komod Edit is a free, cut down version of the full Komodo developers IDE. Supported languages include Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and Tcl; plus support for browser-side code including JavaScript, CSS, HTML and XML. Background syntax checking and syntax coloring catch errors immediately, while autocomplete and calltips guide you as you write. Available on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

http://www.activestate.com/products/komodo_edit/

WinSCP

13 August 2007

WinSCP is an open source SFTP client for Windows. Its main function is the secure file transfer between a local and a remote computer. Beyond this, WinSCP offers basic file manager functionality. It uses Secure Shell (SSH) and supports, in addition to Secure FTP, also legacy SCP protocol.

last noted at http://winscp.net/

GeSHi

13 August 2007

GeSHi is a Generic Syntax Highlighter

_images/geshi.png

GeSHi started as an idea to create a generic syntax highlighter for the phpBB forum system, but has since been generalised. It aims to be a simple but powerful highlighting class, with the following goals:

  • Support for a wide range of popular languages
  • Easy to add a new language for highlighting
  • Highly customisable output formats

Available from http://qbnz.com/highlighter/

MediaWiki

13 August 2007

MediaWiki is the software used for Wikipedia ( http://www.wikipedia.org ) and the other Wikimedia Foundation websites. Compared to other wikis, it has an excellent range of features and support for high-traffic websites (update: Wikipedia peaks at 380 requests per second as of August 2004).

Learn all about it at http://www.mediawiki.org

Category Cloud

14 August 2007

version 1.6 is the latest release of Category Cloud, a WordPress plugin that shows categories as a tag cloud which can (optionally) be coloured.

_images/cloud.png

Available from

http://www.mapelli.info/web20/category-cloud-16

Based on the original weighted categories plugin from

http://www.hitormiss.org/projects/weighted-categories

Free Download Manager

16 August 2007

Something that I use on a daily basis, Free Download Manager (FDM) is a powerful and easy-to-use download accelerator and manager. It is open-source software distributed under a GPL license.

http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/index.htm

Version 2.5 has been released recently - details of all the available features can be found at

http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/features.htm

Microsoft PowerShell

22 August 2007

Microsoft PowerShell is a command-line environment for Windows and is available for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Vista (links below)

  • Windows XP x86 http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=7273814
  • Windows XP x64 http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=7273815
  • Windows Server 2003 x86 http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=7273816
  • Windows Server 2003 x64 http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=7273817
  • Windows Vista x86 http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=7273818
  • Windows Vista x64 http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=7273819

A pre-requisite is the .NET Framework Version 2.0

There is a free eBook that introduces PowerShell scripting at

http://download.microsoft.com/download/a/9/4/a94270c7-ed16-4c72-8280-658c66315719/Windows%20Powershell%20-%20EN.zip

(In addition to scripting, developers can create new commands for PowerShell using C# or VB. The Windows SDK contains everything you need to start developing commands.)

Full documentation for PowerShell is available from MSDN ( the Microsoft Developer Network) at

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/aa139691.aspx

IE Developer Toolbar

13 September 2007

The IE Developer Toolbar provides a number of features for extracting more detail from web pages.

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=92716

You get the ability to

  • Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a Web page.
  • Locate and select specific elements on a Web page through a variety of techniques.
  • Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.
  • View HTML object class names, ID’s, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.
  • Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
  • Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS web feed links.
  • Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.
  • Immediately resize the browser window to a new resolution.
  • Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.
  • Display a fully featured design ruler to help accurately align and measure objects on your pages.
  • Find the style rules used to set specific style values on an element.
  • View the formatted and syntax colored source of HTML and CSS.

Fiddler

13 September 2007

A web debugging proxy which is used to log traffic between an application and the internet. It allows you to fiddle with the in-coming and out-going data.

QuickStart Video.png

Available for Internet Explorer and Firefox amongst other browsers.

Details available from

http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/

or

https://www.telerik.com/download/fiddler

Ajax View

13 September 2007

The Ajax View proxy provides the ability for remotely monitoring client-side wep application performance and behaviour.

This is currently an early research prototype available from Microsoft Research.

The Ajax View project at Microsoft Research aims to give developers easy visibility into their web apps’ performance and behavior as the apps run in end-users’ browsers. Ajax View uses a server-side proxy to rewrite JavaScript on-the-fly and automatically inject instrumentation code into a web application. This instrumentation provides end-to-end visibility into app performance, behavior and critical state. On-the-fly rewriting allows Ajax View to serve different instrumentation across users and over time, capturing more detail about app behavior while minimizing per-user performance overhead.

Find out all the details at

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/ajax-view/ (updated link 17 January 2018)

Open multiple tabs when starting IE or Firefox

07 November 2007

You can open multiple home page tabs when starting IE or Firefox as shown below:

In IE Open the General tab from the menu item Tools…Internet Options

_images/multiple_tabs_ie.png

and simply enter the address of each page you want to open in a separate tab on a different line in the Home Page list box, as indicated.

In Firefox Open the Main tab from the menu item Tools…Options

_images/multiple_tabs_ff1.jpg

and add the address of each page required separated by a vertical bar ‘|’ character as shown.

VectorMagic

13 November 2007

VectorMagic is an online tool from Stanford University, for converting bitmap images to vector art images.

https://vectormagic.com

Upload an image, follow the simple instructions and the vector representation of your image will be created for you.

_images/vectorization_horizontal_narrow.png

The system currently supports JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP and TIFF formats for input and will produce EPS, SVG and PNG files as output.

Testing Windows Live Writer

13 November 2007

I’m writing this using Windows Live Writer which I’ve just downloaded. This is one of the applications which is part of the Windows Live series and is available, at the time of writing, from

http://get.live.com/

Other items include:

  • Hotmail: Stay connected anywhere with your Web e-mail account
  • Mail: Access your multiple e-mail accounts in one place
  • Messenger: Connect, share, and make your conversations count
  • Toolbar: Easy access to Windows Live services from any Web page
  • Spaces: The best place to share your world online
  • Photo Gallery: Get creative and share your photos and videos
  • Events: Plan your event. Send invitations. Share photos.
  • OneCare Family Safety: Help protect your family and computer

So far so good, although I would like to see an auto-save feature; it may already be included, I just haven’t found it yet.

Installation was relatively straightforward, although it did seem to take long time to complete.

In addition to Live Writer, I also installed Live Mail which is a client email application and Photo Gallery which is equivalent to Picasa from Google.