Bearfruit

I have a theory and so far it has worked out correctly. There are three ways to complete a web application project. The wrong way is to skip the planning step and just start designing and coding. This greatly decreases the chance of finishing your project. However there are two ways that I’ve used to complete projects:

OK, I’ve been trying to think of a way to report this problem for a while. Who does it go to, GNOME HIG, Ubuntu, Usability, Art team? I’ll probably send it to all of them but in order to simplify my explanation, this blog post exists.

In brief: GTK dialogs are way too big and they tend to waste a lot of screen space. To demonstrate my point I’m comparing the File Save dialog from Gedit and Windows XP Notepad. You’ll see that the Windows XP dialog is far smaller and yet communicates significantly more useful information. This is accomplished because it makes more efficient use of the screen space. It does this without being any less usable, and actually, because of it communicates more useful information can be more usable under some circumstances.

My current task will be assisted by showing an iframe but without the distinctive scrolling of an iframe. So if the iframe content is 350px high the iframe should be 350px high so that it appears to be part of the content above and below it. I’ve seen people refer to this technique as “100% height iframes” but I think that’s a misnomer or at least confusing since some people want an iframe that fills the height of its parent container. I just want an iframe that looks and acts as if its content were part of the normal page content and not on a separate site.

This isn’t so hard to do when your content is all on the same domain but when you need to work across domains its far more difficult because of the same domain security policies all browsers enforce. But there are ways to do it and the way I’m using now is clever and not well documented on the web. As a matter of fact, if it is documented I couldn’t find it. It does not require an iframe within an iframe nor does it require that the iframe’s content be tailored to the site that will be embedding the iframe. I’d love to hear any advice or suggestions for making it better.

OK, here’s the problem… you want to test a website by sending custom headers, but the website uses https. Normally you’d just telnet to port 80 like so:

telnet www.somesite 80
GET /index.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.somesite


(Note you need to press enter twice at the end)

This would be a valid HTTP GET request and you’d see the server’s response headers and response data. But with an SSL website this won’t work at all. What do you do?

I have a few servers (virtual and physical) and all of them run Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (aka Dapper Drake). Until now. I did my first LTS to LTS upgrade and it went without a hitch. So now I’m running mostly 6.06 servers and one 8.04 server.

I was very brave, maybe foolish even. I didn’t create a snapshot of the server before I started. 8-) I just did the upgrade. Apache upgraded fine as did MySQL, Django, Python and Samba. There are some warnings about upgrading SSH in place but I did it and had no issues. There were numerous warnings about needing to upgrade grub that scrolled by but the installer handles these for you automatically so you can disregard the warnings.

I did this because I wanted to install couch db (via) which is an exciting distributed database project. My first impression is that it is an excellent and exciting project but I will do more investigation and report later. In the meantime, test the LTS to LTS upgrade!

Strong words, I know, and there are definitely some qualifying statements. I am not throwing out Eclipse just yet because it can still do some things that Netbeans doesn’t. But first, let me say that I’m excited by Netbeans 6.1, which is currently in Beta. I’m excited because I see in it a product that will challenge Microsoft’s Visual Studio, especially for new users and those doing development without a computer science background.

PHP web applications tend to be very easy to deploy. You simply upload the application and it works. Maybe your application needs to have an install.php that creates the database tables but that’s hardly difficult.

The next easiest applications are cgi apps. In addition to uploading, users need to know if they have a special cgi-bin folder that they upload to and ensure they upload to it. They also need to know how to make a file executable. However no server configuration needs to be done.

A year ago I was making my decision on a javascript library. At that time I felt Mootools was the best deal. It was small, it was easy to learn, the ajax was dead simple (and needed no stupid tricks like reading the HTTP header for json data), it had beautiful effects and it was fast. It was far smaller than dojo and mochikit and it was a toss-up between it and jQuery as to which would dominate in the “market” that they both shared.

I’ve done a couple little projects using the fabulous Blueprint CSS Framework lately. Let me just say, this rocks for getting your stuff done quickly. It allows you to create fixed-width layouts much faster than if you do your layout by hand. If you’ve already created your own CSS framework then it may not be a huge benefit, but you may still want to give it a try.

It works on the premise that you create a container that is a grid made of columns (by default, 24 columns 30px wide) and each column has a 10px gutter. Then, you assign styles to your elements that packs them into the grid. You can use an online application to generate a custom grid for you so that the result will be a layout that matches the widths you’ve specified for your site.

OK, so you’ve downloaded Parallels for Linux (if you have Ubuntu 7.10 you can just apt-get install parallels) and you’ve tried to get it working but the window is transparent. This seems to be because parallels has a problem with desktop effects enabled. Here’s how to fix it.

If you launch parallels using the below command it will work just fine:

env XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 parallels

Voila! It works like magic, now parallels works just fine.