Open Source Operating Systems

I’ve posted a lot of information about the common ‘free’ open-source software that I routinely use, however… I just realized that I missed one of the most important applications you use, the Operating System itself.

While my “day job” relegates me to use Windows products for much of my work, I do a lot of additional work at home and for friends.

Currently I use and highly recommend Ubuntu Linux for most users, it’s got most of the usability features of Microsofr Windows and Apple OS/X, but without all of the additional baggage. It’s updated regularly, with new releases every 6 months and software patches made available almost daily. Updates are as non-intrusive as the Windows Update process, and only a very few ever require a reboot.

To quiet the other Linux users out there, I’ve used a lot of Linux ‘flavors’ in the past… each has had it’s place and may do so again…. this is my opinion for the moment and will likely change again in a few years. 🙂

Here’s the list:

Cheers!


Eclipse ResourceBundle Editor

I typically use the open-source Eclipse IDE for most of my Java and PHP work. For my corporate work, this means that I use IBM‘s packaged RAD and WSAD offerings that are based on various versions of the Eclipse framework.

When working on Internationalized (I18n) applications, most experienced Java architects rely on ResourceBundles to store the various text that is needed for different languages, problem is that editing these files becomes problematic, especially when dealing with multi-byte character sets as are often used in Unicode (non Latin-1, aka ISO-8859-1) languages.

The best editor I’ve found for this case is, as you may have guessed, free for download.

Here’s the links:

Cheers!

Resume and skills

I’d be doing myself a great dis-service if I didn’t take the opportunity to share my resume with readers of this blog. You’ve obviously found me because you have a similar interest to those of my own, perhaps you have need of part or full time knowledgeable employees with similar skills to my own.

I’m currently employed full-time and will not consider relocation or accept contract work, but would consider small side jobs in some situations.

Please see my online resume at:

http://www.skotfred.com/resume.php

Additionally, I generally have my information available on most job boards such as:

NOTE: Resume available in other formats (such as Word) by request.

Good Day!

Old versions of software

There eventually comes a time when you’re not satisfied with the “latest” version of some software, often this is due to increased resources required to run on older machines. Sometimes it can be due to ‘free’ software becoming nag-ware or no longer free.

Here are a few websites that I have found useful when looking for such older software.

Obvious Warning – older software may have security concerns and known bugs… as such, be careful when using them!

Cheers!

Downloadable WebFonts

To maintain accessibility and SEO (Search Engine Optimization), there’s often a need to be creative with fonts. This is sometimes due to aesthetics, but often to meet technical needs like foreign non-Latin languages that have unique characters/glyphs not normally installed on workstations. Producing images for each character would be very time consuming, bandwidth intensive and destroy search engine rankings.

Create embedded fonts using one of 2 available formats:

1. Portable Font Resources (.pfr): TrueDoc technology was developed by Bitstream and licensed by Netscape. It can be viewed by Navigator 4.0+ and Explorer 4.0+ on Windows, Mac, and Unix platforms.

<link rel = “fontdef” src=”myfont.pfr” />

2. Embeddable Open Type (.eot): Compatible only with Explorer 4.0+ on the Windows platform. Create .eot files using Microsoft’s free Web Embedding Font Tool (WEFT).

<style type=”text/css”>
<–!
@font-face {
src:url(/fonts/myfont.eot);
}
–>
</style>

References:

Tooling:

Tutorials:

Cheers!

Browser Rendering Engines

This is knowledge that is generally “tribal” by nature, reserved to only the nerdiest web developers, recently I was asked to name these and failed. Here’s the bounty of my research.

Gecko is generally considered to be the second most-popular layout engine on the Web, after Trident (used by Internet Explorer for Windows since version 4), and followed by WebCore (used by Safari) and Presto (used by Opera).

Gecko is the open source, free software web browser layout engine used in all Mozilla-branded software and its derivatives, including later Netscape browser releases. Written in C++ and licensed under MPL/GPL/LGPL triple license, Gecko is designed to support open Internet standards. Originally created by Netscape Communications Corporation, its development is now overseen by the Mozilla Foundation.

Trident (also known as MSHTML) is the name of the layout engine for the Microsoft Windows version of Internet Explorer. It was first introduced with the release of Internet Explorer version 4 in October 1997, has been steadily upgraded and remains in use today. For version 7 of Internet Explorer, Microsoft made significant changes to the Trident layout engine to improve compliance with web standards and add support for new technologies. Despite these changes, Trident remains significantly less compliant than competing layout engines Gecko, Presto and WebCore.

Presto is the name of the current (Opera 9 series) layout engine for the Opera web browser developed by Opera Software. It was first released (following several public betas and technical previews) on January 28, 2003 in Opera 7.0 for Windows. Presto replaced the Elektra engine used in versions 4–6 of Opera. Presto differs from Elektra in that it is dynamic: the page or parts of it can be re-rendered in response to DOM and script events. The Presto layout engine is only available as a part of Opera browser or related products. The source or binary (DLL) forms of the engine are not publicly available. Subsequent releases have seen a number of bugs fixed and optimizations to improve the speed of the ECMAScript (“JavaScript“) engine.

Tasman is the name of the layout engine introduced with version 5 of Internet Explorer for Mac. Tasman was an attempt to improve support for web standards, as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium. At the time of its release, Tasman was seen as the layout engine with the best support for web standards such as HTML and CSS. Unfortunately, MSIE for Mac is no longer supported, but newer versions of Tasman are incorporated in some other current Microsoft products.

Cheers!

Scan for Windows System updates

Most IT professionals are already aware that Microsoft routinely publishes updates to their operating systems on the second Tuesday of each month, early notification and download access is also available to select groups.

There are also several semi-automated tools that will scan your Windows computer on demand to list updates that are available to you.

I should mention that while the application from Secunia only scans Windows, their website discusses updates for most other popular operating systems and software

Have a happy and safe 2008!

Preventing portions of a webpage from printing

A colleague asked me about my solution for this just the other day, here’s the quick solution.

  1. Add a CSS class attribute to the items.  Assuming they are <div>’s for header and footer, they would look like my example below, but you can add the ‘no-print’ class to anything you don’t want printed.
  2. Add a stylesheet with media=”print” to change the visibility and/or display attributes of that class.
  3. With a little more work, you could add a ‘no-screen’ solution too… this would be advantageous in cases where you may need to mask an account number or SSN.

<html>
<head>
<title>Example</title>
<link media=”print” href=”print.css” type=”text/css” rel=”stylesheet” />
</head>
<body>
<div class=”no-print”>This is your header</div>
<div>this is the body</div>
<div class=”no-print”>this is your footer</div>
</body>
</html>

print.css could then contain:

.no-print { display:none; }

Cheers!

MSIE PNG Alpha Transparency

In usual form, MSIE doesn’t directly implement Alpha-Transparency on PNG images. Typically this feature is used to allow for anti-aliased gradients on images so that they can be used to support a variety of backgrounds.

There are a variety of solutions online for this problem, however I take issue with most, here’s why:

  • .htc files – this is a proprietary Microsoft solution, to add support on most web servers the MIME type must also be added.
  • filter: progid: – this too is utilizing a standard in Microsoft’s own particular way.

While neither of these is perfect, the ‘filter:’ is obviously the best of two evils. Surround it with the “Conditional If” comments (previously documented) and you’re at least safe for most other browsers.

Here’s my example code:

<!–[if gte IE 5.5000]>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
function correctPNG() // correctly handle PNG transparency in Win IE 5.5 or higher.
{
for(var i=0; i<document.images.length; i++)
{
var img = document.images[i]
var imgName = img.src.toUpperCase()
if (imgName.substring(imgName.length-3, imgName.length) == “PNG”)
{
var imgID = (img.id) ? “id='” + img.id + “‘ ” : “”;
var imgClass = (img.className) ? “class='” + img.className + “‘ ” : “”;
var imgTitle = (img.title) ? “title='” + img.title + “‘ ” : “title='” + img.alt + “‘ “;
var imgStyle = “display:inline-block;” + img.style.cssText;
if (img.align == “left”) imgStyle = “float:left;” + imgStyle;
if (img.align == “right”) imgStyle = “float:right;” + imgStyle;
if (img.parentElement.href) imgStyle = “cursor:hand;” + imgStyle;
var strNewHTML = “<span ” + imgID + imgClass + imgTitle
+ ” style=\”” + “width:” + img.width + “px;height:” + img.height + “px;” + imgStyle + “;”
+ “filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader”
+ “(src=\'” + img.src + “\’, sizingMethod=’scale’);\”></span>”;
img.outerHTML = strNewHTML;
i = i-1;
}
}
}
window.attachEvent(“onload”, correctPNG);
</script>
<![endif]–>

References:

Good luck out there!