Recent Blog Posts
Blogs ยป Archive for July, 2004
Open Source Apps for Windows
Many regular Open Sourcery readers know my primary workstation is a G4 1.25 GHz Powermac running Mac OS X Panther. However, my network here includes Windows XP Pro, Red Hat 9, SUSE Linux 9 and some older machines and os’s (yes - Windows 98 SE lives on for client testing purposes).
While I have invested financial resources in applications such as Windows, OS X and Microsoft Office for both platforms, I am always researching and testing open source apps across all the systems.
This morning I wanted to jot down some of my favorite open source tools used on my Windows XP system. I have found development incredibly rich for open source projects committed to Windows, and often they provide a solution that replaces in some cases prohibitively expensive proprietary software.
And for the record - I am testing out the use of Open Office in place of MS Office, on Windows, I just am not quite ready to switch. On my Mac I build presentations in Keynote, databases in Filemaker and word processor documents/spreadsheets in AppleWorks - so Open Office probably will not find its way onto OS X for me.
PDFCreator - https://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/
Creates PDF files from numerous Windows apps, most …
A Challenge
How much effort does it take to display the results of a query in HTML? More specifically, how many lines of code?
Recently, Jason has done an amazing job of putting together a Data to Table tag for WACT.
You can see some examples of what it does here
It’s that good that I’m foolhardy enough to bet you can’t beat it in this challenge…
The Challenge
For the sake of bragging rights or just keeping ourselves amused; using any programming language you like and any public domain (i.e. available for download) libraries you wish, try producing the same results as the following three examples, with less lines of code.
I know number of lines of code isn’t necessarily the best measure of the value of code but it became one of the main issues in the J2EE vs. .NET Petstore shootout so I figure we can follow the lead.
To set the scene, the table should be displayed in an HTML layout like;
The Table Challenge
The Table Challenge
That …
One relevant post on action planning and one irrelevant but hilarious link
Well, my pipeline is running a bit on the dry side, and it’s not hard to figure out why: I’ve slowed down on my marketing activities over the past few weeks. Shame on me.
So yesterday and today I’ve taken specific steps to get my business accelerating again:
1. I contacted three potential referral sources — real heavy hitters — and continued or began conversations with them about generating business.
2. I’ve put a plan in place for the next few weeks to ramp up my marketing activities.
You get out what you put in. About 60% of my consulting clients love learning about how to do business development the right way, and then never put anything into action. It’s as if they want the answer for general knowledge or Trivial Pursuit. It’s a waste of their money!
When I call them on it, they admit that they do need to take action, I give them homework to develop an action plan for us to work on, and that’s the last I hear from them (even with follow up, which results in excuses). Yes, I can and do hold their hand from there, but it’s remarkable. Lots of people want to be successful, but …
Micrsofot has an IE Blog (plus they’re hiring)
Via Scoble - since yesterday Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team has a blog.
Wonder how long it will be before the comments are disabled? ;)
Upcoming articles
So I’m working on my next few articles and I wanted to give everyone a heads up so I could get some feedback before most of them go to the editors here at SitePoint.
I’m going to do a series on Frameworks. The first article will be a brief overview of frameworks, the pros, the cons, etc etc. Then after that I’ll spend an article a piece on each framework. Right now I’m planning on just doing the “big 3″ as I call them , which consists of FuseBox, Mach-ii, and OnTap.
If anyone has anything in particular they’d like to see let me know here or in the forums. If you want to chime in your thoughts again I’m all ears, or eyes as the case may be!
The only thing I ask is that you don’t start a “this framework is better than that framework” war here, take that to the forums for everyone’s sanity.
I DO want to hear why you like one framework over another, how you are using or plan to use frameworks, and what problems you’ve encountered with your particular framework / project.
Illustrator Krispy Kremes
One thing that makes it hard to write a clear, concise article about using any kind of software is that there are often so many different methods to achieve the same task. Here’s an example: Let’s say that you want to make a “doughnut” shape (two circles on top of each other). How many different ways can you achieve this in Illustrator? I can think of three off the top of my head…
1. Make two circles, one smaller than the other. Click on one circle to select it and show the center point, then click on the center point and drag it over the other object. If you pay attention, you’ll see that the objects “snap” when you mouse near the center of the second object.
2. Use the Align palette: Select both circles, then click the “Horizontal Align Center,” then the “Vertical Align Center.” Pretty fast; the only con is that your objects will move around the page, and maybe you don’t want that.
3. My preferred method: Make one circle, select it, then use the Scale tool while holding Shift-Alt to scale down a copy of the circle.
(Feel free to post a comment if you came up with other ways …
PHP on MAC resources
First via Simon (as usual): Installing PHP 5 on OS X (if you’re using Server Logistics).
There’s another article on phpmac.com (which seems to be an excellent site): Building and Installing PHP 5 and Apache 1.3.31 on Mac OS X 10.3.4 - the configure / make / make install approach.
Just posting those as PHP MAC developers seem to get largely ignored (perhaps because “it just works” for them). Not being part of the wealthy, MAC-using bourgeois, I wouldn’t know ;)
Any more MAC links (ideally from MAC users)?
Favorite Illustrator Functions
As I’ve been working on my “vector graphics basics” article, I’ve been thinking about more functions in Illustrator that make my life easier. Here are a few more, once again, in no particular order…
- Outlining Text: Ever wanted to tweak some of the curves and lines in text? Make a copy of the text (just in case you decide you want to edit it later), select the original, and hit Ctrl-Shift-O (PC) or Command-Shift-O (Mac). (You can also go to Type > Create Outlines.) This converts the text to paths so that you can actually manipulate them.
- Pathfinder: I really, really like the different pathfinder options (Window > Show Pathfinder). You can merge objects together into one, or take two objects, overlap them, and “divide” them so that the overlapping part is its own object, as well.
- Locking or hiding objects: This is useful when you have a complicated document with lots of objects. Select the object(s) you want to temporarily “lock” (you can see it but can’t select it) and hit Ctrl-2 (PC) or Command-2 (Mac). To completely hide objects, hit Ctrl-3 (PC) or Command-3 (Mac). On the other hand, let’s say your document is complicated enough where you’d …
How to overcome limiting beliefs and insecurity to be a more effective marketer
“Whether you think you can or whether you think you can’t — you are right.” Henry Ford.
The last two blogs led up to a big question: How do you overcome your insecurities to be an effective business person?
How does someone who is insecure suddenly transform to become secure and confident?
All I can do in a short blog like this is point you towards some approaches, and you can pursue those that call to you.
First, let’s get one thing out of the way: Your behaviors and speech need to line up. There are lots of people out there (I used to be one of them) who say things like, “I want to start a business, but….” or “One day I’ll be a successful entrepreneur, but right now I’m too [old, young, uneducated, poor, unknown…].”
A few comments like this are fine from time to time, but some people (and I used to be one of them) go on and on. It is as if they think that by talking about starting a business they are actually doing it. These people are wannabees. They bore the pants off family, friends, and co-workers — and don’t even know it.
Worse, it is not healthy …
TheyWorkForYou Source Code
Following on from Political Hacking in the UK, via Simon’s blogmarks originally (then with further prompting from Jeff) - the developers behind TheyWorkForYou have published their source code on Sourceforge.
Makes interesting code to explore (still exploring). The front of the site itself is mainly PHP backed with MySQL, while they use Python for mining HTML, published by various government sources.
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