New RIFERS blogs entries from Maarten Stolte

YUI 2.4 released

Maarten Stolte — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 21:13:32 +0100

The YUI library from Yahoo sees another big release in its 2.4 release.
I'm looking forward to implementing this one on our sites. We have been using the calendar widget quite alot on our backend systems (building confference administration system requires quite alot of date entry stuff), but we have also implemented other parts.
I'm happy that the calendar widget now has a year selector, which was something that was making entering a date like 20/5/1976 hard; you'd have to click through 12*31something months...
For those who don't know YUI, or haven't looked at it, do it. The documentation of the YUI libraries is great; good api docs, nice cheatsheet pdfs and great videos with experts from Yahoo but also from outside Yahoo, like Peter Paul Koch (PPK).

Resetting local passwords on Windows

Maarten Stolte — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 10:47:06 +0200

At work we had a problem with a pc where somehow the local administrator account was not accessible anymore, we didn't know the right password or something else was up.
Luckily I found this application: Offline NT password and registry editor, which is a very cool linux bootdisk which can edit your registry, either to reset passwords, or to make other changes.
When changing a user, it offers good documentation and nice menus, which in our case found that the admin account had been locked, and it offered to unlock it and to reset all counters for it, and some other nice automated tricks.
Be aware of the catch that encrypted files for that user are not readable after this trick, but other then that it's a very useful tool.

Conversations with the X/HTML 5 team

Maarten Stolte — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 10:51:00 +0100

There is an interesting interview with the X/HTML 5 team overhere.
The things I'm most hoping for will end up in the final spec are the improved input elements and the datagrid, but that might be because for those two I can most clearly envision how they will improve my work as a webdeveloper (less client side scripting needed, hurray!). It would not surprise me that in the end the things that mean less to me now will change the web most, like the vague activex component some company from Redmond introduced for their Outlook webclient, which now is the foundation to AJAX.

Help; Can I see what rendering mode Internet Explorer uses?

Maarten Stolte — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 09:24:58 +0100

I'm trying to build sites that will work in both Internet Explorer 6 and 7, and in more standards compliant browsers. It helps alot if Internet Explorer is not using Quirks mode for those sites, but I can't find where I can see what mode it uses, and thus I'm never really sure about the mode it has chosen to render.
Does anyone know how I could find that out?

Nice photography course for free

Maarten Stolte — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 19:54:45 +0100

I've found this nice free photography course on digg. I've ran into another nice course, written more towards the digital slr's from Canon, but this is a good general course. (now where is that other course)

Lol

Maarten Stolte — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 20:14:14 +0200

"Love JavaScript? Now you can write desktop apps, widgets, and web pages all using the same platform." ..that made me giggle
On the serious side, http://ajaxian.com/archives/adobe-apollo-at-max sounds like fun, wonder if I can write nice apps with RIFE and OpenLaszlo..

Free AJAX course online

Maarten Stolte — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 16:15:59 +0200

I don't want to bury Geerts' facebook news (http://rifers.org/blogs/gbevin/2006/8/16/facebook_uses_rife), but I found this nice AJAX course on http://www.javapassion.com/ajaxcodecamp/. I still have to start with the first lesson, but a quick glance shows that its quite well done, and I'd take it if only for learning more about Firebug's Javascript debugging capabilities.

Simple small things to improve

Maarten Stolte — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 17:50:06 +0200

When a website is a big as e.g. blogspot.com, you'd expect them to at least have nailed the nitty gritty interface details. When I commented on the blog I linked to in the last post, I found these small things which made me wonder why people can't 'put the dot on the i' (pay attention to the last little details) as we say in dutch.
The small details I'm talking about are:

When there is 1 (one) comment, they say '1 comments'. This might be faster to execute (no code needed), but if that's really the reason I would be very much surprised :-)
If you comment on a story and choose 'anonymous', the submit button is still called 'Login and Publish', which was a bit confusing to me. A little Javascript is not too much to ask here is it, and otherwise a different title for the button maybe..

I told you these were little details, but thats where the devil is ;-)

Lets see how he does

Maarten Stolte — Wed, 31 May 2006 11:18:49 +0200

Going to be following this page to see how my former collegue does. If he makes it to millionaire, at least I can say I helped him ;-)
[back to the regular transmission]

Setting the docroot in PHP Eclipse

Maarten Stolte — Mon, 29 May 2006 15:06:42 +0200

This is not a RIFE post perse, but since my dayjob is working with PHP, and since I could not easily find this information elsewhere, I figured I'd write a bit about it.

I had looked at using Eclipse as my php IDE before, but the problem seemed to be that Eclipse wanted everything to be in its workspace/project directory structure, whereas I like to have my php documents in my DocumentRoot directory.
The workaround I found before was to symlink from the Eclipse project directory to the docroot, but that seems like an ugly hack, and working on Windows one would have to work with the not so well documented 'junction' feature of window nt..

When I was browsing the EasyEclipse.org site I happened to find this post that explains how to set up the structure. Because it is a bit lacking in its explanation, I give you a more complete explanation, where I assume you have installed EasyEclipse ' LAMP distribution. Any other Eclipse + phpEclipse ought to work as well.

Start Eclipse, and create a new PHP project, with a name of your choosing
uncheck the 'project contents' box, and then fill in the path to your php files (not the docroot perse,e.g. /www/htdocs might not be it, cause you also need files from /www/settings, in this case you'd fill in /www)
click 'finish'
now rightclick on the project folder in the navigation pane on the left, and choose properties.
Choose PHP Project settings on the left, and click 'use project settings'. Fill in the URL to your local site and the docroot (/www/htdocs in my example) . Add the Include path(s)
Now click on the PHP Parser link on the left in this same window, and choose 'use project settings', so that the PHP Parser will know to use your projects' specific settings.

Now click OK and you're done with this part.

EasyEclipse also comes with CVS/SVN and DB tools, which a typical LAMP setup probably also uses, but setting those up are something I leave up to you.

W3C helping (?)to standardise AJAX

Maarten Stolte — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 14:10:36 +0200

The W3C is going to try and help standardise AJAX, see The XMLHttpRequest Object, W3C Working Draft 05 April 2006 I really hope that it'll work, and with Anne van Kesteren doing the groundwork I feel almost confident, but as with other W3C or in general, commitee driven developement, we'll have to wait and see. update: I just noticed MSFT is not in the authors section yet, that wont help. Did you know they *invented* the damned thing in the first place?

Java licensing issues part 937

Maarten Stolte — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 08:42:49 +0200

I have to agree with this post on nearly all accounts, apart from the LAMP stack one. With frameworks as RIFE and other ones that are attempting to simplify Java, it might have happened if they were around back when PHP was moving in for the P in LAMP, but Java back then was just too inaccesible for the public that PHP attracted. The other arguments are pretty good imho, especially the one about people choosing Java over Javascript if that had been possible, and the one about Mono... If Java had been opener, I'm pretty sure folks would have chosen Java over Mono to do developement, maybe extending Java with some of the features that mono/.net folks say make that a better choice.

Great Javascripting

Maarten Stolte — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 14:23:07 +0100

Now, why aren't more people using this great javascript? I mean, buttons that *resize* depending on how long the *scrolling* text is, it is so 1996 that it must be the in thing today!

Agile web development

Maarten Stolte — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 11:21:00 +0100

This article makes a good point of skipping the whole paperwork step when trying to work out the website-to-be with a customer. I wholeheartedly agree with it, and with a framework that allows one to rapidly develop the core functionality, why not adapt this method.

Origami launched, I want one with Maemo

Maarten Stolte — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 09:36:47 +0100

Microsoft have unveiled the much hyped origami project , http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/umpc/ , Now I want one, and I want to run the http://www.maemo.org platform in a dualboot config on it