IComeFromTheNet.net

I’ve been doing some work in PHP  and my normal IDE Visual Studio 2008, obviously does not support php syntax. I was introduced to Aptana by an article from site-point into development of AIR apps.

It has the features that I need PHP support, SVN integration and CSS,JavaScript and html syntax highlighting and has code-assist for a number of JavaScript libraries like extJS and jQuery.

From the Aptana website:

Aptana Studio is a complete web development environment that combines powerful authoring tools with a collection of online hosting and collaboration services that help you and your team do more. 

For under $200 AUD with the features I want it was worth the investment. My on quibles are with the FTP support which is not as good as it could be and the speed is not always fantastic on larger documents.

Also on a minor note.

I also signed up to a SVN service, I wanted a repository for a few projects now and in the future and since I have an IDE with support it felt a good time to sign up.

Is a host service that includes SVN and Git repositories , Access management a ticket and wiki system and millstone tracker, many good tools for teams, I am using a free plan atm while I trial it but a basic plan is only about 20 dollars AUD a month.

I bought A new PC Last week , a mid-range warrior Duel Core AMD AM2, 500GB 2GB DDR2 and a NVIDA 9800GTX graphics card, I added my old Audiology 2ZS PCI sound card and I had a System. The Case is a black finish Lan-Li brush aluminum with a very cool light on the front. My Last pc was also a mid-range warrior that I built myself back in 2004, it dies recently and after that many years the upgrade path was max out. I hope this new PC will last a similar number of years.

It took me nearly 2 days to install all the software necessary for development and leisure. I decide to make a list here for future reference.

List of Software :

• Windows Vista Business
• Vista SP1 and 30 so updates
• Office 2007 Student
• ASUS Bluetooth Adapter Drivers/Software
• Audiology ZS Drivers
• Mother Board, LCD Drivers
• Nero Essentials
• Flash and Silverlight runtimes.

Browsers:

• Fire-Fox
• -Addin: FireBug
• -Addin: WebDeveloper
• -Addin:Sage RSS Reader
• -Addin:ColorfulTabs
• -Addin:SQLite Manager
• -Addin:Tamper Data
• -Addin:Screengrab!
• IE8 Beta 2
• Google Chrome

Development Tools

• Visual Studio 2008
• Visual Studio 2008 SP1
• .Net 3.5 SP1
• JQuery Intellsence plug-in
• Notepad ++ and plugins
• PSPad and plugins
• WAMPServer
• Virtual PC 2007
• IE6 windows XP image
• VSTO SE Runtime.
• Aptana Studio
• AIR Runtime and SDK

Graphics and Misc Tools

• Gimp Image Editor
• AVG Anti-Virus
• SpyBot S&D
• Adobe® Digital Editions

Still to Install

• Trillian
• TheBat Pro Email Client
• Mobipocket and new e-book licenses

Title says it all, I wanted to enjoy some lounge room gaming and the DS was the right price and I love the use of a stylus.

I have always had a dream of playing Civilization on the DS ever since the consoles release many years ago. With the release of Civ Revolutions I can finally realise that dream.

Initially after purchasing it I decided to let that dream wait a while longer and purchased another port of an old favourite  Simicity Creator.  I think revolutions will have to be a Xmas present to myself later on.

I also received the ‘Sight Training’ game and have managed to keep at it for 3 weeks, not that I see a difference the games are fun and like to see how I can improve my score over the coming months. 

After putting the job off for a few months I have have a new phone (Nokia 6500 Slide), it was really an impulse buy at $400 from my local Vodafone store.

I was looking for a phone with Bluetooth (very common now) and a camera above 3 megapixel , both of which this had. It is also a 3G phone, which helps with the future proof. It also looks cool to.

The coolest feature is not actually related to the phone, I purchased a new mp3 player some weeks ago the Samsung  YP-T10, this player also contains a Bluetooth option.

This Bluetooth option allows the phone to connect to the mp3 player as a remote headset. The T10 can then be used to make and answer incoming calls using its own inbuilt microphone.

I did have a problem previously of missing calls when listening to mp3's, not any more :-) 

Interesting Links

HTML or XHTML: Does It Really Matter?

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/html-or-xhtml-does-it-matter

I found this article an interesting read , however I disagree with James Edwards option on XHTML's legacy, simply forcing cleaner syntax on the Internet is an achievement in itself, it really does not matter that the content type is normal html, using xhtml valuators can help to overcome issues with testing and the benefits that clean markup provide in improving  browser page rendering-consistency is worth learning a few new syntax rules.

Handling Flash Crowds from your Garage

http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix08/tech/full_papers/elson/elson_html/index.html

This is a research article on developing web-sites to handle large surges in traffic, what the author called Flash Crowds, I am only part way through, the main content of the article is short analysis of current content distribution networks, a good read so far.

I got a little bored today, so I decided to give a new theme a chance. As a base theme I download a theme called Envision. I found it in the list of themes on the blogengine.net homepage. The theme seemed to have the potential to be mine with a little tweaking of course. An example of the original is below.

Why did I like this theme, well it is based on a light colour scheme, that would go well with my new colours. It's a 2 column page , my previous was a two column fluid layout, so I wanted something different. I love grey background and after examining the image files, I determined that I could re-colour the header, footer ,menu and the the main content frame background.

Out a pull Gimp and 2 hours of 'trial and error' I arrive at what you see now.

Conditional Style Sheets

This is the first time that I used a conditional Style-sheet. A quick explanation is necessary. HTML conditional comments are an IE propriety ability, they are used to target different versions of Internet Explorer. Other browsers will ignore the comments and using conditionals is considered a safe Hack.

   1: <!--[if IE]>

   2:   <link href="/blog/themes/Envision.1.0/css.axd?name=IE.css" 

   3:                         rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

   4: <![endif]-->

IE  interprets this conditional and if true will print the html inside as normal content, other browsers will treat the conditional as a comment only and will not evaluate the expression.

By using a link statement I was able to create and IE only CSS style sheet to override settings in the master Style-Sheet that would not render correctly in versions of IE.

Current I am using rendered content using cssclass:after attribute selector, which IE7 and below do not support, IE will ignore that declaration but will miss out on necessary css settings, by using and IE only Sheet I can override the cssClass and add back the missing details (if you supply cssclass:after it will only apply css you declare to the attribute value of 'content:').

Having bought a very large LCD monitor last December a 26 inch LCD monitor that is and just regretting it a little upon finding that it was really a television not  an up close and personal computer screen but it was cheap and very appealing at the time. Well I just could not let such a large screen go to waste.

The project build a Jukebox for my bedroom,  its got use my existing components , have a remote of sorts and be quiet and low energy as possible.

Existing Components

Vewsonic 26inch LCD Monitor

VIA Mini-ITX ML 1000 

Lian Li PC-9100

New Items

Logitech diNovo Mini

1GB PC2100 Memory

Pioneer Slime Line DVD-Burner

ATA 320Gb HDD

The Software

There were 2 choices:

MediaPortal

My-HTPC

Media Portal, is large well featured and very pretty but it is build for faster machines, on my setup all menus were un-responsive and this kills the application for a jukebox. I chose to use my-HTPC, its a shareware application that ceased in 2003 however it is an excellent front end for media and since I use media player classic for movies and DVD's I don't need these integrated features anyway.  The drawbacks are no support for play-lists and some odd control behaviour and the big one its no-longer in development.

I have just finished some CSS mockups of the interfaces that I previously mentioned here.

Images

I found the Chapter 5 Forms in "The Art & Science of CSS, to be very helpful and I recommend the book to any designer and especially to code developers like me who need that extra help in designing nice looking forms.