Archive for October 2006
Launching Applications on Windows startup
In that case the simple solution is to locate the Startup folder like this:
C:\Documents and Settings\userlogin\Start Menu\Programs\Startup
where userlogin is the user login and you can replace C with your particular drive.
In the Startup folder, you just paste the shortcut to the application you want launched and
the easiest would be to get the shortcut from the desktop if you have the shortcut there.
delicious
digg
Browsing with IE7
I use an IE browser mostly for checking how a website looks like when browsing with IE as the majority of my users still use IE. I was impressed from the brief testing that I carried out that it looks like IE7 is more compliant to CSS as some pages that didn't look right with IE6 now look perfectly alright in IE7 as they do in both Opera and Firefox.
Unfortunately IE7 is not available for Microsoft operating systems earlier than XP SP2 and therefore users who use Windows 2000 will still have to make do with IE6 unless they opt for another browser like Opera or Firefox. XP SP1 users also won't have access to IE7 but I don't see any reason why one would be stuck with XP SP1 when they can freely upgrade to SP2.
For those users with Windows 2000, a developer would need to have Windows 2000 installed preferably in a virtual environment to check the user experience for IE6. I won't be going that path as I will just check with IE7 unless there is a compelling reason to do so.
RSS handling and tabbing are some good features of IE7 as well as increased security which includes the anti-phishing checker.
From the few pages that I printed I also realised that IE7 handled the printing better than
IE6 used to do.
Moving around with your settings
One of the most useful portable applications that I use is Firefox Portable. This helps me to use Firefox but will all my usual bookmarks and extensions irrespective of what PC I use. This is quite useful for me because my bookmarks contain most of the sites that help me with my work.
I think the second most important application would have to be Thunderbird Portable. Once in a while I use Mail2Web to access my e-mail but while you can read and sent e-mail quite alright you won't have access to your address book and this is where Thunderbird Portable comes handy.
The one portable application but I haven't tried yet but will be trying soon is XAMPP. This is an integrated
server package of Apache, mySQL, PHP and phpMyAdmin that will allow you to do your
development from a USB flash drive and until I try it out I can't say any more.
Taking care of orphaned libraries
I used Orphaner to select and then remove the orphaned packages. I think its a good idea to click Simulate first before clicking OK after selecting the libraries set for removal. Simulate will let Orphaner test the removal of the packages selected and will notify you if there are any issues. I didn't get an error myself so I don't know how the error message would look like.
If you have the gstreamer libraries listed in the list don't select them for removal. gstreamer libraries may be listed as orphaned but don't remove them because they are used by multimedia Gnome applications and that may cause problems in the future. A more detailed coverage of package removal can be found on the Ubuntu forum.
Still on installations, I started my Ubuntu PHP development using the Bluefish IDE but I have since moved on to the Quanta Plus IDE as my main development environment. I installed Quanta Plus to see how it works and I have since been impressed by its handling of projects which I think is better that Bluefish's and also another plus is that you can collapse or expand sections of code like you would do in Microsoft Visual Studio.
I like this because on fairly large classes you can just make sure that all that you can see are the methods you are dealing with and then expanding others as you need them and then collapsing them again.
I haven't unistalled Bluefish as such because I still use it for writing quick test scripts.
