I've Moved

2009-07-21T11:07:00.001+04:00

I know you've all been wonder where I've been and what I've been doing.Over the past few months, I've been investigating WordPress as a blogging platform and have implemented it as the engine behind a financial news website. I've developed a couple of plugins and widgets for it, and there's some pretty good stuff that the WordPress folk are still putting in.In other news, to get my blog running

WordPress: Disable Canonical URL Redirection Plugin

2009-04-28T15:45:00.000+04:00

If you've got WordPress redirecting the browser to a URL, only to cause Apache (or whatever you are running as a web server) to redirect back to the original URL, you've got to disable the canonical URL redirection in WordPress. You can do this by saving the following to a PHP file in the plugins directory and activating it via WordPress.

Changing my WordPress blog domain

2009-04-28T14:37:00.001+04:00

The WordPress guys and my co-worker who made some mods on it made it difficult to move our blog from the staging environment to the production environment. As the domain name is different, I had to fix up the post GUID links using string replacement in the PHP file, as I didn't want to change the database on the live site (our PHP files are version controlled, but the data on the DB server is not

CSS: Center Aligning Text Vertically - Method 3

2009-04-28T11:09:00.002+04:00

Another approach to vertically centering text is to change the display property of the container to table-cell and add the vertical-align property with the value middle. This method does not work with MS Internet Explorer.Examplediv#header { vertical-align: middle; display: table-cell; height: 200px; background-color: yellow;}

My text

CSS: Center Aligning Text Vertically - Method 2

2009-04-28T10:06:00.001+04:00

You can center text vertically by using absolute positioning on the child element and setting the top property to 50%. You might have to adjust the margin-top attribute to get the text exactly in the center.Examplediv#header { position: relative; height: 200px;}div#header span { position: absolute; top: 50%; margin-top: -10px;}

CSS: Center Aligning Text Vertically

2009-04-28T09:48:00.005+04:00

The easiest way to center text vertically using CSS is to set the line-height to the same size as the container's height.Example//Add this to your STYLE tag or external CSS filediv#header { height: 100px; line-height: 100px;}UPDATE: Also seeCSS: Center Aligning Text Vertically - Method 2CSS: Center Aligning Text Vertically - Method 3

Multi-lingual Email Address

2009-04-25T14:23:00.002+04:00

Multi-lingual email addresses, or Email Address Internationalization (EAI) as it is more commonly known, has been around for a while. Netaka, a Canadian firm, has been providing an email service for the Chinese community that supports the use of Chinese characters in the email address.The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has also assigned a committee to oversee the internationalized email

Yahoo! Geocities Pulling Down Shutters

2009-04-25T11:40:00.002+04:00

Yahoo! will stop providing the Geocities free web hosting service later this year. What started off in 1994, providing free web hosting communities, was started off by Beverly Hills Internet. In it's original form, Geocities consisted of several virtual 'cities' that represented a category (Eg. Cape Canaveral was for Science & Silicon Valley was for Technology (?) ).It was acquired by Yahoo in

Judge of The Pirate Bay case

2009-04-25T10:41:00.002+04:00

A recent blog article reveals that the judge who presided over The Pirate Bay hearing was, in fact, a part of two intellectual property protection organizations. As if that wasn't bad enough, he was also a part of the organization acting as the plaintiff i.e. the guys suing The Pirate Bay. If that isn't a mis-trial, I don't know what is. Get more of the juicy details here.

Torrent Sites Shut down After Pirate Bay Verdict

2009-04-21T13:31:00.001+04:00

Following the court verdict against The Pirate Bay, several other torrent search and tracking sites have shut down to avoid becoming the target of legal lawsuits. Among them are: Nordicbits, Powerbits, Piratebits, MP3nerds, and Wolfbits. Nordicbits has a page here indicating the shutdown, while the others simply disappeared into thin air.

Why Are Software Development Estimates In-accurate?

2009-04-20T21:26:00.001+04:00

I came across an article on CodeOfDoom.com about why estimations are inaccurate. The article starts with the question - Who made the estimate? If it's the new guy, he hadn't a clue of the team's efficiency, the skeletons in the closet (flaws in the existing system), and the requirements. If it's the upper management, the estimates made are either based on a dissimilar project or to please a

Google Torrent Search

2009-04-20T20:35:00.000+04:00

In another protest against the court ruling against The Pirate Bay, a supporter used Google's Custom Search to provide a torrent search. This is simply another voice that says, "Is assisting users to find torrents any different from a search engine?"

Oracle buys Sun Microsystems

2009-04-20T19:36:00.000+04:00

Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems for $9.50 per share, which works out to about $7.4 billion. There is a lot of speculation over how Oracle's acquisition affects Java and MySQL. This also puts the Solaris & Sparc brands under the Oracle umbrella.

Replicating data from MS SQL Server to MySQL

2009-04-20T13:18:00.002+04:00

I managed to replicate data from MS SQL Server to MySQL using an SQL Server Agent job.I tried to use a trigger to directly insert data into MySQL via a trigger, but that just didn't work. For more info, see my earlier post.My approach was to create another table, which was exactly the same as the original table on MS SQL Server, except for the identity property which I left disabled. I then

Attempt: Replicating data from MS SQL Server to MySQL

2009-04-20T12:26:00.001+04:00

I took my first stab at getting MS SQL Server to push some data to MySQL. My approach I tried was to use an INSERT trigger that inserts data into a MySQL table using the Linked Server feature in MS SQL Server.I did some reading on Linked Servers and read that it only supports OLE DB drivers and since the only OLE DB drivers I could find were either old or commercial, I decided to use the MySQL

Comic: Spammers Are A Lower Life Form

2009-04-19T22:06:00.002+04:00

Spammers are low life form, particularly the ones who sneak links into blog comment posts. Spam bots can be stopped by the Captcha, but not human spammers :-(

Ubuntu 9.04 Releasing On Thursday

2009-04-19T21:44:00.000+04:00

Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) is releasing on Thursday. The availability of the Release Candidate last Thursday was a taste of things to come.Jaunty Jackalope features out-of-the-box support for Wacom digital tablets, reduced bootup time, the 2.6.28 kernel featuring stable Ext4 filesystem support and updated packages of all included software.

MockupScreens Sent Me A Free License

2009-04-19T20:52:00.001+04:00

MockupScreens just sent me a free license to try out their software. You can use it to create mockups for your software before you begin development. If you would like to order a license, it costs under $90 for a single user license.MockupScreens is Vista-compatible and you can find screenshots of it here:http://mockupscreens.com/index.php?page=Screen-Prototypes

Protest Against Sentence To The Pirate Bay

2009-04-19T20:28:00.002+04:00

Hundreds of youngsters protested the sentence by the Stockholm court to the founders of The Pirate Bay.

Bezeq Intl Seeds Torrents Locally

2009-04-19T20:02:00.000+04:00

Bezeq International, an Israeli Internet Service Provider, is finding ways to both satisfy customers' torrent needs and improve network performance while proving both aren't necessarily exclusive. Their approach is to seed torrents on their own network by modifying torrent files downloaded by subscribers, adding a tracker containing the seeds to it.With the recent turn of events in the Pirate Bay

Pirate Bay founders sentenced in copyright case

2009-04-19T19:44:00.001+04:00

Earlier this month, in the case of The Pirate Bay versus Universal, MGM, Sony et al, the Stockholm court convicted Peter Sunde, Carl Lundstrom, Frederik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Ward of acting as an accessory to breaching copyright laws.The Pirate Bay founders are optimistic and have appealed the decision. In either case, I'd go grab all the torrents off The Pirate Bay while I still can.

WordPress Mod: Authenticate via ASP.NET

2009-04-19T19:23:00.006+04:00

I hooked up a WordPress blog to authenticate via ASP.NET. It's wicked, I tell you! After hacking through the WordPress source code, the integration was quick and easy from both the PHP and ASP.NET sides. The purpose of the integration was to deal with differences in hash algorithms, so we wouldn't have to create user accounts with completely different passwords.We still would have to build a

Virus Sweeper

2009-04-13T10:40:00.000+04:00

You shouldn't believe everything you read on the Internet. Most people simply just ignore that advice and that's how Virus Sweeper gets into computers. Virus Sweeper is advertised as a warning indicating that you should use it to disinfect your computer. When users do download and run it, that's when Virus Sweeper takes over.They even have a very convincing user interface that makes Virus Sweeper

HttpResponse.Close instead of HttpResponse.End

2009-04-13T09:35:00.000+04:00

When profiling my application, I noticed that Response.End takes more time to execute than Response.Close. I'm guessing this is because Response.End causes a ThreadAbortException and .NET's handling of the exception causes the overhead.

Twitter Worm

2009-04-13T08:51:00.002+04:00

A worm has been running amok on Twitter. It changes profile info, posts tweets, and resets the password. You can get the source code of the worm at:http://gist.github.com/93782All it requires is an active Twitter session to take effect.

Bury The DiggBar

2009-04-11T09:33:00.003+04:00

If you've been using Digg for finding websites to visit or bookmarking, you've no doubt come across the DiggBar. It is an annoying bit that takes up screen space. Having to close the DiggBar each time is a pain.Digg, bury the DiggBar. Make a browser toolbar instead.

A Start In Joomla

2009-04-08T21:16:00.003+04:00

I've been trying out Joomla, the free and open-source CMS developed in PHP. I set it up on XAMPP and the first thing I can tell is that it's not very intuitive. The features provided on Joomla make it worth the effort to learn it all though - advertising banner management, contact lists, news feeds, polls, search and more.

Twitter Hands Over Registration Details of "Skype"

2009-04-08T08:56:00.001+04:00

Twitter handed over the registration details of the user "Skype" to Skype Inc. It definitely raises privacy concerns, but what makes this extreme is that they do not notify the user when they do reveal private data.

Manual Sliding Expiration

2009-04-06T12:14:00.002+04:00

When using ASP.NET Forms Authentication, ASP.NET sets a timeout of 30 minutes by default for which a user is logged in. If the user does make a request within the 30 minutes, the authentication ticket is renewed for a another period. This normally happens behind the scenes and the developer is often not aware of this process, known as sliding expiration.However, if you've got some pages on your

Aspose Library for Creating Excel and Word Files

2009-04-05T16:16:00.002+04:00

If you want to generate Excel and Word files using .NET or Java code, then the Aspose.Cells and Aspose.Words libraries are just what you are looking for. The Aspose.Cells library costs roughly $600 while the Aspose.Words library costs about $900, but you can get a discount of about $200 for purchasing both libraries in a single transaction. You might want to buy Aspose.Total, which is a package

W3C Geolocation API

2009-04-05T14:37:00.000+04:00

W3C Geolocation API - Making Websites Location-aware

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Source Code

2009-04-05T13:52:00.000+04:00

For those of you who are still in the dark, the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 source code is available for download at:http://aspnet.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=24471

Twitter Comic Strips

2009-04-05T09:17:00.001+04:00

Funny Twitter Cartoons

Windows 7 To Minimize OEM Software Performance Hit

2009-04-04T00:03:00.000+04:00

Microsoft aims to deliver a better user experience for Windows 7 users by going as far as keeping a check on the performance hit and impact on startup time due to pre-installed OEM software. After the failure of Windows Vista, Microsoft is taking every measure to ensure that it doesn't repeat the same mistakes with Windows 7. A lot of effort goes into improving UI elements that we use everyday,

New Path For .NET 4 Certification

2009-04-03T23:11:00.000+04:00

It's quite likely that the certification path for .NET 4 may be significantly different from the ones for .NET 2.0 and .NET 3.5. The certification path for .NET 2/3.5 requires test-takers to take a foundation exam that covers various topics.The change would be welcomed by many professionals. After all, how many ASP.NET and Silverlight developers want to spend time learning COM interop instead of

Tiobe Index For Programming Languages

2009-04-03T19:15:00.000+04:00

The Tiobe Programming Community Index, indicative of a programming language's popularity, can be found here .According to the index, Java, C, C++, PHP and BASIC are the top 5 languages, with Python, C# and JavaScript following closely behind. Over the last year, there's been a sharp decline in the popularity of BASIC and Perl, and a moderate decline in the popularity of Java. On the other hand, C

Cross-Domain Policy Files

2009-04-02T14:25:00.003+04:00

A Cross-domain policy file or crossdomain.xml is used by Adobe Flash in determining whether it is allowed to access resources from a domain other than that of the currently running Flash object.The master cross domain policy file has to be located at the root of the server Eg. http://api.flickr.com/crossdomain.xml .The root element of the crossdomain.xml file is the cross-domain-policy tag which

On A Pentium-II

2009-04-01T21:49:00.004+04:00

I'm making this blog post from my old IBM Thinkpad 600E, which is powered by a Pentium-II 366MHz processor and 64MB RAM. It runs Opera 9.64 on Windows 98 and can send/receive email and post to my blog without breaking a sweat. It makes you wonder how newer machines have lots and lots of processing power but you only need so much to get the job done.I must admit though that for the amount of

Flash Game: Darts

2009-04-01T16:35:00.004+04:00

Check out this really cool game of darts:http://www.gamesolo.com/flash-game/darts.htmlIt's fun to play - you use the mouse to aim left/right and hold the mouse button down to set the force at which you throw the dart. It's pretty much impossible to beat the computer-opponent at the game though.

Will Users Switch Over To Windows 7?

2009-03-31T01:49:00.000+04:00

After Windows Vista was released, some users decided to take the leap and stayed on in the Vista camp while others were forced there as it was pre-installed on their computers. In either case, the most popular OS running on PCs today is Windows XP which according to NetApplications Market Share is 63.5%.

HugeURL

2009-03-30T23:11:00.000+04:00

I stumbled across a mock of TinyURL called HugeURL. They take any URL you can throw at them and they turn it into an obnoxiously long URL.Just for giggles, check it out at http://www.hugeurl.com

ActionScript: Why can't you access a Button's children

2009-03-30T13:50:00.000+04:00

Have you ever wondered why you have to use a MovieClip instead of a Button symbol type when you want to access the child elements? Here's the explanation...MovieClipThe MovieClip class in ActionScript has the following inheritance tree:MovieClip - Sprite - DisplayObjectContainer - InteractiveObject - DisplayObject - EventDispatcher - ObjectThe ability to interact with child elements of the movie

Where Dost Thou Point To?

2009-03-29T22:45:00.001+04:00

I spent some time recently working with ActionScript 3 and Adobe Flash. One of the common issues encountered by novice ActionScript developers is that when loading resources, the path to the resources should be relative to the page on which the Flash Player is embedded, instead of from the SWF file.If you have an ASP.NET web page, a master page, a user control and an SWF file, the relative path

First Views On Internet Explorer 8

2009-03-29T13:27:00.000+04:00

I just installed Internet Explorer 8. Right after the install, I was taken to the Welcome to Internet Explorer 8 page which invited me to try the Accelerators feature. The first thing I did was to select the "One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052-7329" text on the welcome page, but that didn't seem to go too well - they seem to have a problem tracking my mouse cursor.I got the Accelerators working

Internet Explorer 8

2009-03-29T11:13:00.000+04:00

MS Internet Explorer 8 was released on 19th March, with lots of new features and better standard compliance. You can get a copy from the IE website.Changes in IE8 include removal of the WBR tag and CSS Expressions. You can still use Compatibility Mode by including the following META tag onto your page:

IE-specific HTML/CSS

2009-03-29T09:36:00.000+04:00

I've been using IE specific CSS overrides in my CSS experiments for stuff that handles differently in IE and Firefox. When creating a Fieldset in IE, I get a rounded border. This apparently is the simplest way to get a rounded border in IE. I added the CSS attributes for the rounded border into the style sheet for Firefox. Now, the visual difference between the rendering in IE and in Firefox is

The Picometric