Category: Digital Life

The first release of new web browser which gains more and more popularity is coming soon. Now, second release candidate is available to download and test here.
Firefox developer team ask to test heavily following components:

• site authentication (especially over SSL)
• extension installation via update.mozilla.org and other sites.
• the MacOS X builds, a number of theme changes have been made.
• software update – we’re making another attempt at this.

Also, I’d like to remind you that after Firefox 1.0 release MozParty will start in the world. See more details on Mozilla 1.0.0 party locator page.

Sometimes people, who develop web sites, need to create a wright color scheme for those. “The WellStyled Workshop” allows you to choose color scheme based on specified color.
Other tool – “Color Blender” – allows you get up to ten tints of two colors. It’s very useful when you have already chosen the color sheme and need to expand it.
And finally, I’d like to say about project “VisiBone”. It contains free samples of color / font references for web designers, HTML / CSS / JavaScript / DOM cards etc. All of them are available as hardcopies.
I’m sure those tools will make life of web developers easier.

I had very strange problem today morning with convetion string to date. I’ve spent about 2 ours before I found what was a problem. The problem became apparent because we put a clock one hour back. But our DateTime module uses difference between local time and G.M.T. So, for all dates which are creater than 31/10/04 it works correct, but for other it returns wrong date (minus one day). So, I needed to find formula to calculate period of Daylight Saving Time and I found quite good resource – Daylight Saving Time. You can read there about history of Daylight Saving Time, its utility and etc.

Many of you know the best resource for hosting of open source projects. Sure, it’s SourceForge.
Recently, sourceforge team has upgraded server software.

Old configuration: Debian Potato Linux, kernel 2.4.x, GNU libc 2.2.1, Apache 1.3.26, Perl 5.005_03, PHP 4.1.2, Python 1.5.2, Tcl 8.0
New Configuration: Fedora Core 2 Linux, kernel 2.6.x, GNU libc 2.3.3, Apache 2.0.51, Perl 5.8.3, PHP 4.3.8, Python 2.3.3, Tcl 8.4.5.
For more details, see here.
Hope that this upgrade will allow Sourceforge to be some better!

The first point release of the stable 2.8.x series of GNOME has been released. This release includes the latest bugfixes and other improvements such as updated translations and is the first in a series of point releases.
Also, new version of GARNOME has been released to build GNOME 2.8.1.

Google is the most famous and power search system in the computer world! But Google doesn’t stay on that and it evolves constantly and offers new services and tools. I’d like to show you the most interesting (in my opinion) from them:

• Google Desktop Search allows you make a search in the Internet and on your computer using Google Search Engine. It’s very useful for MS Windows users because they don’t have any tools for quick search like Linux utility localte
• Picasa Photo Organizer allows you find, organize and do things with our digital pictures.
• Blogger allows you space and tools to create your web blog.
• Web APIs allow you develop your own applications using Google APIs.

Also, Google offers email service with free storage 1,000 megabytes and possibility to use it like external hard drive in your computer.
And finally, I’ve heard that Google’s started to develop its own web browser to make up competition to IE.

memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load.
It supports Perl, PHP, Python and Java. Developers of LiveJournal.com have used memcached to speed up access of LiveJournal users and visitors.

Once I’ve needed to convert an example of Perl code to HTML to hightlight it. I’ve made a big Google search and found Code2HTML.
It’s a Perl script which parses source code and generates HTML page with hightlighted code. Code2HTML is easy in use and supports Ada, Awk, C, C++, HTML, Java, JavaScript, Makefile, Pascal, Perl, SQL, ruby.
Many thanks to Peter Palfrader who developed that utility.