What Mike Does All Day

Best Notepad Replacement

Windows Notepad is a pretty crummy text editor. Here is the best replacement I've found:

Notepad 2

Free, with lots of handy goodies.

GLAT

More Google puzzle madness, like this one, only now in the form of the Google Labs Aptitude Test.

khtml2png

Hey Gaza,

Got khtml2png working on a red hat 9 box:

download.
./configure
make
make install

mv kcookiejarrc-accept ~/.kde/share/config/kcookiejarrc

vncserver -depth 32 -geometry 1000x1000

(enter password)

then

./khtml2png/khtml2png -display :1 --width 1200 --height 1600 --scaled-width 220 --scaled-height 260 http://www.google.com/googleblog/2004/07/warning-we-brake-for-number-theory.html e-commerce.png

and it makes a png of the URL.

Then, I made a php script where you send the parameters $_REQUEST - style, call the script, and dump back the png to the calling server(still working out the delivery format of this). This makes for hot feedbag/bookmarks action in Rage Against The MachineSpeak.

You are now kissing my grits.
Hoover

Firefox @ Work

We installed Firefox on all users machines, used a standard security config, and told them to stop using IE except for certain sites, such as microsoft.com and various, stupidly designed, internal applications. I expect to see a drastic decrease in spyware on the "Usual User Suspects" machines. The same usual suspects that always have something like "420 objects found" when you run spyware cleaning tools on their machines. I'll let you know how it works out.

XMLHttpRequest

This may be OLD NEWZ, but I just found it last week, so here is what I learned.

When you want to make things change on a web page, based on something the user selects or does, you used to have to do it with pure javascript. Say, if you wanted the user to select an item in one option menu, and see a second option menu change based on that selection. Javascript was always the answer. The reason it was the answer, was because it would do the DOC manipulations within the current browser session, and not make calls back to the server, provided you had all the data in javascript arrays and such.

Later, you could do the same thing in PHP (or cgi, or whatever), but you would have to use a combination of javascript and server processing (a PHP example), with a browser refresh in the middle.

NOW, thank yoda, you can begin doing such things with the badass XMLHttpRequest Object (which, apparently, is supported in all current browsers), AND, you can transfer XML data, URLS, files, images, whatever. The only hitch is it has javascript security, meaning all calls and data must come from the current domain. This is no big deal, because you can make a XMLRPC/SOAP/URL/Whatever proxy function that retrieves any data you need remotely, and spits it back to XMLHttpRequest from your domain.

These examples all worked in Firefox/Mozilla/IE6.

Read this first:

yeah yeah yeah
with associated example:
yes yes yes

then this one:
no no no *finger wagging* no no no

then, this killer one:

hold on to your butts!

it's a UNIX system!

technology is finally becoming less of a pain in the ass!

Server Hosting

I have a server at server beach, which, I believe, is a AMD 2200 with 1 G Ram and an 80G (might be 60) Drive, plus 900 G of bandwidth per month. A nice deal. NOW, however, you can get a AMD 2600, 1 G RAM, and 2x80 G drives, with 2000 G of bandwidth per month, for the same price I'm paying for the older server. You can also get fedora as the OS, which I like. If I had the money, I would order 5 of these right now. That is a sweet deal, man.

I've also been ch-czeching out 1and1. You can get a Pentium 4 3.06 GHz, with 1 G RAM and 120 G drive, with 500G of transfer/month, and $0.99/GB over the 500...for $99/month. This is a pretty good deal. You get Plesk, php 4.2.2 and apache 2.0.40 with full root access.

Seems like the best thing would be to have the main servers at server beach, and redundant backup servers at 1and1. Serve Path is also a nice place, but only for colocation of your machines, as the dedicated server prices are too high, and the monthly bandwidth allotment too low.

Just some pondermints to go with your wintermints.