Firefox 2.0 Recap

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Besides the ugly new theme, the convoluted “too-cool” first-run website, and the myriad of half-baked features that Firefox 2.0 brings to the scene, there’s a couple of not-so-welcome policy changes in Firefox 2.0 that make us wonder what’s going on at Mozilla. Basically, these changes go against everything that the Firefox team has been doing for the past couple of years, and make it look like Firefox wasn’t run by an open-source community so much as a big corporation with nothing but money on its mind.

When Firefox 2.0 came out, we didn’t really care to review it – after all, there were plenty of reviews already out there from the Beta and RC stages. But now, a month into the RTM release of Firefox 2.0, we find a re-cap being called for.

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Updated Comment-Entry Form

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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A long time ago NeoSmart Technologies used to have WYSIWYG editors all over the place, but things just didn’t work out. For one, it was rare for a post with even tiny bit of formatting applied to be rendered as valid XHTML (like the rest of the site), and for another, it was very incompatible with newer versions of certain web browsers and older versions of others – so we got rid of the system.

However, we’ve had quite a few complaints about WordPress’ default requirement for encoded HTML entities, and many posts were lost by including an unencoded “<” or other element. We’re glad to say we’ve found an alternative. We came across the Xinha WYSIWYG editor, a nice (and possibly minimal)-looking editor that has a new experimental HTML-creation engine that produces truly valid code no matter what you throw at it. That and the fact that it can easily be customized (as we’ve done here) and works on almost any browser made it the ideal choice for NeoSmart Technologies.

Anyway, it works fairly well and a spell checking module is also being added at the moment. For anyone not wanting to use the WYSIWYG editor (especially if you’re trying to write some code), you can press the icon of a document with “<>” superimposed on it – that’ll display the pure HTML and you can do what you like from there.

 

Vista Symlinks Revisited…

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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It’s not often that something we classify as a “really good” feature turns out to be a bit of a sham, but unfortunately, that’s the case with Vista’s symlinks. Just a couple of days ago, symlinks were our “big Vista feature of the week,” but now, we’re not so sure.

First, a correction. Symlinks haven’t really been added to Windows Vista. Sure, you can use the mklink command to get Vista to intercept calls made to certain paths and have them silently and invisibly replaced with whatever real paths you previously specified, just like Symlinks are supposed to be – but that’s about it. Vista’s symlinks aren’t much better than junctions in 2k/XP that don’t take up extra hard drive space, and indeed are quite a bit less compatible.

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How To: apache_response_headers() on IIS

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Along with the release of our request_uri for IIS yesterday, we have another useful tip for a second function commonly found in WordPress plugins and other PHP redistributable scripts. apache_response_headers is used to get a list of all the headers sent out by a page, in the format of an associative array.

IIS doesn’t use this function, and before PHP5, there was no way to properly emulate its behavior. But on PHP5, it’s nothing too difficult. Without further ado, here’s the code:

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100% Apache-Compliant REQUEST_URI for IIS and Windows!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Ever since moving NeoSmart Technologies to a Windows server, we’ve had one headache after the other dealing with various PHP scripts that included references to $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"], and unfortunately, none of the “workarounds” or hacks provided on the internet work. Some of them are for Apache on Windows, and others work most of the time, but break the minute you introduce url rewriting or launch scripts as the default files in a directory.

REQUEST_URI for Windows is a must-install for absolutely anyone that uses IIS & PHP, no matter what software you run. It’s free, it’s one-hundred percent compatible with Apache’s own REQUEST_URI, and best of all, it’s guaranteed to work no matter what. REQUEST_URI for Windows gets whatever the user entered into the address bar – period. Nothing more, nothing less. And of course, you never have to modify a single script to make them work, this does all the work for you.

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Windows Longhorn/IE7 Beta Program Rewards!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Windows Vista RTM’d a week ago, and now, the beta testers have gotten their swag. If you (actively) participated in the Longhorn Beta program, this is your chance to get a free (as in free speech beer) Windows Vista Business or Ultimate Edition product key (legally, and it activates!).

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Comment Subscription Fixed

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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A while back we had to disable subscribing to comments & receiving notification to subscribed posts, but we’re glad to let you know that it’s working again. It’s one of the sacrifices one makes in running the latest SVN software right out of the oven compiler errr opcode or wherever it is that PHP comes from.

But the bad news (yes, there’s always bad news, you should know that by now!) is, RSS feeds for individual posts aren’t working the way they’re supposed to. But we’re working on that… We’ll have that fixed soon enough!

WordPress, WP-Hackers, RSS Feeds, and More

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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At NeoSmart, we’re all about WordPress. Hands-down, it’s the most powerful, most flexible, and certainly most popular blogging platform available, and it’s free. We do what we can to help (which isn’t much, really), but we’re planning on getting a bit more “involved,” so to speak. Besides the couple of (hopefully useful) WordPress plugins that’re in the making, we also have several WordPress-centric articles coming up, and we hope you’ll enjoy them.

For now, here’s a quick one: Did you ever hear of “WP-Hackers?”
Well, those guys are the 1337 WordPress users, and they know all about WP, and what makes it tick. They have a mailing list you can subscribe to if you want to participate in all the fun, but what if you don’t want to (or can’t) join in the discussion? And since you don’t require a bi-directional form of communication, why use clunky email anyway?

We took the WP-Hackers mailing list archives, added a RSS feed to ‘em, and churned it through FeedBurner, the result is the WP-Hackers Live Archives – where you can find out what WP is all about and pick up all the tricks of the trade without divulging your email, filling up your inbox quota, or worrying about privacy. Just click and subscribe!

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Why not Embedded? ATM’s Running XP Professional…

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Today while on my way back I stopped at the (Cairo Amman) bank to withdraw some money. As luck would have it, the ATM wasn’t working – again. This time, I happened to be there when it suddenly BSOD’d and began a reboot cycle. Obviously, to BSOD it needs to run Windows, and moments later, that was confirmed. But that’s not the story here – believe it or not, most ATMs run Windows nowadays, and there’s absoloutely nothing wrong with that.

The problem is, they’re all running Windows XP Professional. Of course if the only alternative was Windows XP Home Edition, we’d understand; but there’s a reason why Microsoft developed Windows XP Embedded. It’s not just about performance, size, & reliability, but it’s also about speed, adaptability, cost, and ease-of-use. Windows XP Embedded is several times cheaper to license and deploy across a wide range of computers (err, ATM machines) than Windows XP, especially Professional Edition. What’s more, it doesn’t require as much power, and doesn’t have as much bloat.

I had the (mis)fortune of seeing the PC/ATM boot. They’re using an IBM with Phoenix Bios (from the 60s) and 512 MB SDRAM. Forget about speed, just think about it in terms of cash. It must be more expensive to buy thousands of these machines new than it is to purchase a minimal-device capable of supporting the stripped-down XP EE – which is all you really need to run an ATM. You most certainly don’t need Internet Explorer!

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The New & Improved Google Translate

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Everyone’s favorite search-engine/social-networking multi-billion dollar corporation is at it again. Following the addition of several new features to the Gmail platform earlier this week, Google has also revamped certain portions of its language tools – in beta of course. It’s not available for all languages, nor is it in a place where most casual users would find it, but Google’s newest feature makes online translation of websites and documents a bit more enjoyable.

The trick is – use the Arabic. About a month ago, Google launched its brand-new (beta) English-to-Arabic and Arabic-to-English translation service, making it the first free online translation tool that actually gives decent results… of sorts. At any rate, that’s another story for another day; right now, it’s the (“Web 2.0”) technology we care about: Dynamic switching between source and destination languages on a translated webpage.

For instance, here’s our “WordPress-in-the-Name Issues” story from a couple of weeks ago in Arabic; it’s ideal because of it’s more “natural” language and glaring lack of code boxes, technospeak, and general all-around esoteric content. If you understand Arabic – ignore the grammar, it’s really bad. If you don’t, that’s ok, it doesn’t matter.

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