Praj's Site » Software

Gmail Problems

praj — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 10:45:32 +0000

Had a problem getting into GMail today, it would just stop on the preview screen, and not get to the inbox. This is in Firefox 4. Turns out, it was a cache issue! Clearing my browsing cache/sessions, and restarting my browser fixed it. So it looks like even Google applications have to bow before the cache gods!

Web Mockups with Pencil

praj — Mon, 03 May 2010 04:25:09 +0000

Discovered Pencil today, a nifty free/open source mockup tool. Initially I wasn’t going to try it because it is advertised as a Firefox extension, and I didn’t want yet another firefox extension installed. But then I found you could download a standalone version. So far, it works pretty good, my only complaint is that I there isn’t a grid view OR at least I don’t know how to turn it on.

Web Development with NotePad++

praj — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 10:33:24 +0000

I’ve started using NotePad++ as my primary editor for web development – HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP. Notepad++ gives you everything you need, but you do have to turn on a few settings.

Autocompletion.

This will prompt for you to complete repeated or known text for the relevant language you are working with:

Settings > Preferences > Backup/Auto-Completion

Tick enable auto-completion on each input, and leave it as function completion. You can start from the 2nd character or more if you find it annoying. Press the or keys to automatically populate the full word.

TextFX Settings

TextFX can perform automatic closing of (X)HTML and XML tags through the following setting:

TextFX > TextFX Settings > Autoclose XHTML/XML

NotePad++ Run in Various Browsers

praj — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 01:46:49 +0000

By default, NotePad++ has a number of browsers included in the Run menu including:

Firefox
Internet Explorer
Safari
Chrome

However, depending on where these browsers are installed on your computer they may not work. For example, I have Firefox Portable installed, so, the command to launch it is D:\Programs\Firefox\FirefoxPortable.exe.

To update the shortcuts listed on the Run menu, you need to edit the file shortcuts.xml in the NotePad++ installation directory (e.g. C:\Program Files\NotePad++\shortcuts.xml). However there’s a catch. You can’t edit this file with NotePad++. Instead, edit with another text editor (e.g. plain old NotePad). If you edit this file with NotePad++ the changes won’t persist – and the file will be reset back to its defaults.

Here’s the change I made to the file for Firefox Portable:


D:\Programs\Firefox\FirefoxPortable.exe "$(FULL_CURRENT_PATH)"

StatPress Analytics in WordPress

praj — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 21:00:06 +0000

I’ve been trying StatPress for a week now and its going pretty well. Its an alternative to analytics software such as Google Analytics to give you information about visitors to your wordpress site.

Minimalist Gmail Firefox Extension

praj — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 23:22:19 +0000

Matt Constatine has come up with a fantastic Minimalist Gmail Firefox extension which cuts out all the guff in Gmail and leaves you with the bare essentials. The other day I was using Gmail without the extension and noticed that Gmail has actually got quite cluttered. If you like it, a donation is the best thank you.

NotePad++: my new favourite editor

praj — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:55:36 +0000

For a long time I’ve been using PSPad which is a very good free text editor for Microsoft Windows. I’ve always known about NotePad++ which has always been a great text editor (and its open source). However, I’ve never been able to fully justify the switch from PSPad to NotePad++.That is until I started Ruby on Rails development and got a case of Mac envy watching all the screencasts with TextMate and the really nice Railcasts theme. It seems the Ruby on Rails community is full of Mac users — well at least the helpful people that write the tutorials and screencasts anyway.

What I wanted was the really simple interface, theme and explorer you get with TextMate. I just had two conditions:

I didn’t want to switch to a Mac. We’re not all made of money. Although I hear you can power a Mac with your own sense of self-satisfaction
I wasn’t going to switch to a paid editor (at least not without exploring the free/open source alternatives first) like eTextEditor or Sublime Editor. Something open source would be good too.

The solution came pretty quickly as soon as I found out you can convert TextMate themes to NotePad++ themes. Another great feature is the plugins manager which makes it easy to install a number of really useful plugins.

Here’s how my NotePad++ now looks running on Windows 7 (Consolas font) using the Railscast theme and Explorer plugin:

I know, I know, no TextMate bundles but hey, you can’t have it all, and I’m just a wannabe Mac fan boy anyway. Also I wish they would hurry up and update the NotePad++ icon. It looks like something that survived from Windows 95

Guide to Git on Windows

praj — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:19:28 +0000

Found this site: An Illustrated Guide to Git on Windows for us poor folks on Windows that want to use Git for version control

Its a good walk through on how to use the major features in Git with plenty of helpful screen shots.

Testing websites with Internet Explorer

praj — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 07:25:37 +0000

Testing web sites with different versions of Internet Explorer has always been a bit painful. Sure you can use different machines, or virtual machines, but that all takes time. However, there’s a tool to take care of testing IE versions 5.5,6,7 and 8: IETester. Its free for private/commercial use, however for commercial use you should buy a license.

On a related note:

Check out this article by Lins about why we should stop developing for IE6
Check out this article by NetTuts+ about 9 common IE bugs and how to fix them

Copying very large files across a LAN network

praj — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 05:08:54 +0000

I needed to copy a very large file (~25GB), a virtual machine disk across a network (LAN). Standard Windows copy isn’t great for this, and it kept on getting stuck. I also tried using the copy/xcopy commands but they weren’t much help. The problem was a matter of feedback and recovery. That is, having the ability to see how much longer it was take and to pause/resume in case of a failure.

Finally I settled on TeraCopy, a GUI file copy tool which has a portable version. All up it took about 4 hours to copy across a wireless network. Best thing is you can pause/resume if there are any network drops and you get instant feedback about the copy process. The remaining time is also a little bit more reliable than Microsoft time!