Daily Green Ideas is a decent site for those who are looking for simple ways to cut back. The other day they posted this. The upshot for those that do not wish to follow the link is that instead of buying a new computer upgrade the old. Ah If only I could, You see I love Guild Wars. I have been waiting for Guild Wars 2. I bought it early to get in on the Beta and the head start. Except - I cannot run it.
Overlord is a blast. I loved it. Overlord II came out and guess what? Yep, I can't run it. Same applies to many new firewalls, virus checkers and various other software. I have expanded the RAM as far as it will go. The processor is the best it can be. I have tweaked and prodded and overclocked. Guess what, I have hit the limit. Good thing I have a tower if this were a laptop I would have hit the limit YEARS ago.
So what to do. Well I plan for the fun of it to build my own. I have never built a gaming machine before, or modded a case even. But what about those who are not so adventurous or even 'gasp' dislike the idea? They are most likely stuck buying a new machine. Why? Because the new processors need a new motherboard. The new OS's need new monitors and peripherals and all of the above need more power.
I thought maybe at least ArenaNet had 'gotten' it. They swore if we could run the present Guild Wars we would be able to run the new, probably. Alas it seems even they have bought into the hype that we all need the latest in technology. What for? To play games? to look at Facebook? To build a personal network for all our daily needs so hackers and crackers can pluck our information out of the air - literally in some cases?
Let's get real. Businesses need computers to do work. A handful of people in an enterprise need a higher end machine. According to Wikipedia approximately 38% of users use Windows 7, 22% are still using the now unsupported XP. It seems that 'normal' people and businesses do not NEED the latest and greatest. Why can't companies get this through their heads. People do not need touch screen operating systems and monitors to create a spreadsheet. We still use the keyboard more than the mouse to communicate and most of all we do not need to buy a bigger, faster, more expensive machine to shop at Amazon.
To the writers of Daily Green Ideas, I wish that what you suggest was possible, but the machine makers are not in agreement. Please instead of putting the pressure on your readers to try and upgrade, encourage them to pressure the software and hardware manufacturers to just STOP and look at usability and accessibility to those who do not have beaucoup bucks to spend on a tool. Because when all is said and done that is what a computer is, something to make our lives easier, not a sinkhole for money.
Showing posts with label tools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tools. Show all posts
Sunday, August 26, 2012
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Learning CSS
I was asked to assist in redoing a website and ensuring it was completely accessible. This meant learning CSS, something I have avoided for a while. Friends who started doing CSS complained constantly. Then there is the fact that every time I went to look at the simplest technique, there was always an exception for I.E. (WHY does Microsoft do that?)
Well first let me say CSS is not difficult nor is it the bear that many lead me to believe. HOWEVER, many sites that purport to be pure CSS are not. They have .js or worse flash. They run server side applications and even loud music and sound that cannot be turned off. Some have only 1 page and no variations on it for mobile or other media. Yes they are using a CSS but why bother?
However as usual there are some roses in the weeds for learning CSS and finding templates and examples in the wild as it were. First is the obvious one W3 Schools the tutorial covers all of the basic concepts and commands and explains very well why CSS is a good idea. Standards for accessibility are covered as well as techniques to make the site look better. But honestly, what you build in the tutorial, looks like a middle school or grade school site. Once you understand the techniques and commands, it is time to move on to see what you can do DO with it.
I learn by doing and observing so off I went to find blogs, templates and sites I could view to see how they did something. There are a LOT out there, so let me list the ones I found the most useful.
Veerle's Blog This is the designer's old site, by all means check out the new one, too. But this has invaluable techniques for using Photoshop (or any graphic editor really) and basic information on CSS.
Free Website Templates - this site has a lot of templates of varying types, complexity and price. Most techniques can be gleaned from studying the CSS of many of the templates. Not all are accessible, pure CSS or even free - but it well worth a look to see what people can do.
CSS Zen Garden - This site is a perfect example of why to use CSS. All it is is the same page in several designs. The only difference is the CSS.
So, that should be enough to get anyone started. And my own design I hope you will see soon, I am down to tweaking and will post the links here when they are done. From what I learned I managed to come up with 5 very different looking designs for the site. So if the vote is tied among the owners I can just change them in a few months and swap out the design without changing the content pages. And THAT is the beauty of it.
Well first let me say CSS is not difficult nor is it the bear that many lead me to believe. HOWEVER, many sites that purport to be pure CSS are not. They have .js or worse flash. They run server side applications and even loud music and sound that cannot be turned off. Some have only 1 page and no variations on it for mobile or other media. Yes they are using a CSS but why bother?
However as usual there are some roses in the weeds for learning CSS and finding templates and examples in the wild as it were. First is the obvious one W3 Schools the tutorial covers all of the basic concepts and commands and explains very well why CSS is a good idea. Standards for accessibility are covered as well as techniques to make the site look better. But honestly, what you build in the tutorial, looks like a middle school or grade school site. Once you understand the techniques and commands, it is time to move on to see what you can do DO with it.
I learn by doing and observing so off I went to find blogs, templates and sites I could view to see how they did something. There are a LOT out there, so let me list the ones I found the most useful.
Veerle's Blog This is the designer's old site, by all means check out the new one, too. But this has invaluable techniques for using Photoshop (or any graphic editor really) and basic information on CSS.
Free Website Templates - this site has a lot of templates of varying types, complexity and price. Most techniques can be gleaned from studying the CSS of many of the templates. Not all are accessible, pure CSS or even free - but it well worth a look to see what people can do.
CSS Zen Garden - This site is a perfect example of why to use CSS. All it is is the same page in several designs. The only difference is the CSS.
So, that should be enough to get anyone started. And my own design I hope you will see soon, I am down to tweaking and will post the links here when they are done. From what I learned I managed to come up with 5 very different looking designs for the site. So if the vote is tied among the owners I can just change them in a few months and swap out the design without changing the content pages. And THAT is the beauty of it.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Boxer Editor
Ok for those of you who are not coders, do not do CSS or HTML or care for the software reviews - talk among yourselves. For the rest of us.
As most of you know I am a great supporter of small useful utilities. This one is not so small is extremely useful and while it is not free it is well worth the price. Boxer Text Editor. I love this tool. I was introduced to it by an online coding acquaintance (Ken Perry) who suggested I try it. Ken is blind. (He says he hates to be called visually impaired and prefers blind). He was looking for an affordable accessible editor. He suggested I try it knowing I hate the wordpad like editors. I missed Multi-Edit but at the time the cheapest version was around 500.00 too rich for my out of work self (they now have a lite version I may look at.) I started with the 30 day trial and have used it through a few versions now for over 4 years.
Installation
I opted for the disks to be sent to me. It arrived quickly and well protected - good job! Yes you read that correctly 1 disk. Download is also an option but my connection is slow and who know what my daughter is downloading or uploading as we speak? Boxer installs like a dream. No glitches on Vista, Windows 7 or my old 98 machine. First time I did it it went so fast I was not sure it worked. But it started up with no issues. The Boxer Shorts tips are cute, they get annoying fast though. You can turn them off easily. User configuration and preferences are a breeze to set up. Projects are more work and sometimes a lot more annoying but you can start right out coding.
Features
I am very happy with Boxer. It is small, easily configurable for any language and comes with quite a few templates like HTML, C, and Pascal, users have made others that can be downloaded from the site and you can of course add your own. I made one for myself for DIL using the C as a base. The entire program is small enough to run on a thumb drive (5 MB fully installed) which is great for carrying to a client site so you have an editor you know well.
It has all the features that make my life easier and I expect in a code editor; like find mate so you can ensure all your braces, brackets and parenthesis are closed. You can set it format your code (or plain text) and most other main features that larger and more expensive code editors have are built in. Side by side window configuration to find differing or same lines when comparing source. In other words it is a professional level tool.
For HTML, it is an excellent tool that includes a spell checker you can set to ignore HTML tags so that only the text is spell checked. When I hover the mouse over a color code, a small pop up appears showing me the color. The find mate works to find the end tag or starting tag in a pair.
Boxer also has some handy tools that save time, the HTML color, ANSI and OEM charts as well as a calculator, and a calendar. It comes with quite a few user macros and you can download more from the site to use as is or study to make your own. You can set up projects or just work on individual code. There is a an evaluation of 30 days available. I bought a copy after playing with it for a month, 30 days was not enough time to complete what I was working on, and I liked it well enough I wanted to continue using it.
Drawbacks and Issues
For the most part it is a nice little package. However every once in a while if I am working on a project it starts to hog the ram and fight over memory addresses. It has caused the Vista machine to lock up if I am running a telnet client or winscp or other ftp software on the WiFi router. Sometimes the text for linked documents or projects will show up in a hover type alt text and not go away. This last can be annoying. And like any tool that has autotext it can come up with some very odd fill ins. I usually keep that turned off. Lastly it is not 100% accessible on all features. Ken could not use the find mate for parenthesis and such. But he did use it almost exclusively on his windows machine.
The only issue I have with it for HTML editing is if I am editing a document and adding tags to an existing site (like a div for a new CSS class) it adds the end tag automatically. so if I want to change a section it looks like this div /div stuff I want in the div. I then have to go back and delete the end tag and put it where I really want it.
Making a simple "find this text in this situation and change to title case" is kludgy when making a macro. Something a word processor or pure text editor does easily. A lot of the pure text manipulation is not intuitive and you wind up writing a macro in the C-like language. While it is powerful I do not recommend this for say a blogger or an article writer.
Overall
The drawbacks are minor though and truth be told I tend to push my ram a lot. If I could just find the conflict with winscp I would be elated. But I suspect it is something unique to my Vista machine and over all I highly recommend this product for any developer. At $59.99 it well worth it. It is available for both 32 and 64 bit. It is great for a consultant or even for a consulting company due to the small size and the fact it leaves no traces on the client machine when used from a USB drive. I actually cannot say enough good about this product. Just go down load the 30 day trial and see for yourself. But be ready to be impressed.
As most of you know I am a great supporter of small useful utilities. This one is not so small is extremely useful and while it is not free it is well worth the price. Boxer Text Editor. I love this tool. I was introduced to it by an online coding acquaintance (Ken Perry) who suggested I try it. Ken is blind. (He says he hates to be called visually impaired and prefers blind). He was looking for an affordable accessible editor. He suggested I try it knowing I hate the wordpad like editors. I missed Multi-Edit but at the time the cheapest version was around 500.00 too rich for my out of work self (they now have a lite version I may look at.) I started with the 30 day trial and have used it through a few versions now for over 4 years.
Installation
I opted for the disks to be sent to me. It arrived quickly and well protected - good job! Yes you read that correctly 1 disk. Download is also an option but my connection is slow and who know what my daughter is downloading or uploading as we speak? Boxer installs like a dream. No glitches on Vista, Windows 7 or my old 98 machine. First time I did it it went so fast I was not sure it worked. But it started up with no issues. The Boxer Shorts tips are cute, they get annoying fast though. You can turn them off easily. User configuration and preferences are a breeze to set up. Projects are more work and sometimes a lot more annoying but you can start right out coding.
Features
I am very happy with Boxer. It is small, easily configurable for any language and comes with quite a few templates like HTML, C, and Pascal, users have made others that can be downloaded from the site and you can of course add your own. I made one for myself for DIL using the C as a base. The entire program is small enough to run on a thumb drive (5 MB fully installed) which is great for carrying to a client site so you have an editor you know well.
It has all the features that make my life easier and I expect in a code editor; like find mate so you can ensure all your braces, brackets and parenthesis are closed. You can set it format your code (or plain text) and most other main features that larger and more expensive code editors have are built in. Side by side window configuration to find differing or same lines when comparing source. In other words it is a professional level tool.
For HTML, it is an excellent tool that includes a spell checker you can set to ignore HTML tags so that only the text is spell checked. When I hover the mouse over a color code, a small pop up appears showing me the color. The find mate works to find the end tag or starting tag in a pair.
Boxer also has some handy tools that save time, the HTML color, ANSI and OEM charts as well as a calculator, and a calendar. It comes with quite a few user macros and you can download more from the site to use as is or study to make your own. You can set up projects or just work on individual code. There is a an evaluation of 30 days available. I bought a copy after playing with it for a month, 30 days was not enough time to complete what I was working on, and I liked it well enough I wanted to continue using it.
Drawbacks and Issues
For the most part it is a nice little package. However every once in a while if I am working on a project it starts to hog the ram and fight over memory addresses. It has caused the Vista machine to lock up if I am running a telnet client or winscp or other ftp software on the WiFi router. Sometimes the text for linked documents or projects will show up in a hover type alt text and not go away. This last can be annoying. And like any tool that has autotext it can come up with some very odd fill ins. I usually keep that turned off. Lastly it is not 100% accessible on all features. Ken could not use the find mate for parenthesis and such. But he did use it almost exclusively on his windows machine.
The only issue I have with it for HTML editing is if I am editing a document and adding tags to an existing site (like a div for a new CSS class) it adds the end tag automatically. so if I want to change a section it looks like this div /div stuff I want in the div. I then have to go back and delete the end tag and put it where I really want it.
Making a simple "find this text in this situation and change to title case" is kludgy when making a macro. Something a word processor or pure text editor does easily. A lot of the pure text manipulation is not intuitive and you wind up writing a macro in the C-like language. While it is powerful I do not recommend this for say a blogger or an article writer.
Overall
The drawbacks are minor though and truth be told I tend to push my ram a lot. If I could just find the conflict with winscp I would be elated. But I suspect it is something unique to my Vista machine and over all I highly recommend this product for any developer. At $59.99 it well worth it. It is available for both 32 and 64 bit. It is great for a consultant or even for a consulting company due to the small size and the fact it leaves no traces on the client machine when used from a USB drive. I actually cannot say enough good about this product. Just go down load the 30 day trial and see for yourself. But be ready to be impressed.
Saturday, July 24, 2010
RU Botted? Dunno RU Working?
A few weeks ago I logged into TrendMicro for my weekly Housecall run. I noticed a Beta Utility call RU Botted. The copy pointed out the possibility of your machine being used as a server of files or in DOS without your knowledge. Ok, so it is feeding into the present paranoia of users on virri and worms, but it is also not a bad idea to check. Many virus checkers do not check for bots so I decided to DL this and give it a try.
Download and setup - Quick and painless as was the installation. Great job! Am not enamored of it setting itself to run at startup, but I can change that. It would be nice to have a when "connected to the internet" option though, because I still turn the modem and router off and work offline. But it is beta and free so I am not complaining.
Function
This seems to be a daemon. It does not seem to interfere often or eat too much ram (488K according to system). It is very quietly idling in the background until it detects bot like activity. Then it logs it and pops up a screen informing the user that activity has been detected, do you want to go to TrendMicro's site, run Housecall and check it? Now is when I had a few issues. It took me to Housecall, asked me if I want to dl it etc. Then the launcher failed when I trird to run it. So I turned OFF RU Botted, closed the browser. At this time I noticed there was a separate window open for Netflix. I muttered about damn marketeers. closed that, opened the browser (Firefox, Trend like most companies refuse to admit Opera and Chrome even exist.) Downloaded the file, install and voila, it worked!
I picked up a book to read. Housecall finished quickly and returned a there is nothing message. Odd. I checked the log. It had an entry of a DNS inquiry to a malicious site. How.. informative. From where, what site and what called it? I shrugged it off, decided maybe it was a probe, but firewall did not go off.
I go on my merry way, except next day when I fire up machine it gives me the same message. I think this was because there is still something in the log. I opened the log and sure enough two entries said "Detected DNS query of malicious domain." No further information. I would like to know what domain, what app made the call perhaps even what port. I checked my firewall logs. No outgoing. and as a matter of fact nothing at the exact time logged. That sort of makes sense. If the firewall had caught it it would have stopped it and RU Botted MAY not have gotten a chance to spot it.
Then I got another. Same error, different site, then another from my own site. Then another. I look, sure enough Netflix is open again in most cases.
Overall
At this point I have no clue if the app is working or not. I will be installing a different bot watcher and putting it through its paces. In the meantime, anyone know anything about this? If you are interested in trying it be my guest, but there is presently no way to tell if it is working, and honestly - until they get the bugs out I would not recommend it at all.
Download and setup - Quick and painless as was the installation. Great job! Am not enamored of it setting itself to run at startup, but I can change that. It would be nice to have a when "connected to the internet" option though, because I still turn the modem and router off and work offline. But it is beta and free so I am not complaining.
Function
This seems to be a daemon. It does not seem to interfere often or eat too much ram (488K according to system). It is very quietly idling in the background until it detects bot like activity. Then it logs it and pops up a screen informing the user that activity has been detected, do you want to go to TrendMicro's site, run Housecall and check it? Now is when I had a few issues. It took me to Housecall, asked me if I want to dl it etc. Then the launcher failed when I trird to run it. So I turned OFF RU Botted, closed the browser. At this time I noticed there was a separate window open for Netflix. I muttered about damn marketeers. closed that, opened the browser (Firefox, Trend like most companies refuse to admit Opera and Chrome even exist.) Downloaded the file, install and voila, it worked!
I picked up a book to read. Housecall finished quickly and returned a there is nothing message. Odd. I checked the log. It had an entry of a DNS inquiry to a malicious site. How.. informative. From where, what site and what called it? I shrugged it off, decided maybe it was a probe, but firewall did not go off.
I go on my merry way, except next day when I fire up machine it gives me the same message. I think this was because there is still something in the log. I opened the log and sure enough two entries said "Detected DNS query of malicious domain." No further information. I would like to know what domain, what app made the call perhaps even what port. I checked my firewall logs. No outgoing. and as a matter of fact nothing at the exact time logged. That sort of makes sense. If the firewall had caught it it would have stopped it and RU Botted MAY not have gotten a chance to spot it.
Then I got another. Same error, different site, then another from my own site. Then another. I look, sure enough Netflix is open again in most cases.
Overall
At this point I have no clue if the app is working or not. I will be installing a different bot watcher and putting it through its paces. In the meantime, anyone know anything about this? If you are interested in trying it be my guest, but there is presently no way to tell if it is working, and honestly - until they get the bugs out I would not recommend it at all.
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