Video: Web Development: You’re Doing It Wrong

Stefan Tilkov challenges many commonly-held assumptions about how to best develop web applications, emphasizing the strengths and ideal roles for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, HTTP and URIs.

The video about this topic can be found on infoq.com

Mythbusting Cloud Computing

An interesting video busting myths about cloud computing can be found on infoq.com

Khawaja Shams presents how NASA’s JPL uses cloud computing, and evaluates some of the existing cloud computing myths in the MythBusters style.

How to easily merge PDF files with linux

There is an easy way to merge two or more PDF files. You can use the free software called Pdftk. You can get it via the package system of your preferred linux distribution or the homepage of the project.

Here is an example for merging threepdf files

pdftk 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf cat output 123.pdf

You can find more examples on the projects website.

A nice mono laser printer working with linux: Samsung ML1860

If you are looking for a  reasonable priced mono laser printer which works flawlessly under linux: I recommend the Samsung ML series. For example the Samsung ML1860.

For more information how to install the driver, just look here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=341621

note to myself: compiling qt and installing as local user

I’ve decided to build kde4 trunk on my computer again. For this, one of the first steps was to get qt 4.8 running. As the debian repositories only contained qt 4.6, I had to build and instal qt for myself. I created a user named “kdedev” and a build and src directory in his home directory.

• get the QT sources and place it under /home/kdedev/src :  git clone git://anongit.kde.org/qt
• Change into the result qt directory and configure qt: .configure -no-phonon -prefix <where/I/install/Qt>
• make
• make install

voila, you have your working qt trunk installed in the home directory of a local user account…

Samsung Series 9 NP900X3A wireless Problems

After installing Ubuntu on my new Samsung Series 9 NP900X3A notebook, I was having massive problems with my wireless connection. The problem was, that the speed of the wireless connection was changing from full speed to transmitting nothing at all. After quite some googling and researching on the web, I found the solution.

gedit /etc/modprobe.d/iwlagn.conf
and add the line:
options iwlagn 11n_disable=1

The wireless controller is from intel… after all, I’m quite happy with the new notebook…

How to handle Flag Arguments

Martin Fowler’s Website is teaching about the do’s and don’ts of handling flag arguments

A flag argument is a kind of function argument that tells the function to carry out a different operation depending on its value. Let’s imagine we want to make booking for a concert. There are two ways to do this: regular and premium .

If you are interested in improving your coding skills read the whole article.

BibTex information for books?

If your are citing books and you are sick of creating the BibTex data for yourself: Cheer up, there is a easy way to get the data created. You just have to get the ISBN Number of the book (easiest by finding the book on wikipedia). Then you use the OttoBib webservice. Just replace the ISBN number in this example

http://www.ottobib.com/isbn/9780199535705/bibtex

Calling this URL gives you

@Book{marx2008capital,
author = {Marx, Karl},
title = {Capital : an abridged edition},
publisher = {Oxford University Press},
year = {2008},
address = {Oxford New York},
isbn = {9780199535705}
}

Easy and a real life saver….

Alternative to GoogleReader? rsslounge

Maybe you are one of the people who is using GoogleReader not because you like Google that much, but because you are not aware of a nice online alternative.

organize and read your feeds, set priorities, filter your feeds and items and fetch news, images and photos in a really easy way
simple ⋅ free ⋅ open source

You can install rsslounge on your own server. You just need apache/php/mysql.

Where is the RSS Feed Icon in Firefox 4?

Have you ever asked yourself: Where the $&”(% is the RSS Feed Icon in Firefox 4?” I did.

By default the new RSS web feeds subscription button is not visible. To add this to the toolbar ( or navigation tool-bar as it is called in Firefox 4 ) just right-click on the toolbar and select customize. In the customize tool bar window that appears, click and drag the “Subscribe” icon to the desired location. Done.

More Details can be found on technophilia.madharasan.com