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The message they got was:

I knew that the site and file were both available and a bit of hunting around I was reminded that IE used to have issues with Gzip encoding in the past - but I presumed that it was a thing of the past.

I also noticed that when downloading the file Firefox would not show a progress bar but would instead show a "indeterminate progress" bar.

Looking at the headers the it turned out that there was no Content-Length header but there was a header as follows:

To fix this I added some more exclusions to my mod_gzip rules to not zip some particular file types.

Now its working a treat. It would also be possible to do this only for IE - but most of the files we use on this are already well compressed to gzip compression doesn't help too much anyway.

Cheers, Mark

• Makes it practical for students to practice Oral and Aural skills
• Is efficient and effective for teachers, as they can listen to each student individually at a time to suit them
• Can be used for homework assignments or “High Stakes Assessments”

Learnosity are creating the next generation of language and assessment technology for use in schools and education worldwide. The current product portfolio includes:

• High availability web based systems
• Cross platform software (Windows, Mac and Linux)
• iPhone/Android native applications
• Telephony/VOIP and SMS applications

We need someone who can:

• Use Javascript or Actionscript to create great user interfaces
• Develop highly scalable web applications using ColdFusion, PHP or similar
• Cut code with the best in the world

You will also need to be:

• keen to continue learning new technologies
• able to have a conversation with non technical people
• enthusiastic and ready to push the boundaries

You'll need:

• 1-3 years of programming experience
• Experience in at least one Client side language (Actionscript or Javascript/jQuery)
• Experience in at least one Server side language (eg PHP, Java, ColdFusion, etc)
• Understanding of Object Oriented design
• Understanding of XHTML and CSS

It would be good if you have:

• A degree in Computer Science, Engineering or similar.
• been working with open source tools
• Experience with Adobe AIR or Flex
• been playing around with iPhone/Android applications
• experience with some of Linux/VOIP/SIP/Asterisk/Jabber/XMPP

This is a full time role and you will be working in a casual workplace with flexible hours in the Sydney CBD. Salary commensurate with experience.

If this sounds like the job for you, email a covering letter explaining why you'll be great and your resume to mark@learnosity.com - no agencies please.

In order to come up with a reliable solution to this we decided to use the SSH server we had available and tunnel the windows sharing across the local port forwards, much simpler and more reliable.

Thanks to this article it was a breeze to set up.

Steps are as follows:

• Create loopback adapter on windows
• Configure loopback adapter on windows
• Reboot
• Configure SSH connection
• Test it all out

Create loopback adapter on windows

We'll give your computer an additional (fake) IP address, and we'll port forward to that address instead of the computer's real IP. Windows XP will continue to do file sharing on the real IP address. We'll assign it an IP of 10.0.0.1 (that's what we configured putty to use above.)

1. System->Control Panel->Add Hardware
2. Yes, Hardware is already connected
3. Add a new hardware device (at bottom of list)
4. Install the hardware that I manually select
5. Network adapters
6. Microsoft , Microsoft Loopback Adapter
7. (Go through the installation procedure.)

Configure loopback adapter on windows

1. Open your new fake ethernet adapter (Network Connections) , enter a made-up IP address (I suggest 10.0.0.1, which is a privately routable address that most folk don't use.)
2. Enable Client for Microsoft Networks.
3. Disable File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks
4. Enable Interent Protocol (TCP/IP)
5. Click on properties for TCP/IP.
6. Enter your chosen IP address (10.0.0.1), subnet mask (255.255.255.0). You can leave gateway blank.
7. Under advanced->WINS, Enable LMHosts Lookup and Disable NetBIOS over TCP/IP

Reboot

Configure SSH connection

• Download Putty
• Enter IP address
• Enter Auth Key (if using SSH keys)
• Enter Port forwards for: (these connect the ports on you local machine to
  • 10.0.0.1:137 to 127.0.0.1:137
  • 10.0.0.1:138 to 127.0.0.1:138
  • 10.0.0.1:139 to 127.0.0.1:139
  • 10.0.0.1:445 to 127.0.0.1:445
• Save the config.

Test it all out

• Open putty, load the settings and connect.
• Open Exporer and type in: \\10.0.0.1\

You should now be connected to your remote windows system over a secure encrypted tunnel.

Cheers, Mark

You can use it to clear the query cache - to ensure you are starting from a level playing field. Or if you are tuning queries in a application and want to ensure they are not cached run it before each run:

Cheers, Mark

It does exactly what is says on the tin and makes it very easy to copy dvd's. Initially I used it from my Mac and it worked flawlessly.

I also tried the Linux version on Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) which has no GUI but it is pretty simple when you get the hang of it.

Here's a typical command line:

This reads from /dev/cdrom and uses the handy "iPod Low-Rez" preset which fixes it all up nicely for the iPod.

And here's one that takes the second title:

The wiki has more information on command line usage.

Happy iPodding.

Cheers, Mark

Prism is a cut down version of Mozilla which is designed to run single sites from icon - what's the use of that you may ask? Well it allows you to have an icon on your desktop for Gmail or Google Calendar or docs or analytics and get to it nice and quickly.

It also free's up some much needed screen real-estate as all the other toolbars relevant for a web-developers browser can get in the way and are not used when you are using you email and calendar.

Additionally - as web developer I tend to restart firefox more often than some - and having my email seperated from that is nice.

Give it a try and see if you like it. On Ubuntu Hardy you can do the following to install it:

On other platforms (windows,mac or other linux versions) you can go to the Prism site and download it.

For the different applications check out the Bundles section or the User contributed bundles section.

Obviously this shares a lot of similarities with the adobe AIR platform albeit not as full featured. It will be interesting to see what further development plans there are for the prism platform.

Cheers, Mark

However, inspired by this article, I'm starting to use a new solution, Inkscape, that fulfills my criteria that works on Linux, Mac and Windows.

Now you may argue that Inkscape is not a diagraming tool but a generic drawing tool. This is true, but with the addition of a few templates of pre-drawn items it become a very good diagramming tool.

I've created a few simple flow chart elements which I use and also scoured the net for some SVG icons for network based diagrams which were sourced from Gnome (via Ubuntu) and from Quantum Bits.

Templates Previews

Download

• Flowchart Template (SVG) (10k)
• Network Devices Template (SVG) (1.6M)

Give it a try - it's very easy.

Aqua Data Studio

This is my current DB IDE of choice and has some significant features in the new version 6.5 that means I'll be staying with it for a while, particularly as it runs on Linux, Macs and Windows identically.

• Schema Comparison - very handy for keeping development and production db's schemas in sync.
• Charts & Pivot Tables - makes it easy to create adhoc graphs withouth having to resort to Excel/OpenOffice Calc
• Morph to Delimited List - A simple but powerful function that saves a lot of time. Allows you to take the results of a sql query and convert to comma seperated list. I've done dozens of adhoc CF scripts to handle this before :-)
• Subversion Support - As we use subversion for our code it's handy to have it built in.

MySQL GUI tools (Query Browser & Admin)

These have some very nice functionality but have always found them to be pretty unstable - they just crash a lot with no explanation.

Navicat

This is pretty good option, but the Linux version is the poor cousin to the Windows & Mac versions.

Love to hear any comments feedback or suggestions.

Documenting code wasn't as easy as I thought it would be, so I thought I'd share this with you and hopefully it will save someone some time. I use an Intel Mac and this is what you need to do to get your basic code documentation generated successfully:

1. In your terminal window go to your Flex SDK bin directory. Typically this is located under /Applications/Adobe Flex Builder 2/Flex SDK 2/bin

2. From "bin" directory run this command:

If you have any external Libraries in your Flex project you will need to include them in your command:

The key thing to remember for Mac users is that you need to run the command from Flex SDK bin directory and use -source-path option to tell the compiler where the source is located. -doc-sources will tell the compiler to generate output for the current directory and all subdirectories recursively. If you run this utility from any other directory other than "bin", you will get NoClassDefFoundError.

I haven't tried running ASDoc in Windows yet, but it should be very similar to running it on a Mac. And since ASDoc is a command line java utility, you would think it would run on Linux too. Well, for all you Linux users out there, this is the message I got from the compiler:

ASDoc is nicely documented here.

Cheers
Marko

When I'm flicking back and forth between Windows and Linux I typically leave the Windows window at 1024x768 which allows it to have no scrolling and still fit on my 1680x1050 screen.

However, there are times when you just need more screen real estate in windows and as the VMWare driver doesn't come with a native 1680x1050 resolution you need to make some minor registry edits to get it working.

A bit of searching got me to an knowledge base article but the instructions didn't work for me, as the registry keys didn't exist there but were located pretty close. So without further ado (there's been quite a bit already I admit).

• Start->Run and type regedit
• Select the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Video\{device id}\0000. Note the deviceid is a big horrible uuid, and there may be multiple ones. Use the one that has a key "Device Description" of VMWare SVGA II
• There are a load of Resolution.x lines, add a new "Binary Value" 1 higher than the highest resolution. Eg Resolution.11
• Enter the binary value of: 31 36 38 30 78 31 30 35 30 which is ASCII for "1680x1050"
• Close regedit and reboot.
• After reboot you should have a new resolution available to you.

For other resolutions you can use the following numbers keys:

Cheers, Mark