New Blog Title, New Logo
As you already saw, I changed the title for this blog from “Robby Chen Personal Blog” to “Ubuntu Web Coder “as well as the logo.
One reason for changing the blog title is because I’m going to stick to Ubuntu, specifically Lucid Lynx (10.04.1), since I depend on some PPAs to get the updates. Maverick Meerkat (10.10) just doesn’t work for me. I will wait until Natty Narwhal (11.04) is out and see. If this still won’t work for me, I will stay with 10.04.1 and wait for the next release… Anyway, you get the idea.
As most of you who read this blog in the past know, I used to write code in Netbeans until I discovered the hidden potential of gedit for being such a good IDE. That’s why I abandoned Netbeans and replaced with gedit in the new logo. And I renamed blog title specifically to “coder” because I would like to try writing the code in each post from now on.
Besides the gedit logo in the new logo, I have also included two groups of logos, GNU/Linux and PHP. The GNU/Linux logos include Linux penguin, Chrome OS, Android, and Open Source. The PHP logos include PHP, CakePHP, and WordPress. I also included just released HTML5 logo created by W3C. I regularly use these tools and talked and will continue to talk about them in this blog. That’s why I included them in the logo.
What do you think about the new logo, blog title, and background color?
Create PDF without using PHP PDFlib
I never used PDFlib on my website because the extension isn’t available in the PEAR Modules of my web host. PDFlib is a PHP extension for generating PDF documents dynamically. PHP extensions need to be installed separately apart from PHP. In my one year experience with PHP, I only used GD extension to generate images for use with CAPCHA and other random images. Therefore I don’t have enough experience to talk about these extensions.
Recently when I was searching for some useful PHP tutorials, I stumble across a PHP class that can generate PDF documents without PDFlib extension. I thought this is very useful since my web host doesn’t provide the extension. It’s called FPDF. After some experiments by following its tutorials, I felt it’s not too difficult to use once you know the Object Oriented Programming way of PHP. The class also has dozens of extended classes. They can be copied and used as the extensions of FPDF. One thing that I don’t like about is its website. When I went to the site, the first thing I noticed was that it uses iframe. I don’t like iframe since it isn’t bookmarkable. I wonder why it doesn’t use PHP include instead of iframe since this is a PHP-based website. Fortunately, I can open the frame in a new tab by right-clicking appropriate frame in Firefox so I can add the Scripts page to Update Scanner to check new scripts update.
Created a new logo
I decided that the logo redesign is my next step for the project. Blender and GIMP are two editors that I used to design the current logo. The tools I used to create redesigned logo are Inkscape and GIMP. I used Inkscape to design the basic text and add shadow and reflection effects using GIMP. This is the first time I have used Inkscape so I only can discover its features through using it. I found out that it has the ability to directly change the font size without converting the text to image like GIMP does. This means that I can change the content of the text after I changed font size. Inkscape also has drag and drop feature to import different image files into the document, including JPG and PNG. Below is my finished text created using Inkscape:
Click to enlarge
The file saved by Inkscape is a SVG file. It can be imported into GIMP as an image file. By following this tutorial, I was able to create a shadow effect for the logo, as well as the reflection effect. Below is the logo with effects added:
This image is directly linked from beta.robbychen.com
Note that this logo might change based on the future development of the site. For instance, I might add or remove some open source software images, such as Ubuntu logo for letter o in my name. However, I will write a post about the change once I make a change on the beta site.
Ubuntu Sources List Generator
Ubuntu Sources List Generator provides many useful repositories that I didn’t know about, including AWN Testing repo and Firefox Daily Build repo. To generate Ubuntu-based sources list, just select your country and the Ubuntu release you are using. Then select the repos that you want and click the Generate List button. Follow the instructions on the next page to add the repositories that you selected. The only downside of the service is that it dooesn’t have NetBeans daily build repo. Although there is an Add Repository feature, I don’t know what’s the URL of NetBeans daily build repo. Overall, this service is great. It also includes the newest Ubuntu Lucid repos.
jQuery CSS Browsers Compatibility
Different browsers require different CSS property syntax, especially in CSS 3. In CSS 2, the only property that I know of requires different syntax is opacity property. Firefox called opacity, and IE called filter. You need to set values for opacity and filter properties at the same time. Not only this is inefficient, but it also adds up the size of the CSS file.
Fortunately, jQuery has a css function to make the CSS cross-browser compatible. For example:
$("#thing").css({
opacity: 0.5
});
It will auto changed to filter CSS property if the user is running IE.
However, since the new CSS 3 is in the draft mode right now, jQuery has not implemented CSS 3 standard yet. It means that border-radius and other properties that are different from each browser needs to write all of the possible style properties into the CSS file.
For more information about jQuery CSS and a jQuery plugin to support CSS 3 syntax, please read original article.
Firefox Lorentz Beta beginning to handle plug-in Crashes
I heard long time ago that Mozilla had planned to separate the tabs into different processes in Firefox 3.6 release similar to Google Chrome. Because of the time constraints, Mozilla plans to release this feature as well as other features in future release of Firefox as updates. I think Firefox Lorentz is the first feature that Mozilla plans to release. On its homepage, it states that
Firefox “Lorentz” provides uninterrupted browsing for Windows and Linux users when there is a crash in the Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime or Microsoft Silverlight plugins.
If a plugin crashes or freezes, it will not affect the rest of Firefox. You will be able to reload the page to restart the plugin and try again.
Firefox Lorentz will become part of a future release of Firefox 3.6.
Firefox Lorentz only improves plug-ins handling. According to Firefox roadmap, the process separation for tabs will be made into Firefox 4.
Mozilla Prism Running on my GNU/Linux System
Mozilla Prism is a Mozilla Lab product that available in both Firefox add-on version and stand-alone version. It has the ability to run web apps directly on the desktop using Firefox Gecko engine. Web apps that created using Prism can be placed onto the application dock and in the system tray.
This morning I remembered the use of Mozilla Prism is because of the performance of Ubuntu on my netbook. Firefox always freeze every time I refresh my Gmail webpage. I need to get rid of this issue, so it was the first to come to my mind to solve this problem: Mozilla Prism. I used Prism before on the Windows. I never tried it on GNU/Linux since I migrated to GNU/Linux one year ago. First I installed Prism as a Firefox add-on from Mozilla Prism website. It failed. The web apps created through this add-on simply failed to launch. It launched another instance of Firefox browser instead of a new minified version of Firefox. After its failure, I downloaded the stand-alone version of the app. It successfully launched the main conversion window directly in the extracted folder. However, it needs to manually type the URL address that you want to convert to a web app. After that, it launched a new minified Firefox version for each converted web app.
It runs and converts web apps on my 32-bit Ubuntu netbook without problem. However, the issues became to come up when I tried to run Prism on the 64-bit based Fedora. According to the Prism spec, it doesn’t have 64-bit version for GNU/Linux available yet. Unfortunately, it still doesn’t work even I installed 32-bit components on my Fedora system. As far as I know, it couldn’t run on the 64-bit GNU/Linux system because it couldn’t load XPCOM and I couldn’t find any clue about what is XPCOM.
The overall performance of Prism compare to the standard Firefox browser is faster response and less freeze during the use of my gmail web app. I felt opening gmail is quicker and JavaScript becomes more responsive.
Prism is a good application to get the most out of the web apps. I hope Mozilla would continue to improve the usability of this app. The features I would like to see in the future version of Prism are to have ability to open the new window link directly inside the web app window or open a new minified Firefox window instead open in the regular Firefox browser window, to have more options in the Prism preferences dialog box, and to enable the new tab button as sell as enable Ctrl-T keyboard shortcut to open a new tab in the web app window.
Still Solving Flash Problem in Second Life
Yesterday I successfully ran Second Life official viewer on Fedora x64. However, I discovered that I cannot view YouTube video and other Flash-enabled websites when testing the new Shared Media feature in SL Viewer 2 Beta. Today I found out there only have one blog post related to the Flash problem over Second Life blog. It talks about Flash and Firefox issues related to SL Viewer 2 Beta. You can view this blog post right here: https://blogs.secondlife.com/message/111720, and don’t be afraid to start a discussion if you have any problem with SL Viewer 2 Beta on GNU/Linux.
Ubiquity Experiment was Ended For Now
Ubiquity was an experiment Firefox add-on released by Mozilla back in 2008. It basically added a command line interface to the browser to search almost everything on the web using Google search engine. According to the Ubiquity homepage, the first phase of the experiment was successfully ended in 2009. Some of its feature has been integrated to Jetpack, another experiment add-on developed by Mozilla to allow web developers to develop Firefox add-ons more easily. Mozilla stated on the Ubiquity homepage that it will launch second phase of the experiment in “indefinite future”.
I used Ubiquity long time ago. In my experience, it is very easy to use, best for people who love using the command line. However, I always forgot to use Ubiquity by pressing Ctrl+Space when I was doing my research rather than use the search bar. Maybe sometimes in the future Mozilla should add the option to add Ubiquity onto the Firefox toolbar in their Phase II experimentation.
Google Toolbar has slowed my Firefox Performance
I installed Google Toolbar Firefox extension today to see how does the new Google Toolbar affect the performance of Firefox. I tried the earlier version of Google Toolbar before to use Page Rank and it slowed my Firefox performance. Since then, I have waited Google to release its new version of Toolbar hope it would solve the problem. Sadly, Google Toolbar still causes the performance of my Firefox to go down. I have no choice other than to uninstall the extension once again. Hopefully Google will solve this performance lag in the next release of Google Toolbar for Firefox.