Just picked this up on Friday, and I’d just about finished it by Sunday evening. Its a collection of R. Stallman’s lecutures & articles on free software, copyright, copyleft, the GNU license and so on.
Recommended with anyone with even a passing interest in the free software movement. You will be much richer (intellectually) for having done so.
For my deeper thoughts…
(more…)
Ok, ok, I debated putting this here, as this really is a *scripting* site, but as anyone who can look to the left can see, I’m too lazy to have my own blog, and I think this is of interest to web users/developers (plus, I think this would probably slip under most people’s radar):
Major changes to mozilla In a major ’bout time move, Mozilla is decoupling its browser & mail components from its Gecko rendering engine. An excellent move, as I have been using Phoenix as my main browser for a while now, and its the goodness of Gecko rendering without the bloat of Mozilla. Not to mention that upgrades to the mail client won’t mean upgrading your entire browser suite.Unfortunately it looks like WROX press (they make those big red books with the ugly authors on the cover) is going out of business
Story Here
In my opinion they have put out some excellent books, esp. their “Professional” series. I use the Professional PHP 4 often. There will either be a good sale on WROX books at your local bookstore, or they will just dissapear…
Well, for those that know me, its a known fact that I’m an obsessive book reader… so here are a couple scripting books I’ve been working my way through over the last few weeks:
Windows NT/2000 ADSI Scripting for System Administration
Ok, its VB & VBScript, but the best for scripting windows domain stuff.. a constant reference
Windows Script Host
Everything you need to know about WSH. Useful for Sys Admins, and those wanting to tweak windows…
Professional PHP4 Programming
Great book, just what it says, and not for the newbies.
Professional Apache 2.0
Another fine WROX book… its getting me up to speed on Apache 2.0
Maximum Apache Security
Last listed, but highly recommended.. if you want to know *anything* about security and the web, get this book ASAP. Ins and outs of apache
Not a script, or even relating to it, but the ‘Enhancing’ section of this page is one of the most concise explanations I’ve seen of how to use Photoshop to coax a good photo out of a not-so-good photo. It’s close to a good chunk of the evil things I did to photos on a daily basis when I did commercial design a few years ago.
(Courtesy of Heather of urbancombatdriving.com.)
I really wish that someone had showed me something like this page when I was starting to learn PHP. I could have saved myself from writing a lot of really bad code.
It’s also got a really nice explanation of what changes are required of your code when register_globals is turned off. I’m slowly working through some of my old code and converting it to play nice when register_globals is turned off, and I can’t be the only one.
(I shall now return to my hidey-hole and crunch on mySQL for another week or so…)
Like many users of MT, I use javascript to call a pop-up comment window. What I didn’t realize though is that 11% of internet users don’t use Javascript and it can cause problems for people who are disabled because their browsers don’t support it. Mark has posted instructions on how to replace the code so that you can still have pop-ups but also have a solution that works for other browsers. You can find it here. He has pointed out that the latest default templates in MT now “get this right” - but if you’re like me, I don’t normally upgrade my templates every time I upgrade MT.
I should also point out that Mark is doing a whole series on 30 Days to a More Accessible Weblog and there are a lot of other really good tips worth reading there!
While my personal blog tool of choice is MovableType, this article, The Weblog Tool Roundup, offers up an interesting review of other options out there. (Via Meryl’s Notes, a great resource of many things!)
Beginning in CSS is a little something I put together for a web design newsletter. There are some tips inside of it (in the large table) for beginners, intermediate users, and an advanced tip. Some stuff that I haven’t shared here yet! But since I was *hired* as a scripty-goddess because of my css knowledge and not my good looks 
makes sense to share this article!!!
There are a *ton* of amazing tips at evolt.org, a truly handy resource. The articl about IE 6 centering table content has a fast, easy & effective way to keep that from happening to your site! Thanks to Cheryl for pointing out the link!