If you are in an office environment, you don’t have the administrator privileges to install any software and don’t have Firefox installed but want to use Firefox, try Portable Firefox which can work off a directory or even a pen drive.

Happy Weekend!

I had posted about network latency sometime back and the delay it can cause determined by the distance between the communicating systems. But will it hinder someone’s work? If you haven’t heard of the 500 mile email case then here is the link to “The case of the 500-mile email“, an interesting phenomena caused by the distance between communicating systems.

With more and more rich user interface based screens there is lot of HTML + CSS that has to work together to make it really rich. There can be more than one HTML element that can produce similar result but the way in which they render might be different. The best example is the TABLE and DIV element. While both can achieve putting the data in a matrix format there are differences in terms of rendering, advantages and disadvantage of using either of them. If you are a presentation layer developer you might want to know the difference in using these elements, when to go for a TABLE and when to go for a DIV. A TABLE alters its size dynamically as the data gets filled up. Here is an example site that extensively uses TABLE. If you see carefully you can see how the table size varies as the page gets loaded. This could be annoying if there is too much dynamic data represented in table and there is a flicker effect on the screen when the page gets loaded.  For some insights on the differences refer this article “Table Vs Divs“.

One of the key highlights of Web 2.0 trend is to engage user participation and enrich site with user provided content. The enormous valuable content for sites like Wikipedia comes from user participation. Wikipedia is online encyclopedia covering entire possibilities of content that’s available with us scattered around the world. User participation could also be narrowly focused on a specific site to bring more value to a specific area where users specialized or who have something interesting to share can add that value. I came across this site Radeopaedia.org which allows users to add content in the department of Radiology. I think there would be more such sites coming up focusing on specific areas and allowing users to add content when they have something useful to share to others.

If you are working on different projects locally then you might want to access them with the project name in the browser without providing the localhost prefixing it, just like how a production environment URL would look like. Apache is an amazing web server that can front end a web application irrespective of technology (except for .Net as far as I know). Apache can be configured to work with other application servers and the request routed to them appropriately. But most of the scripting language based web application such as PHP can work directly from Apache using the appropriate module plugin. Setting up Apache on your local development environment to configure and host the projects locally will provide an environment that resembles production and will also help learn Apache. Here is a good article “Setting Up Multiple Apache Local Web Sites On Your Computer” that provides details of how to do it.

How do you customize a feature? Customizations that will involve user initiated feature? While this does not mean that a user can create a feature out of the air but under the context of the application’s domain features could dynamically adopt to a user’s need. One example here could be offering promotions or additional inputs based on users past usage history and an appropriate user interface to highlight it. A template based engine could exactly do that by generating source during the runtime. The inputs to a template engine is a data model that feeds the input data and a template that provides where to use this data and on the fly an engine uses these inputs and provides an output. Apache Velocity is a java based template engine that can generate source during runtime. Use the following resources to get started with Apache Velocity.

• Template-Based Code Generation with Apache Velocity, Part 1
• Template-Based Code Generation with Apache Velocity, Part 2
• Velocity Users Guide

When executing a project keeping track of the issues from the quality control team as well as keeping track of issues from customers/users is the key to making sure that they are prioritized and fixed. Having a manual system for such a need can be vulnerable for human errors as well as chances of missing them is high. An issue tracking system is a must for every organization. An issue tracking system should not only be available for the project team but should also be accessible for the customers/users to post the issues they find. There are many open source as well as commercial issue tracking systems available. This recent article in JavaWorld “What issue tracking system is best for you?” discusses three issue management tools, Bugzilla, JIRA and Trac. Another open source tool that is quite good is Mantis which is a PHP based open source issue management tool. Nevertheless technology doesn’t matter but selecting a right issue tracking tool that will fit your organization as well as help customers post the issues through a system is a must.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5) is out and brings in the concept of virtual platform wherein multiple operating systems can run on the same physical box. The release news also says that RHEL 5 is Web 2.0 ready as it also provides the capability to run as webtop meaning web based operating environment. I am glad that the Indian Government is going for open source environment for building e-governance systems (Source: The Hindu - Red Hat releases Linux 5). The Q&A session with Scott Crenshaw, Senior Director of Product Management and Marketing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, on “RHEL 5: What’s coming” published in InfoWorld has some insights on the features of RHEL 5.