LeoTech

Substantial content is in the pipes, but in the meantime here’s Arve Bersvendsen’s history meme:

In my cygwin:

And on a Linux machine I administrate:

I can survive in vi if pressed, but nano is my text-mode editor of choice. I do serious Linux development in Eclipse, Kate, or Kdevelop.

TeXnicCenter is an excellent IDE for developing TeX documents on Windows. It follows the usual interface conventions and is quite helpful in getting started and debugging. TeX is the standard page layout language for writing mathematical and scientific papers.

Here are some excellent tutorials for getting started with TeX.

The IDE requires MikTeX for actually compiling TeX files into PDF, PS, and so on.

After I installed Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, I tried to update it. It prompted me for a root password even though the install hadn’t asked for one — it had only created a regular user. Sudo didn’t help.

I tried booting in single-user mode, but that also prompted me for the root password.

Finally, I appended init=/bin/bash to the Linux boot command in GRUB. That booted me in a passwordless command line, letting me run passwd and fix things.

One of the tables of my MediaWiki installation crashed. When I tried to repair it, I got this less-than-helpful error message. So did the mysqlcheck utility when I SSHed to the server. However, the command has extra options that can be used to repair high levels of corruptions, such as when the MYI is missing.

John Resig writes very positively about Jaxer. It runs Javascript on the server while serving documents to the client, with seamless communication between JS on the client and JS on the server.

Jaxer provides:

1. Full DOM on the server
2. Shared code between client and server
3. Database, file, and socket access from JavaScript
4. Familiar APIs
5. Integration with PHP, Java, Rails, etc. apps

In other news, IE8 will use the latest rendering mode by default for documents with the HTML5 doctype:

Finally, Good Math has a published a good defense of Google’s MapReduce algorithm.

• HTML 5
• HTML 5 differences from HTML 4

Woot!

After an internal build of Internet Explorer 8 passed the Acid2 test, they’ve announced that the new engine will only be used for sites with a special, opt-in meta tag:

It can also be triggered from the server via an HTTP header:

Firefox is unlikely to follow suit.

In other news, John Resig has done some testing on sub-pixel rounding across browsers.

Base2 has just come out in beta on Google Code. It’s hosted there and can be included straight off the Google Code server.

I think it’s a really neat library because it basically fixes all browsers so that the built-in DOM, events, etc work the same way. Instead of providing an API of its own, it makes the existing API work consistently and reliably.

Base2 Features:
- A fast implementation of the Selectors API
- Fixes broken browser implementations of the DOM events module including document.createEvent(), dispatchEvent(), addEventListener(), etc
- Supports DOMContentLoaded
- Fixes getAttribute()/hasAttribute()/setAttribute() (Internet Explorer)
- Implements a few other useful DOM methods like getComputedStyle() and compareDocumentPosition()
- Supports a variety of browsers including ancient browsers like IE5.0 (Windows and Mac)

Dean Edwards has also done the excellent Packer Javascript minifier. It has probably the most in-depth support for obscure language features that simpler minifiers tend to mangle.

When writing Python scripts which rely on python-ldap and openLDAP, it is often useful to turn on debug messages as follows:

This is also useful when debugging the LDAP Plugin for Trac.

John Resig has posted a whitepaper outlining the new features in ECMAScript4 (aka the Javascript standard), how it differs from ECMAScript3, and the rationale for any incompatibilities.

Many of the features have already made their way into Opera and Firefox, which is at Javascript 1.7 level. ES3 is equivalent to JS1.3, and ES4 is the basis for forthcoming JS2.

I look forward to optional strict typing, multiline strings, comprehensions, and generators making their way into browsers. A lot of the new features make Javascript more like Python without losing all the nice things tabout Javascript.