indiWiz.com

Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital. ~Aaron Levenstein.

Microsoft has released statistical feature-comparison of its browser IE8 with other popular browsers. And guess what, they have exposed only what is interesting to them, concealing vital information. I could only laugh at their wordings (for example, under Manageability: Neither Firefox nor Chrome provide guidance or enterprise tools: my my, please tell me what guidance and enterprise tools do they miss) and wrongful advertising of misinformation.

I was immediately reminded of another joke site where IE6 was compared to other browsers. Microsoft seems to have misunderstood this site: they have missed the sarcasm and copied the concept from it.

This is a much more objective comparison.

When placing Ogg Theora video files in your site using HTML5 <video> tags, you can optionally specify the width and height of the videos. But how do you find the width and height? Use the tool ogginfo:

$ ogginfo video.ogg

Festival is an interesting OpenSource project for converting text-to-speech in Linux environment. It has a commandline tool text2wave which converts, guess what, text to voice in wave format. Simple usage:

$ echo "Hello World" | text2wave > a.wav

Wave files are uncompressed, and occupy lot of space. To encode to Ogg Vorbis format:

$ oggenc a.wav

This will create a.ogg in the current directory.

I was surprised to find a major new release of Maven. It seems that Maven 2.1.0 suffered from a major bug due to which releases could not be done. A quick overview of this bug and other feature improvements are discussed in this blog.

Came across three short essays:

• Why Ugly Teams Win by Scott Berkun: Scott Berkun discusses his experiences working in the IE team at Microsoft, and ponders why Ugly Teams Win.
• Designer, Owner, Manager – 1: Hiring the Right People: Tips on hiring designers. Most of the points applicable to programmers too.
• Strangers at a cocktail party: Why do people at cocktail parties discuss weather, sports and other inconsequential things? What happens when you have a team consisting of cocktail-party-strangers?

Important tips for building great teams!

We can make Ajax requests using Prototype.js (version 1.6.0.3) thus:

var url = ...;
new Ajax.Request(
            url,
            {
               method:'DELETE',
               onComplete:function doMessage(response){
                   alert(response.status);
               }
            });

While working on this code, we found out that the method parameter accepted only GET or POST requests. When we give any other request type like DELETE or PUT, the Prototype.js library converted the request to POST.

Arun Jeganath found this post where the same issue is discussed. The problem was solved when we commented these lines from the Prototype.js code:

      if (!['get', 'post'].include(this.method)) {
        //simulate other verbs over post
        params['_method'] = this.method;
        this.method = 'post';
      }

Tom Baeyens, founder of jBPM project has announced the 4.0 release of jBPM. jBPM is a enterprise-class Workflow and BPM engine.

The latest in Yahoo!’s innovation drive is SearchPad. SearchPad allows us to take notes as we visit web pages and save them. I am using it now for my research and study activities. Seems to be a EverNote killer

recordmydesktop is a powerful screencasting commandline tool for Linux. To capture the screen:

$ recordmydesktop

Press Ctrl+C to quit capturing. The captured video will be encoded in Ogg Theora format and saved as out.ogv (if out.ogv exists, as out-1.ogv and so on). To save the file in another name, say myout.ogv:

$ recordmydesktop myout.ogv

There is also a GTK frontend for recordmydesktop. To launch it:

$ gtk-recordMyDesktop

To encode a video file for use in HTML5 video compatible browser (firefox 3.5 and above supports HTML5 video), use the command:

$ ffmpeg -i in.flv -vcodec libtheora -sameq \
   -acodec libvorbis -ac 2 -sameq out.ogg

Finally use it in your page:

<video src="out.ogg">
Your browser does not support HTML5 video.
</video>

Reference: HTML 5 <video> Tag.

I was surprised to find that Apache Software Foundation’s older software releases were not present in their distribution site. They have a new site archive.apache.org/dist where they archive older releases.

Have you upgraded to Firefox 3.5? Read a review of its new features.