Not beginning from scratch was a bad idea. Trying to copycat other peoples styles made it even worse. This is how far I’ve gotten sofar:
My skin seems to look better (sidebar) in FireFox than it does in IE. *sigh* Another reason to dump IE.
Quite an achievement, running .NET applications that use the Windows.Forms-namespace on Linux. The instructions on how to setup Mono to do such a thing can be found on these pages.
Delphi Developers’ Singapore and Asia Fortress of Solitude has a short but simple tutorial how to implement an RSS 2.0 newsfeed (using Delphi 8 for .NET) on your corporate website. Or whatever website. Check it out here.
Nick has a nice piece about normalization of database-schemas, or in his experience: the absence of it lately. I’m an educated databasedesigner myself, and when looking at the underlying databases of some applications I’ve used, shivers run down my spine most of the time. People not knowing how to normalize is something I can live with (it means my salary is justified), but if you create a schema for your application, at least be consistent in naming your tables and columns. Don’t mix plural and singular names, don’t use a hyphen in one occasion and an underscore in the other (if both are allowed), and for crying out loud: use sensible names. We have more than 64bkyte of memory in most computer nowadays, so why abbreviate everything to 3, 4 or 6 characters? Because it’s easier to type when coding? Get a decent IDE with CodeCompletion. That’s easier than trying to remember what all these cryptic TLAs stand for.
LaCie has a new version of her Big Disk, and it’s simply called Bigger Disk. And Bigger it is: the beast sports 1TB (that is 1000,000,000,000 bytes!) of diskspace. The Bigger Disk will be available in May, and the suggested retail price is about $1200. That’s not too bad for that much space. You can hook it up to your PC or Mac via Firewire400, Firewire800 or USB 2.0. Perhaps I’ll discuss this thingie at home, since my picture collection is an ever growing disk-burdening monster. I now use DVD’s as my backup, but searching for pictures means swapping disks. Not to mention the search-speed (or lack thereof) on a DVD-R(W) compared to my 10Krpm U160-SCSI disks.
Boy, is creating a decent skin/stylesheet a difficult task. It’s not that difficult to place a navigation bar / sidebar to the left in a stylesheet, but hey, I want it on the right. The problem I’m experiencing now is that a “position: fixed” will keep it on its place, no matter what other content scrolls by. Without the “position: fixed”, the sidebar is displayed after all other content, basically becoming a footer. Perhaps there’s too much old stuff (from Planque) in there that should be removed first. I’ll give it a try tomorrow.
No, that’s not a typo!
Anybody coding in HTML once in a while or at a regular basis should have a look at the FREE HTML editor “1st page 2000”. I think this is a must-have. From their website:
Evrsoft 1st Page 2000 helps you write, edit and improve your HTML, its powerful tools let you author websites faster, easier and better! Most new builders don’t realize the time they’re losing by relying on traditional based text editors like WindowsTM Notepad to author their sites. Whether you’re a beginner or an HTML guru you’ll find 1st Page 2000 great to use!
I think they’re right.
OUAU should now work for all Office versions, and you can select the Office version (if for some reason you have partial Office installations) and it will reread and write the appropriate registry-entry.
Changes
To do
I tried ouau here at work, and we’re using Office 2002/XP. It finds the correct Office version, I’m able to make changes to the blocked extensions, which I can verify by restarting the program: it finds the new settings. But the new registry-setting resort no effect: right-click and send-to-mail-recipient of a unblocked extension (e.g. .EXE) still results in Outlook saying that the attachments are potentially unsafe. What’s going on here? Something to do with (group)policies?
Update: I think I already know: Exchange administrators can add/remove Level 1 and/or Level 2 extensions within the Exchange-server settings. This can not be overruled by the Outlookclient. So, I guess I’ll have to find another way to test other Office versions.