Robs Programming Junk

I have never been a fan of IE8. Most serious developers (web or otherwise) know that it is rubbish that unfortuneately has a very large adoption. I generally do most of my web development in FireFox and use Fire Bug to do my web site debugging and design. I like of course the on-the-fly features of changing and prototyping different web layouts.

IE has always been a pain my side not only because of their refusal to adopt widely used DOM standards but buggy browsers that are impossible to reasonably debug.

Today I needed to verify a layout issue and with my recent IE8 upgrade noticed the developers tools in the menu. I nearly fell out of my chair in shock to see a robust set of developer tools. This was just amazing that I could now do nearly the same things I could do in Fire Bug. I am in no way going to ditch firebug but I now have a rather decent means to debug IE problems specifically.

I could use Fire Bug Lite but I find that it's performance is poor in IE. This does work well however. I imagine that Microsoft is trying to muscle-in on the developer market but I think most serious developers are going to do ground-up development in FireFox.

Chrome is still my favorite browser to surf in. I can't wait till they get the developer tools in it so I can use it for more web development.

Anyhow, IE8 gained a few (very few) points with me today since they finally got some developer tools that actually work.

I have to admit that I first thought that portable Ubuntu was going to be a install on a flash drive. It actually runs UNDER windows. The real credit though goes to Cooperative Linux. This allows a linux distro (almost any) to run while windows is running. Now I took the easy route and ran Ubuntu which is a decent distro for most desktop users.

Performance
It ran sluggish at first. I was really kind of disappointed and thought that it was because it was running from the flash drive. It really was just not getting enough CPU. I was able to improve the experience considerably on my laptop by setting the colinux and associated exe's to a high priority. This allowed them to get a bit more task scheduling from windows. This was enough to kill the little bit of sluggishness and get me rocking with all that linux has to offer.

On a side note this isnt my first experience with linux or ubuntu. I've run it under VM's and dedicated boxes for some time. It is just very nice to be able to start it up, shut it down and run it while I'm running windows apps. I'm going to go download aptana for linux and try it out under there. Would be nice to be able to take my favorite IDE everywhere regardless of the PC I'm on.

I recently had to add some curly quotes to text on the page. The following function allows you to add Microsoft Word Style Curly Quotes in replacement of standard quotes. Uses some basic regex to accomplish this quickly and easily.

<br />echo curlQuotes('"This" is a "test", a great "test" I think. Don\'t you?');<br /><br />// Curl Quote Function rob@mechsoftware.com<br />function curlQuotes($curlme) {<br /> // Adds fancy Microsoft Word Style Quotes to standard text.<br /> $curlme = preg_replace('/(.+)"(.+)"(.+)/Ss',"$1“$2”$3",$curlme);<br /> $curlme = preg_replace('/(.+)"(.+)"/Ss',"$1“$2”",$curlme);<br /> $curlme = preg_replace('/"(.+)"(.+)/Ss',"“$1”$2",$curlme);<br /> $curlme = str_replace("'",'’',$curlme); <br /> return $curlme;<br />}<br />

Output is:

“This” is a “test”, a great “test” I think. Don’t you?

You have to be blind not to notice the new look on my blog. It now matches the www.mechsoftware.com look and feel for a uniform look across my sites.