Here's a generic repository for articles that I intend to write. The page itself is under construction, therefore things might change in the future. However, all links pointing to this page (or to articles inside) are likely to remain valid.

Please beware that I don't guarantee that anything you might find here is useful :)

Free Software

Me, myself and free software (viewed 10875 times)

(or why the menubar is not free software)

During the past year I have learnt a few things about free software. The most important is that free software dies if it does not attract sponsors and/or a developer community. No matter how determined the original developer is to continue improving and releasing the software.

Perl

A JavaScript compressor (viewed 16673 times)

A couple of days ago I finally decided to write a JS compressor in Perl. The result is a 14 lines script (!) that works bloodly fast and zips all comments and just about every goddamn space in a JS file that doesn't alter the code logic. As they say: "Perl: the laugh of computer programming" :)

Well, since I wrote it I just thought I'd put the code here. Enjoy it!

Linux and related

Apache + mod_perl (viewed 6914 times)

Today I wasted 3 hours trying to convince Apache to work. As usual, I made this happen at some point, after serious hassling with the building and configuration scripts. Their building system sucks and I will try to detail in this document why.
Fuji FinePix A310 as webcam in Linux (viewed 15758 times)

This is an article describing my own observations on Fuji webcams (my model is FinePix A310 but I think this applies to any FinePix camera from Fuji). Here you can also download a program that I've just finished and which is able to fetch at any time “the current shot
Qualcomm CDMA modems on Linux (viewed 15424 times)

Yesterday I bought a CDMA modem from Zapp; this device can provide wireless Internet access at some quite amazing speeds (well, for Romania anyway). The costs are still high, but the connection quality does worth it, considering that in Romania bandwidth is extremely expensive (even when not wireless).

When I asked if it works on Linux, the guy at the store gave some phone calls and then kindly informed me that Linux support is not (yet) available, offering me a chance to change my mind before signing a one-year contract. Hmm... so I bought it.

more...
Suspend your Dell D600 in Linux (viewed 18674 times)

After spending scattered amounts of time on this subject (though cumulated it should be something like a week or two :-) I finally managed to make my Dell D600 suspend (and more importantly, resume)—so far, flawlessly—with Debian GNU/Linux unstable.

more...

Web Development

Principles of Web Design (viewed 12868 times)

As you can notice, the design of this site is quite complex, yet simple in the same time. I hate pages that have many images. I hate pages that have Flash animations. I hate the <table> tag -- unless it really presents data that should be logically grouped into a table. I use <div>-s and CSS for layout.

more...
PieNG -- PNG support in MSIE/Win (viewed 21332 times)
Ever wondered why Microsoft didn't yet implemented correct PNG support in Internet Explorer? I'm not saying I have answers, but I do have some thoughts..

This article also provides a small JavaScript program that allows you to include PNG images in your document just as you would do in a normal browser, I mean this:
```
<img src="image.png" ... />
```
The code is very small and is based on a IE "feature" which I've read about on A List Apart. Of course, other browsers don't have this "feature" because they provide real PNG support, so the script is only affecting IE's brain-dead way of "thinking".
Cross-browser "3D" separators with CSS (viewed 14867 times)

In the last two months or so, I was working on an extremely versatile web-based menu system (which by the way will be available for sale soon). One of the most frustrating problems was creating cross-browser separators that looked good, are equally spaced and don't use images. Since I came up with a quite interesting (albeit technically horrible) solution, I thought I'd write this story to present it.

[more...]

Internet Explorer

IE: where's my memory? (viewed 71602 times)

(or “if one closure is buggy, then use more closures
IE: Popularity theft (viewed 51465 times)

For some time now I am trying to understand a rather strange phenomenon in my server logs. Some times when a new user comes in, there are lots (and I mean lots) of requests to certain image files.

I did research. It is a ~~browser~~ IE/Win bug, which got inserted in version 5.5 SP2 and persists in 6.0 and later; it does not exist in IE 5.x or older. The bug is simple, painful and there is no known workaround (or I don't know of any). And it affects all of us.

more...
Internet Explorer 7 (viewed 28328 times)

I can't understand people that claim that IE is so unsecure (in other words, “sucks so much”) because it's used by 90% of the planet. Otherwise, can I say by analogy that Windows sucks because it's used by 90% of the planet?

You're missing the point guys; IE is unsecure because no one gave a shit on security--Microsoft itself claimed something like “as long as our customers don't ask for it, security is a secondary problem”. The same stands true for Windows. Whoever NEEDS security doesn't use Windows.
Caret position in MSIE (viewed 38606 times)

Many times in my DHTML life I needed to know the caret position in an input field. This is trivial to retrieve in Gecko browsers (input.selectionStart, input.selectionEnd). And you can also select only a part of the input field very easily using input.setSelectionRange(). It's simple and natural—the way it has to be. We're not talking about rocket science.

In IE, however, things are, as usual, much more difficult. In this article I present The Right Way of doing it cross-browser (that is, both IE and Gecko; I can't be sure of other browsers yet).

more...

JavaScript articles

Passing parameters to JS code (viewed 33636 times)

Sometimes we need to pass parameters to some JavaScript function that we wrote ourselves. But sometimes it's simply more convenient to include the parameter not in the function call, but in the affected HTML elements. Usually, all JavaScript calls affect some element, right? ;-)

Well, here's an original way to do it. Or at least, I think it's original.
Window client size in IE (viewed 19827 times)

I took a closer look at HTMLArea in Internet Explorer 6 for Windows XP and I realized that if I would be an end-user I would hate the fact that the dialog buttons are only partially (if at all visible) displayed. So I started my usual width/height ++/-- work that—really—takes hours if you want to make something look right in both IE and Mozilla.

The problem is that Internet Explorer does not provide a reliable way to open a window to a certain client size. It instead only allows one to dictate the total window dimension, including the title bar, borders and scroll-bars. This article shows you how to make sure that a popup has exactly a certain size in the inside.