I’m just a programmer. Period. I work alone, so I have to build both code and web page layout for my software, but I’m no designer. To top it all, I’m color blind. So, I choose the colors, they look great to me, but everyone else with a normal vision will protect their eyes from such a terrible color scheme!
Maybe you’re not a color blind person, but you may have faced trouble choosing colors for your web site. You try two, three, ten times and it just can’t get right. Your designer friend though, can do that in 35 seconds, of which 30 are spent opening Dreamweaver.
There’s a tool on the web that intents to help people like us. It’s called Color Scheme Online v 2.0. It helped me big time. You go to their website, and click on a color (or type the color code on one of the inputs on the left). The site will then show you 12 colors that match with the one you provided. Along with their codes in RGB and Hex.
Great value tool! Try it out. There’s also a desktop software download there, but I haven’t tried that out yet.
[digg=http://www.digg.com/programming/Netbeans_and_UTF8_encoding]
When I started using Netbeans as my Ruby on Rails IDE, I noticed that, at least on my build, it did not use UTF 8 on files by default. If you speak english that usually is not a problem, but for me, who write software in portuguese, it is very important.
But, Mr. Google gave me a tip, and I’ll place it here so you don’t have to bother him again with this same question.
Theres a file, inside the /etc folder of netbeans directory, called netbeans.conf. I don’t know if it stays elsewhere in Linux, I’ll only know later today, but anyway, you should place this option inside the quotes of netbeans_default_options:
-J-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8
That’s it. Worked perfectly for me.
Best
Tor Norbye is doing a great job integrating a Ruby module on the development version of Netbeans. Since I’m still on the look for my definitive Ruby IDE, I decided to take a look at it, and all I can say is that I liked it very, very much. Never had any experience with Netbeans before (I don’t speak Java), but it’s a great software. The Ruby integration is, as far as I can tell, quite good, only a few bugs showed up on 3 days of work.
You can download it from the Netbeans CVS, the standard module. This post from Tor shows how to get and compile it. It took me long 36 hours to checkout the whole source. Don’t know if it was my Internet connection (yes, Telemar, it’s your fault, not mine, DSL provider from hell), or a busy server, but it was long, and I had to restart the process lot’s of times (around 7 times. But you don’t loose your job, it continues from where it stopped).
Give it a try! And, Tor, thank you very much for the great job!
Best!
If you ever needed to publish a few lines of code online, you probably noticed that it is quite difficult to do on the major blogging platforms. I found a good way to workaround this functionality lack, using a third site to host the code, called Pastie. It allows you to post code there, and even split the same post on different sections, meaning whater you want: separate parts of the same file, different files, you name it.
For those of you that aren’t used to it, before the Internet we had things called desktop applications! Delphi was (and still is) my personal favorite tool to build this kind of application.
A few weeks ago, I was requested to build a small software that needed an irregular window shape. Intead of loose time searching through the Windows API, follow this tip: use Delphi Odd Form. It allows you to shape your application with a simple image. The form will be just like the outline of that image. You just have to scan the image and include the resulting .PAS file in your project. Then, call the right function and voilá: a custom shaped form facing you!
Javascript offers you a way to build modal dialogs on web pages. You must have seen it on one of these Web 2.0 sites: you click somewhere, a small box appears from nowhere and prevents you from clicking anywhere else, but on itself. It’s cool!
Rails is full of those one-liners to help our life. Mix them together and you have a one-liner for these boxes. It’s a plugin, and it’s called Redbox. Take a look at it!
I love Firefox! Using it since it’s early days, back in 2004, we did have time to talk and get to know each other. As any other love affair, there’s a thing I don’t like about FF: it’s memory use.
Sometimes I open like 70-80 tabs at once, on one or two windows. I’ve seen my memory use get up to 300MB. And I’m sure some of you have used even more. Well, there are a few things we can do about that, and they are all on your about:config page. Read more…
A colleague at work, Chico Ary http://chicoary.wordpress.com/, came to me talking of a new language “Ruby”, and a web framework built on top of it, “Rails”. I must admit that at the time I did not give it much attention, just making a mental not to take a look on it.
What a shame. I’m sorry Ary! Rails speeds up web development on a way that makes it bleeding fast! To give you an example, I was working on that time customizing an open source application built on PHP. It was a job that had already taken me 4 months, not counting the months the application itself took to be developed by the community. I took the hard decision to abandon PHP and rewrite the application from scratch after I met the power of Rails. And, believe me, 15 days later, 65% of the software was already ported on a much more scalable way. Now, 2 months later, the software is at production stage and I’m working on bugs and new features.
And, best of all, Ruby, the underlying language, leaves the code readable for anyone. Give it a try, get Rails here and Ruby here.
Looks like the name for a 10-day intensive shell script class, right? Well, actually, Shell Revealed is the name of the blog mantained by the Windows Vista Shell Developers. Just in case, the Windows Shell includes things like the explorer.exe process, Windows Explorer, the Desktop, Start menu, User interface and stuff.
Since we are all bound to the wills of the giante, it’s worth a look, specially on the new APIs, like Taskdialog. Quite interesting.
First things first: I’m a Firefox evangelist. The problem is: people do use IE. There’s nothing we can do about that – even if we convert everyone to a browser (a real one, I mean), today, at this right moment, most people use Internet Explorer.
So you face a deal: your javascript is working perfectly on Firefox, but problems arise on IE. What should we do? Read more…
