Chanh's blog

Glary Utilities is the case of the good guy has gone bad!

I used to recommend Glary Utilities to anyone that has problem with their computer that infected with some kind of virus or spyware but today I discover that the latest version of Glary Utilities has done something that I did not know about it until after I installed.

It changes my IE home page without my knowledge and the worst thing is I can’t change it back by click on “use default” I have to manually type where I want to be the home page on IE. That is terrible thing to do, “Glary Utilities”!

With this, I would not recommend anyone to use this utility any more and be warned of “Glary Utilities”

3 months from my previous blog about Firefox 7, they release version 8 which is ok from a user perspective even though Firefox list lot of improvements but the sad fact is Firefox 8 was still slow!

Now comes Firefox 9 which is just released and it is a presently surprise!

It is compatible with all of my add-ons, it is snappy! The memory footprint is still big when open with lot of tabs but the good news is it has no impact to the performance of Firefox!

I think this Firefox 9 has regain my faith with this browser!

You can read the full list of bug fixes and a full list of features here..

I have been using Firefox since the beginning and it was a pleasant experience to use it with so many add-on but Firefox has been going down hill as a bloated browser!

On http://blog.mozilla.com/, it said: “Mozilla Firefox Significantly Reduces Memory Use to Make Web Browsing Faster…” but I don’t know what to believe!

The latest version of Firefox 7.01 claim to be reducing memory, improve performance but it is no longer a fast, lean browser! It is consuming too much memory and now too much CPU. It keeps get stuck on “no respond” when look in task manager. It is just unusable!

I am reliant on some of the Firefox add-on that I must still use it for those add-on but for most of my browser need I will now switch to other browser like IE 9 or Chromium until Firefox clean up its act!

With the latest release of Silverlight and .NET that support dynamic scripting you can now doing straight text scripting with IronPython or IronRuby, no more compile code and dll stuff!

With the Visual Studio integrated Shell and IronPython Tool for Visual Studio that make develop web site with either IronPython or IronRuby scripting very easily but…

It works great in Visual Studio integrated Shell but when you try to deploy it in production IIS server it just does not work!

All you have to do in IIS is either one below:

. Must define .py minetype in IIS for IronPython to load external py script and .rb for IronRuby
. or define in web.config like below

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"? >
< configuration >
< system.webServer >
< staticContent >
< mimeMap fileExtension=".py" mimeType="text/python" / >
< /staticContent >
< /system.webServer >
< /configuration >

It took me quite a while to figure this out and I hope this will help you save some time!

Did you ever have a need to recover photo or files from a corrupted SD card?

I did and while there are lot of available tools from my search many of them either are just demo or ads ware or simple too complicated or not really worth your time.

I tried many of them and I almost gave up but until I discover this little tool that could call “photoRec”

PhotoRec is a multi-platform recovery tool including DOS, Windows, Linux, etc and it works beautifully! It is free and it is fast! The version that I tried was for Debian but other platform might work as well too!

Here is the direct link to the site of PhotoRec.

I hope this will save your time because it would for me if I know about this sooner and would save me money if I decided to purchase some of those demo tools that seem to work but didn’t really!

I revisit WebMatrix site recently just to see what’s up with this nice little web editor from Microsoft and I must say I am in for a pleasantly surprise!

WebMatrix turn into a small full Web development that installs quickly and it support database and PHP. It comes with a build in IISExpress and it works extremely well for web site development.

If you use the web installer to install the open source script like WordPress, Drupal, etc then WebMatrix will configure to support PHP automatically but if you create a site from scratch you have to do some manual tweaking!

You have to edit and a few lines in the config file as shown below and will you be able to edit your PHP file in your site.

C:\Users\[youruserlogin]\Documents\IISExpress8\config\applicationhost.config

< location path="wordpress" >
< system.webServer >
< handlers >
< add name="PHP via FastCGI" path="*.php" verb="*" modules="FastCgiModule" scriptProcessor="C:\Program Files\PHP\php-cgi.exe" resourceType="Either" / >
< /handlers >
< /system.webServer >
< /location >


Note: The above is assuming you install PHP from the web installer

Relevant links:

http://www.asp.net/WebMatrix

http://www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix/features/

This is a continuation of previous article on “Counting PDF pages” and due to some limitation that I discover during testing so I have to find some alternative.

The result is this completely free utility that you can copy and compile into a very tiny executable to use as you wish.

Here is the complete article and source code

Enjoy!

Did you ever have a need to count pages of all your PDF files?

If you do then you are in luck! There are many paid and free PDF counting utilities that you can use but if you are using Windows then you can do it yourself easily!

Here is an article and complete working code that you can take and use it for free.

I have follow NetBeans IDE for a long time and with this latest version of NetBeans 6.8 it is surprisingly good!

NetBeans IDE 6.8 support Java EE, EJB, RESTful web services, JavaFX (Javascript), and PHP and more.

NetBeans also has integration with Kenai project. It has features for database integration, Ruby, Groovy, and C/C++ projects.

The one feature that I want to highlight here is PHP support! NetBeans has the most amazing support for PHP! You can install the plugins to do PHP look up right in the IDE, project, code navigation, code refactor, code usage, code run and debug, PHPUnit test, etc.

Oh my! It just has so much features that it will take pages and pages to even attempt to cover the little bit of what NetBeans can offer.

Best of all, it is FREE! I think I will be spending the majority of my PHP coding in NetBeans from here on unless other IDE can beat its features and price!

You can read the full features list here.

I have been using Visual Studio for a long time and also using the Express edition but until recent version 2008 of Visual Studio Express Web Developer Edition I say this is a clear winner but one little wish item, more about that later…

The Visual Studio Express Web Developer Edition is a freeware web development tool from Microsoft. Its main function is to create ASP.NET pages, It has a WYSIWYG interface and very good HTML editor, support CSS, Javascript, XML, drag-and-drop user interface designer; a database explorer for SQL express edition; and lot more!

I would not go into the limitation in compare to the paid version of Visual Studio but I do want to expand on the database explorer for SQL express edition. Some might think it is limited but I think it is perfect for personal development. It allow you to explore SQL database file without needing to concern about the standard SQL security and all that headache! You can debug your web site which access your SQL database file easily. In some case I would prefer this Express edition over the paid version although I do have both version load on my computer.

I heard the rumor that the future version of Visual Studio Express 2010 will have build in support for PHP if that is to be true it would be wonderful for open source developer. There is a big void out there for a nice editor that support PHP for free! There are some out there and I won’t name it but it just take too long to start up. If Visual Studio Express will have build in support for PHP that will be a big thumb up from me.

One little wish item that I would like to see in Visual Studio Express is to have some kind of plugin or extension support so that the open source community can help to extend this wonderful product further!