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· One min read

One of the weirdest artifacts about Open Office has to be the Styles and Formatting panel. It’s a panel right? Like the one for tables that appear when your cursor is placed inside a table cell. So, it should like behave like them when you drag it to the edge of the window and dock to that edge right? Strangely enough it doesn’t. And don’t bother adjusting your mouse because you thought “I must have not dragged the panel correctly.”

· 7 min read

As mentioned before in earlier posts, I’m involved in a Web application development project. Recently I had to do some testing on the Web application (although it’s barely beta ready, but that’s a different story). During the testing process, I’ve got to see for myself the implications of not incorporating scalability designs early on into the code.

This post will take a simplistic approach to look at why load times can be improved by consolidating CSS files. At the same time, I will also take a look at naming CSS selectors as the approach to consolidating CSS. By taking a consistent approach to naming CSS selectors and organising the selectors in a structured manner in CSS files, we can minimise the number of CSS files.

· One min read

Anyone who uses GNU Screen frequently will one day press Ctl-A s (lower-case s) whether purposefully or accidentally. It would seem that there is no way to unlock the screen. Actually, the solution is to press Ctl-A q (lower-case q). You will then be prompted to enter the user’s password to resume using Screen.

· One min read

Reading this post confirms my decision not to join Facebook a correct one. Hell, if some corporate entity knows about your daughter-in-law, you should be scared!

· 4 min read

Google Apps Provisioning API is a set of API that allows other programs to access stored on Google’s servers. This is done via the Atom Publishing Protocol and HTTP requests (what the industry terms general as a RESTful interface).

The set of data that Google exposes via the Provisioning API include the user accounts and groups and other related data.

Google has improved its groups mechanism not too long ago. With this came improvements to other Google properties such as Google Docs where sharing documents with groups is possible. Previously, this was not available because the original concept of a group in Google Apps is nothing more than an email list where emailing to the “group” allowed users in the “group” to receive the email as well. But this was all that version 1 of “groups” (technically known as an email list) could do.

· One min read

It was supposed to be a headline-worthy cooperation between the world’s arguably most popular tech blog and a Singapore startup. Now it’s all going downhill. Why and how it came to this stage nobody will know for sure, as Arrington puts it, “Ultimately there are two sides to every story…”

But, if it were the case as Arrington described, the “shareholders” deserve this ending. Why squander away a chance to launch a product in a larger market by leveraging on a famed tech blog’s name and instead choose to have the whole of a much smaller pie? If greed was really the cause, I hope Arrington wins the suits against Fusion Garage.

But Fusion Garage deserves a chance to voice their side of the story. Maybe we’ll get to see something on Straits Times to hear from them what exactly transpired. I hope it’s not because they are unable to produce the software – I really look forward to a successful Singapore tech startup make good internationally.