SuperWasp

SuperWasp

Productivity tips, reviews, tools, software and gadgets.

 
CSE HTML Validator 8.04 released
Even though semantic markup is gaining popularity and more developers are aware of the need to create correct code, there are still lots of websites that could use a little validation.
One of the best validators has just released a small update, fixing some bugs and adding Vista compatibility: CSE HTML Validator 8.04

Here's a list of changes since version 8.03:

  • Editor

    • Dragging and dropping a Batch Wizard target list file (that has an lst file extension) onto the editor in the professional edition will now ask if you want to open it in the Batch Wizard.


  • Batch Wizard

    • Following links should now work when links contain ";jsessionid=".


  • Improved Syntax Checking

    • Now assume that <%...%>, <?...?> and <!--# ...--> will evaluate to a text string when CSE HTML Validator tries to determine if there is text in elements such as "b". This should eliminate messages like this for source like this <b><% =MS.SomeRoutine %></b>: The "b" element contains no text and may be useless. Consider removing this element or placing text in it so that it contains text.

    • Recognizes more font family names as valid.


  • Bug Fixes

    • Fixed a bug that calculated an incorrect absolute URI in certain rare situations.

    • New TreeView component to fix access violations when tool tips were on.

    • The tidyprofiles.xml file is now properly stored and referenced to in the user's application data folder.

    • Recognizes the CSS "counter-reset" property.


  • Other

    • Many Microsoft Vista improvements to better support the look and feel of Microsoft Vista.

    • Improvements when adding file associations.

    • Paths in the old 8.3 format that are passed as a filename argument to the command line processor are now, in most cases, converted to long filenames before processing.

    • Miscellaneous user interface improvements and fixes, including new tip messages.

    • Now creates the registry key that HTML-Kit looks for when it looks for CSE HTML Validator. This should cause the menu option Tools->Check Code Using CSE HTML Validator to appear in HTML-Kit when CSE HTML Validator is installed.

    • Minor updates to the documentation.


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  Posted by oVan on Thursday, May 31, 2007 | PermaLink | 1 comments
How reliable is your Vista?
One of the best features in Windows Vista is still unknown to a lot of people: the Reliability and Performance Monitor is a very handy program based on the Microsoft Management Console interface that shows you a lot of information on the current performance and the historical stability of your computer. To start this tool, type "reliability" in the Start Menu and you'll see the shortcut to the "Reliability and Performance Monitor".



Upon launch, it shows you the actual performance status in 4 horizontal bars: CPU, Disk, Network and Memory. When you click on Resource Overview, you get those nifty graphs that show you the latest trends.



When you select the Reliability Monitor from the left column, you'll get a historical chart showing you how reliable your computer was until yesterday. This is based on a lot of factors: software installs and uninstalls, application failures, hardware failures, Windows failures and miscellaneous failures.
When you installed Vista (or bought a new computer with Vista pre-installed), your computer started with reliability index 10. Every day that ended with some problem will lower the index. Similarly, every day without any problem will raise the index a bit. Selecting a day in the chart will immediately give you a list of all problems that occured. This feature comes in very handy when you need to troubleshoot a computer of someone else. Without having to rely on their story, you just open the reliability chart and immediately see what causes the problem.

ps: As you can see in the screenshot above, the reliability index for my Dell notebook is at a very low index of 3.80. This is caused by the HP Sleep Service (HPSLPSVC) that crashes every time returning from sleep (what's in a name?), despite numerous chats with the friendly HP Live Support and disabling DEP for all HP software.

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  Posted by oVan on Wednesday, May 30, 2007 | PermaLink | 0 comments
Solving your Vista sleep problems (really)
Once upon a time
I've posted before of my journeys into solving Vista sleep problems. Although using the latest nVidia drivers for the video card certainly eliminated a lot of lockups, the truth is that the problems on my Dell Precision Workstation 690 never really went away.
In my original post Fix: How-to solve your Vista sleep problems I touched the possibility that nVidia wasn't the only one having trouble writing decent drivers. If you have a sound card from Creative you probably know what I mean.



It struck me that sometimes upon booting or waking Vista from sleep (whenever that worked) there was no sound from the speakers. A quick look at the device manager didn't show anything unusual, and the volume mixer was looking normally too; yet no sound to be heard. This strange phenomena was resolved easily by rebooting, but still it remained in the back of my head.

There's always a side track
In the second post – Windows Vista sleep problems, revisited – I side-tracked towards the LSI SCSI/SAS/SATA controller. I don't think I can prove that the changes to the power plan actually solved much, since Vista still hanged every once in a while upon entering sleep modus.

The solution I stumbled upon
Since I was looking to replace the current speaker setup (two Solid Monitor speakers with a Solid Active Power Bass (now discontinued) from Bowers & Wilkins, which needs a decent amplifier and is thus more suited for Hi-Fi systems, I decided to go with the Logitech Z-10 Interactive Speaker System. I'll leave my impressions of the Logitech speakers for a future post, but for now let me just say that I'm quite pleased with both the sound and the lookds.



What's more important and of relevance to the Vista sleep problems, is that the Logitech speakers are connected via USB instead of audio jacks. Unless you want to use the surround capabilities of your Creative X-Fi card, you can actually replace your sound card with just these speakers. When you open up the playback devices, you'll see them listed amongst other sound hardware you have in your computer.



So, you may ask, that looks really nice, but what is the solution to the sleep problem then? Well you've just read it... remove the Creative Sound Blaster or X-Fi card from your system and replace with something else. The Logitech speakers are one possible option, but you can also use the built-in High Definition Audio Device that is present on many machines, you just need to enable it in your BIOS.

Anyway, I've never had a sleep hang since I removed the Creative card from my system and uninstalled its drivers and software (a whopping 1Gb!).

ps: You can probably apply the same fix by buying a sound card from a different manufacturer, but I'll be the first to admit that I have no experience with other companies. If you do, let us know if it fixed the Vista sleep problems so we can help others too!


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  Posted by oVan on Monday, May 21, 2007 | PermaLink | 10 comments
Vista Productivity Tip: Save To Desktop
When you download a file with Internet Explorer, and your external storage drives or network drives are offline, a lot of people quickly choose the Desktop as destination.
In Windows XP this has a limitation: when you click the Open Folder button when the download has finished, you get the rather silly message that you cannot open that folder because the file is located on the desktop. I say silly, because when you use the Windows Explorer the Desktop is an existing (virtual) folder.
Luckily Microsoft had some spare time to change this behavior: you can now click the Open Folder button and you're then greeted with a Windows Explorer view of the desktop.

Did you find other small tips & tricks? Let us know!

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  Posted by oVan on Thursday, May 17, 2007 | PermaLink | 0 comments
IE Developer Toolbar 1.0 Final Released
Microsoft has released the final release (v1.0) of the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar.

For those of you who are not familiar with the IE Developer Toolbar, here's a bit of info:

Overview


The Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar provides several features for exploring and understanding Web pages. These features enable you to:


  • Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a Web page.

  • Locate and select specific elements on a Web page through a variety of techniques.

  • Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.

  • View HTML object class names, ID's, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.

  • Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.

  • Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS web feed links.

  • Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.

  • Immediately resize the browser window to a new resolution.

  • Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.

  • Display a fully featured design ruler to help accurately align and measure objects on your pages.

  • Find the style rules used to set specific style values on an element.

  • View the formatted and syntax colored source of HTML and CSS.

  • The Developer Toolbar can be pinned to the Internet Explorer browser window or floated separately.



Although there aren't any major new features since beta 3, they've added some reliability fixes and polished the whole toolbar a bit.

Release Notes:

  • If Internet Explorer is running while you install the Developer Toolbar,
    you must restart Internet Explorer before the Developer Toolbar will work properly.

  • The Developer Toolbar icon may not be visible by default.  If you
    do not see it after restarting Internet Explorer, click the right-facing
    arrows at the end of the IE7 command bar to view all available toolbar
    buttons.

  • Some menu items are unavailable (grayed out) when running Internet
    Explorer in Protected Mode on Windows Vista.  To use those options,
    temporarily turn off Protected Mode or right-click the Internet Explorer
    icon in the Programs menu and choose 'Run as administrator'.

  • In IE6 or in IE7 with tabbed browsing off, using the validation links
    will navigate the current window to the validation page.  To launch the
    validation links in a new window, open the Tools menu, click Internet Options..., and uncheck "Reuse windows for launching shortcuts" in the Advanced tab, or use IE7 with tabbed browsing enabled.



» Download Microsoft Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar 1.0

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  Posted by oVan on Friday, May 11, 2007 | PermaLink | 0 comments
Quickly Change Tabs
For all keyboard lovers out there, here's a quick tip on changing the tabs in your browser: you all know that you can create a new tab with Ctrl-T, and that you can jump between the tabs with Ctrl-Tab...

But did you know that you can quickly focus a specific tab with Ctrl and the position of the tab? So for the first tab you type Ctrl-1, for the second one Ctrl-2, and so on.

This works in Internet Explorer 7 and FireFox 2. Maybe other browsers (Opera, Safari, ...) work too, so if you can test and verify this, let us know via the comments.

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  Posted by oVan on Thursday, May 10, 2007 | PermaLink | 0 comments
Microsoft Silverlight 1.1 Developer Reference
No, that's not a typo in the title. Although Silverlight 1.0 hasn't been released yet, Microsoft has already shown the Silverlight 1.1 Developer Reference:



As noted in Andreas Kraus' post Silverlight - Take Back The Web, version 1.1 features true cross-platform capabilities and will offer support for the following soon: Opera browser, Windows 2000 operating system, IronRuby and VBx framework languages, Xml Language Integrated Query (LINQ to XML), XmlSerializer, System.Windows BackgroundWorker, Web Services Client Support, and Atom/RSS Support. These will be available after the 1.1 alpha release.

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  Posted by oVan on Tuesday, May 08, 2007 | PermaLink | 0 comments
Discover relevant RSS feeds with TagJag
As you know, people don't create lasting websites anymore. Everyone posts information quickly into blog postings (hey, you're reading one). To find your way in these blog forests, you need some good tools. One of the best ways to discover relevant articles is by means of tags. Tags are labels that the original poster sticks on the article, they're like the keywords you would look for in a search engine or to find a book in the library.

So how do you use those tags when you're looking for information?

There are some so-called social tagging sites (digg.com, del.icio.us, Technorati, ma.gnolia, Stumble Upon, ...) that let members vote for certain articles related to one or more tags. That's how the most popular posts bubble up to the top of stack.

In theory this is all fine, but when you're looking for a less popular subject or something that is not so recent anymore, you won't find what you're looking for easily. So here comes www.TagJag.com – formerly named Gada.be – by Chris Pirillo. It's a site (and a web service) that lets you search for a specific tag in more than 300 feeds and sites. The results you get are in RSS format, so you can subscribe immediately to those search queries.

Suppose I'm looking for a new job that involves working with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Most job sites provide customized RSS feeds for job queries. Normally, you would need a lot of time checking out each one of them.

Here's how you can do it with TagJag...a few screenshots will say more than a thousand words:

First we surf to www.tagjag.com and see a big orange box to enter our keyword (tag). Below the tag box you see a horizontal list of feed categories and below the categories you see the current sites/feeds that are included.


We click on the "Jobs" category, type "lightroom" in the tag box and press enter. The list of feeds is updated and shows customized RSS feeds for job sites that use our tag "lightroom":


When we open one of those feeds (e.g. Monster.com) we get the current job postings on that site that contain our tag/keyword "lightroom". As you can see Adobe is looking for someone to join the Lightroom team:


The power of TagJag is not only that you get quick access to hundreds of relevant and customized feeds, but also that you can import all of those feeds in one operation into your feed reader via the OPML format. If you look in the second screenshot above, you'll see a dark blue button with a white circle around a dot — in the light blue frame around the feeds. That's the logo of OPML and when you right-click on it you can save it as an OPML-file on your disk. You can then import it into Outlook 2007, Newsgator, FeedDemon, etc. That way you have expanded your RSS feed list with possibly tens of useful links and feeds in one operation.

Give it a try!

Update: Corrected a few typos and added some more social tagging websites.


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  Posted by oVan on Wednesday, May 02, 2007 | PermaLink | 0 comments
Official nVidia Vista Drivers 158.18 WHQL
nVidia updated the download package of the nVidia Vista 158.18 driver –ForceWare158– because now they're official and also qualified by Microsoft (WHQL). This means that the driver has passed the tests at Microsoft Hardware Labs, but this also means nVidia considers this a stable release, even though it still contains a list of bugs.
As I still get frequent hangs on sleep, I'll have to investigate further. Next target on my radar is the Creative X-Fi.

Update: this driver adds support for my Quadro FX 550 (and a whole range of other Quadro cards) so you don't need a modified nv_disp.inf file anymore. It has also fixed the missing nVidia control panel on my system.

Update 2: A newer beta version has appeared – ForceWare Release 158
Version: 158.24 | Release Date: May 2, 2007 | Beta Driver – that promises to fix even more bugs and offer improved performance. Let us know if it solved your Vista sleep problems!

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  Posted by oVan on Tuesday, May 01, 2007 | PermaLink | 0 comments
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