Software Gems

I feel tempted to update this Comsul blog today because I made some discoveries this week while at work.

... darn ... now I have forgotten what they are... alright, let me try to refresh my memory ...

Safari 3 Public Beta (now available for Windows) I like the default font, though it doesn't looked like the Times New Roman that the settings page seems to say. Guess this is why it is still a beta?

The fastest web browser on any platform, Safari loads pages up to 2 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2.

Well of course this is what is found on Apple's website. Look at what ArsTechnica has to say about it.

A friend recommended me PHP on Trax when I asked about a PHP framework with object persistence. My first experience with object persistence was with SQLObject in Python.

Well, I just came back from a search which lead me to Wikipedia page that contains a list of object-relational mappers for PHP and various other languages. There is a whole lot of choices!

Microsoft Internet Explorer Inline Search from IEforge

is an extremely useful free add-on for Internet Explorer that mimics Firefox's search behavior. It turns searching in a web page into a non-modal research experience coupled with a find as you type facility.

I've just installed WINE on the development servers for generating software release packages that require some processing in Windows. Since all our servers are Linux based, using WINE allows us to add functionality for Windows-based software without having to bear the extra cost of installing extra Windows servers. Even though there are still fatal bugs, especially with running Cygwin applications (you might be thinking who would want to run Cygwin on WINE/Linux!!!) and it doesn't run well with older libraries, when it works, it is a gem to have. For those who have sneered with disdain at WINE in the past, now is probably the time to start looking at it.

Update: I have been running Wine with varies success on various systems. Sometimes, even running "wine cmd" would cause Wine to crash and throw exceptions, specifically with libpthread. Anyone has any idea why this is?