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.

The search engine that is. If you are observant, you’ll notice that whenever you go to www.google.com, you’ll be redirected to your local version (unless you’re in the US, I think). For example, in Singapore when you type google.com in the address bar, it turns into google.com.sg

This question has always been on my mind. The best answer I’ve found so far and is reasonably credible can be found at http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080912142314AAZdlh9

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.

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!

Another aspect of the Google Apps Provisioning API that I’ve discovered has to do with adding an owner to a group.

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.

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.

The Facebook game Animal Swapping has caused me much anguish in my bid to best everyone. Now, I’m only third place. It took me a long time to get there and recently I’m reminded why I don’t want to play it anymore.

Some time into the game, I always encounter this error where two animals will overlap and that makes it difficult to solve the puzzle. I don’t know if it’s due to me using Linux, but it’s a good excuse to say why I can’t be first =P

During the lifetime of using the computer, I believe everyone will inevitably face the scenario where you will want resize multiple images to a certain size.

In Linux, you can do it will such ease that makes you wonder what you use Windows for.

This effect can be easily done using the command line. Naysayers will probably disclaim the effectiveness of this tip but it really is easy for those who know Linux. All you have to do is to go into the directory where the images are stored and run the following command:

for k in $(ls *.jpg); do convert $k -resize 1024x768 -quality 100 re_$k; done