Web development icons

In Windows 7 / Vista changing the file type is next to impossible; you have to fire up regedit.exe and do some inhuman things.

Luckily, NirSoft has developed this wonderful and FREE program to handle just this case. Get FileTypesMan here.

Short tutorial is here, if you don’t find it simple enough. It should be though.

Remember, Windows only understands .ICO files; so should you need to convert .PNG or other formats to .ICO, I recommend Icon Sushi (free program) or converticon.com (free web service)

facebook > gmail > phone sync

How would you like to see your friends’ Facebook profile pictures in your phone’s phonebook? Or GMail’s contacts? For free! Note: this only works with contacts you already have on your GMail’s contact list. For importing Facebook’s contacts to your contact list first, see this link.

Interested? Here’s a how-to.

What you need:

• Facebook account, obviously
• GMail or Google Apps account (if you don’t know what Google Apps is, don’t worry; this doesn’t concern you)
• You should have your GMail contacts by their full names. E.g. “John Smith” instead of just “John”. This application only works with full names. “John Smith IBM inc.” works though, because it searches for the Facebook full name in GMail’s contact list.
• Windows
• .NET framework 3.5

How do I know if I have the .NET 3.5 framework? If you have Windows Vista or 7 or you frequently update or XP, you should have it. If you want to check you can go to Windows’ “Add or Remove Programs” to check if it’s mentioned there. If you need to install it, you can grab it easily from here.

Instructions

1. Download FacebookGmailPhoneSync.xslabs.zip, unpack it somewhere, e.g. desktop or C:\Program Files\FacebookGmailPhoneSync
2. Run FacebookGmailPhoneSync.exe
3. Enter your GMail or Google Apps account details, click “Sync”
4. Log in to Facebook
5. It doesn’t have a progress bar, it just quietly runs a while
6. After it’s done, it pops up “Done.”
7. That’s it, it may take a few minutes for the pictures to update into your GMail, and if you’ve set up GMail <-> Cell phone sync, to your phone!

If there’s any error, please check the “What you need” section again, and please note that XS Labs does not offer any support for this, since this software is not originally ours and it’s free anyways.

Is it safe?

Yes, XS Labs has reviewed the source code, and it does not save or send your private information anywhere.

Should you want to see it for yourself, see the “Source code” section.

Source code

If you don’t know what source code means, you don’t need to download this. You only need to follow the “Instructions” section. Source code is intended for developers who want to modify this program.

Download FacebookGmailPhoneSync.xslabs-source.zip

What you need to compile FacebookGmailPhoneSync from source code:

1. Microsoft Visual Studio, preferably 2008 or newer version. Search xs.fi for “dreamspark” and see if you’re eligible for the free version.
2. The FacebookGmailPhoneSync.xslabs-source.zip mentioned above, unpacked somewhere
3. Google Data API Setup (1.6.0.0) or newer from http://code.google.com/p/google-gdata/downloads/list

Credits

GoogleContactSync was not developed by XS Labs. Original credits go to www.koushikdutta.com

However, XS Labs has modified the program a bit (the source code in it’s current form didn’t work and relied on having Microsoft Office installed).

Changes made in MainForm.cs:

1. deleted “using Microsoft.Office.Interop” lines.
2. commented out “Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.ApplicationClass app = new ApplicationClass();” and following three lines.
3. replaced “match.Google.PhotoEditUri” with “match.Google.PhotoUri”

Changes made in Facebook API (Entity/User.cs):

1. Added enum “Widowed” to User.RelationshipStatus, that was causing Exceptions with people who had widowed friends

Read the article here (via onextrapixel.com)

• Data Types
• SQL Numeric Types
• HTTP Codes
• Common Ports
• PHP Reference
• ASCII & Hex tables
• Bitwise Operations
• Web Notes
• CSS Reference
• Binary permutations

http://xs.fi/static/codersreference/

Every release of Windows has been more visually appealing than the previous version. Today it matters how your software looks.

If your installer looks like this, you’re going to think less of the entire product right before even using it. It’s incredible how Java has had this butt-ugly grey default dialogs from since, 1990?

Get with the times, Oracle.

The previous function GetMatchDuration() would be implemented without this library somewhat like this:

$SQL = ‘SELECT MINUTE(MatchEnds – MatchStarts) FROM matches WHERE MatchID = ‘.mysql_escape_string($MatchID);

if(!($Query = mysql_query($SQL)))

return false;

if(!($Row = mysql_fetch_row($Query)))

return false;

return $Row[0];

Quite a lot prettier in the picture, huh?

PHP effin’ rocks.

The added space is marked with a red circle in the picture.

Luckily there’s an easy fix to it, just add the following code to jQuery UI’s theme CSS file, at the bottom:

#ui-datepicker-div { display:none }

I’ve submitted a bug report to jQuery UI, hope it’ll be fixed in future releases. :)

Ever been frustrated when typing the same <html><head><title>..</title><link>…</link></head><body><div>.. stuff over and over again?

Wouldn’t it be wonderful by just right-clicking on the desktop or inside a folder and just picking “New -> Firefox Document”, then Windows creating a fresh template for you with the most frequently used tags already typed in?

Here’s my template, for example: (Download as file: HTML Template)

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>

<html>
<head>
<title>Title</title>
<link type=”text/css” rel=”stylesheet” href=”style.css” />
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js”></script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
$().ready(function() {
});
</script>
</head>
<body>

<div>
<h1>Heading</h1>

<p>Paragraph</p>
</div>

</body>
</html>

This can be easily  achieved without any third-party software by creating a template file in Windows.

Instructions for doing this: (should work with Windows Vista / 7 at least, most probably XP too)

1. Right click on “Start menu > All programs > Accessories > Notepad”
2. Click “Run as administrator” (only administrators can write to the folder in step 4)
3. Copy-paste the code from the file presented above (download the file, the Blog software manhandles the line feeds and tabs)
4. Save file as C:\Windows\ShellNew\html.html
5. Open registry editor from Start menu > “regedit.exe” (type into the free text box and press enter)
6. Go to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.html\ShellNew
7. Right click on New -> String Value
8. Set values accordingly: Name = FileName, Data = html.html
9. That should be it. If it doesn’t work right away, perhaps you need to logout and log in again. If it still doesn’t work, read the instructions again and make sure you followed them precisely.

Happy and productive coding from XS Labs!

It’s about giving students Microsoft professional tools at no charge.

Participating products:

• Visual Studio (various versions, including latest)
• Windows Server 2008 (various versions)
• Expression Studio 4
• SQL Server
• XNA Game Studio
• Robotics Developer Studio
• Virtual PC
• MultiPoint
• Windows Embedded CE 6.0
• Visual Basic express
• Visual C#  express
• Visual Web Developer express
• Visual C++ express

It’s easy, just sign in from Dreamspark.com with your school’s user account. Enjoy!

Today I made an exception by installing this WordPress because frankly, I’m so busy right now I’ve been the entire year in process of developing self made Content Management System to power XS Labs’ site.

Why don’t I like ready-made software? (at least in websites I make myself)

1) Code bloat (see the “small and light” CodeIgniter‘s MVC framework for example, pictured above). Folder size? A whopping 3.60 MB. That couldn’t be right. Most of it has to be documentation? Sure, 2.5 MB but 1.1 MB still has left for the system folder containing the code.

I hate the fact that server and CPU power rises constantly, and that gives some people the excuse to make software bigger and bigger. Just take a look at PHP Nuke, perhaps the bloatest and sorriest excuse for a CMS there is. Don’t even let me started on PHP’s PEAR framework.

2) Security vulnerabilities. It’s almost every day that you hear about a bug in vBulletin or some other popular web gizmo that exposes thousands and thousands of sites to script kiddie’s mercy. I don’t want that shit happening on my server. I’d be arrogant to say that I make better code than the rest of the developers, but hey – my site’s never been hacked. Perhaps that’s due to security through obscurity, but at least I can sleep my nights safe knowing that no publicized vulnerabilities mean that I have to hurry to patch my servers.