HTTP is a stateless protocol, due to which its is unable to understand subsequent requests from the same user/client. It considers all requests as “NEW”. So to manage this ‘state’, Sessions and cookies come into the picture.

Please read more over here How Sessions work in PHP

I just wanted to backup/show people who missed the default Fedora Core 6 wallpaper.

Default

Default 5:4 Aspect Ratio (Normal Screens)

Default-Wide

Default-Dual

Default-Dual-Wide

Note: Above content is available as per GNU Licence

To open a tab, just use the following command

tabe filename

This shall open a new tab.

To move between tabs you can use tabNext and tabPrevious. Ctrl+PgUp and Ctrl+PgDown work as well in the X version as well as on gnome-terminal.

tabclose shall do the needful as the command states.

First check if you have Vim 7 installed and in the VIM directory if you have a folder called autoload. If you have check if it contains *complete.vim files. If everything is Good… lets move…

Lets add PHP autocomplete feature. In your $HOME/.vimrc file add the following command

autocmd FileType php set omnifunc=phpcomplete#CompletePHP

Once done, Open any PHP file and within the <?php tag, write mysql_c and press Ctrl-x Ctrl-o , and here is what happens

You can see a Full list of functions begining with mysql_c

The .vimrc command that we added supports intellisense like autocomplete only for PHP filetypes, note FileType php in the statement. If you want to add support for the other languages as well

• Open the autoload/<filetype>complete.vim file
• Check for intial lines like …
  function! htmlcomplete#CompleteTags(findstart, base)
if a:findstart
• Now, I had opened htmlcomplete.vim file, Now to add support for html files…
  • Add the following command
    autocmd FileType html set omnifunc=htmlcomplete#CompleteTags

Thats it ! add more support the way you want…

Yahoo! Mail

Hotmail

Use of Colors, Icons, images

• Hotmail, has worked upon its old icons, making them with gradient backgrounds though.
• Yahoo has created bold new Icons, Their Icons are more intuitive. They are bigger, considering the higher resolutions (more than 1024 x 768). Hotmail’s icons’ main image still is small, with Text beside it to help
• Hotmail has already given multiple themes like Blue, Red, Black, Sliver, Yahoo still lacks it, or atleast I wasn’t able to find it.

Accessibility

• Hotmail’s interface nowhere comes close to being accessible by using shortcuts, the way yahoo has done it.
• Yahoo although has picked up the overall idea from Desktop Applications and lets not forget Gmail, has provided much easier access to everything.
• Yahoo’s shortcut key indication is when the user uses a mouse and clicks on a particular button for an action; this creates a Div pop-up suggesting the user to use much easier shortcut key.

Usability

• Again Yahoo has won this race, with its ample of shortcuts, and an intuitive interface which resembles a Desktop App, its more usable as compared to Hotmail
• Hotmail, is changing things around, eg. at first look you don’t find a check box beside the message, but when you roll-over the message, the mail icon(read or unread) beside the message changes to a checkbox. User can’t think of that at first glance
• A click on Yahoo will just select the mail, which again is inline with any other Desktop App like Thunderbird or Outlook Express; It doesn’t open the mail with a click. In hotmail, a single click will open the message as well.
• Preview Pane: Hotmail’s ad area is at the topmost part, mostly of “Windows Live” ads, So it reduces the users, available height, as unlike Yahoo’s ad section is on rightmost part, which on today’s wide screens and resolutions is much better suited for a preview pane.
• Font Colors: Yahoo sticks to a decent contrast, dark black fonts on a white background or a Windows XP’s Luna theme’s light beige-yellow background. Continuous use of Yahoo won’t be a problem to the user. But Hotmail has jumped the Web 2.0 bandwagon with its bad or very light color schemes. All basic font colors are light gray, which on first feel look good, but need not be good for long, They will strain your eyes.
• Sorting: Yahoo has done it again, Hotmail is simply pathetic in this area. Hotmail can only sort in Descending order!!! ridiculous ! Hotmail can only sort using Date, Sender, Subject and Size, while Yahoo apart from those can sort on Junk marked messages, Attachements and Flagged messages.
• Flagged messages: Hotmail simply lacks this feature ! Yahoo does not.
• Drag and Drop: Both are good in this area, Yahoo however slightly edges out Hotmail, by suggesting; where the dragged object can be placed and where it can’t.

Cross Browser Compatibility

I need not state who is the clear winner over here, Yahoo Mail. Hotmail’s UI is still facing problems in Firefox. However, the whole live project seems to be the only project where M$ is doing good work on Cross browser compatibilities, but atleast they are moving in that direction.

Errors, Bugs, miscellaneous

Both the interfaces are having lot many javascript errors. Sessions with both interfaces can end up having around 20-30 javascript errors.

Yahoo’s UI seems to be a little slow as compared to Hotmail’s, and there seems to be a continuous background refresh going on somewhere, which at times can be annoying, Hotmail doesn’t have that problem.

Yahoo has also neatly integrated their calender with the mail interface, in Hotmail calender is still like a different page. Yahoo’s calender events are listed like Gmail’s Web Clips which makes it very usable.

Both are evolving and are in Beta stage(Google style) so can’t say much about their bugs, but every 15 days the UIs seem to improve their functionality… So 3 cheers to them.

Conclusion, Inference, Overall…

We’re not having a Scientific experiment over here, but still we need to come down to a final winner over here. And to me if you want to have just simple lazy browsing of 1 or 2 mails, both of them are equally good. But for actual work with emails will leave u using Yahoo Mail more as compared to Hotmail.
So if you ask me… I would say Yahoo Mail.

So we use a trick, The trick is to give actual page link of the slideshow in the href, so that non standard browsers can access that slideshow, but the Standard Modern browsers that have JavaScript enabled can popup the window.

Use onclick event to pop a new window, but also make sure that a return false statement is present.

WAI Compatible: Window Popups

To the “vsp” or the Vertical Split command give argument as “.”, a period. Which will prompt Vim to open left bar that will list all directories and files, directories first, just like any directory listing command of your OS.

You can traverse the directories by pressing “Enter” to change to that directory, and you can go on browsing.

If you want to open a file, Press “o” when the cursor is under that file. That will open the file in the same window as the Browser window.

If you want to open the file in the previously visited window, press “O” (Captial alphabet O). This will open the file in the previous window.

Now you know how to use Vim as your favourite GUI Editor

To override this, what is done is add user interaction (unknown to the user…) to spawn a popup.

Spawning popup windows in Firefox

All you need to do is add an EventListener… to particular area of the page which is viewed, read and make a popup.

I’ve written more, with the code… at the following URL, Spawning popup windows in Firefox

• Make HTTP calls
• Get and parse XML
• Render stuff

You’d say how different is it from AJAX, Well only in a way it uses a stupid Flash file which does all that.

Well AJAX does the same, but it still does not use any other plugin. Now why on earth a developer would use such a library where he has an added restraint of the browser having a specific plugin (Flash in this case)

People nowdays are getting over the wire with this AJAX thing. No doubt its helping change the format of the Web-based Application, which is turning into a more fancy, jazzy desktop like app. But still we must understand it is HTTP, however you try to build, still it has same limitations that of HTTP.

Consider this screenshot of FJAX.net,

Look at the loading page…, this all loading is just to grab another XML file that has contents, that is to be displayed for the indexpage. So what these new “AJAX geeks” are doing are making 2-3 more calls for every page, as compared to a plain HTTP page, which would have simply fetched the main page (with its attached images… etc.) and displayed it…

In the application above,

1. Load the main page (with attached images, files)
2. Load all the heavy Javascripts…
3. Load the XML file, that shall deliver the contents
4. Javascript shall now render the XML-content.

Instead for a plain HTTP page.

1. Load the main page (with attached images, files)

… thats it.

Luckily I’ve got someone to support my idea, FJAX: Just say no

Sometime back I had written about "my concept" of Live Scoreboard. My Idea was of having a Web Service, which would provide a score updates, and that would be asynchronously called to update the scoreboard.

But IBM has devised another way, Obviously using Javascript, they've…

1. Used javascript to write HTML to embed a flash file, which writes more stuff.
   
2. There is a parameter of a XML file "mipConfig.xml" that is given to it. This file has some of the following information.
   
   1. ServerName and Port where Scoreboard (API | Service) is available.
   2. The position of FlashCursor !? ( I guess its the location where flash points latest points grabbed)
   3. The rate at which the Server needs to be queried.
3. The xml file that points to the "FlashCursor" has some kind of serialized data in XML, which I'm unable to comprehend.
   
4. After getting all this data,DOM is used to update the HTML.

If anybody has figured out more than I have (which I think could be wrong) don't mind posting what IBM's Scoreboard really is