Google Gears 0.2 released

Google Gears 0.2 has been released and it is now available for developers. This is a really cool tool for web developers, especially the offline browsing capabilities. They have an announcement with the changes for this release on their weblog.

A few months ago I played a bit with it and implemented offline caching for a Wiki system I was working on, and it worked pretty well. I need to get some more free time and use the SQLite features.

New location for monthly Houston PHP / MySQL Users Group meeting

I’m happy to announce that we are finally changing the location for our monthly meetings, from the dreaded University of Houston main campus to a Galleria location.

Alert Logic has agreed to host the monthly meetings at their headquarters (we are next to the Marathon Oil building), so hopefully this will make it easier for people to attend. I’m looking forward to having a real meeting room with projector and wireless internet for a change!

I’ll be updating the meeting details today, but our new location will be the following:

Alert Logic, Inc.
1776 Yorktown
7th Floor
Houston, TX 77056

Driving directions from Downtown:

1. Head north on Travis St
2. Turn left on Walker St – go 0.4 mil
3. Take the I-45 North ramp – go 1.0 mi
4. Take exit 48B onto I-10 West – go 5.1 mi
5. Take exit 763 onto I-610 South – go 1.5 mi
6. Take exit 9B to Post Oak Blvd – go 0.8 mi
7. Turn right on Post Oak Blvd – go 0.5 mi
8. Turn right on San Felipe – go 0.6 mi
9. Turn left on Yorktown – go 0.1 mi

Changing image src attribute reliably in Internet Explorer

I just spent quite a bit of time debugging this silly problem on Insightory.com, where the document control buttons were not working under Internet Explorer. Since it might be useful to somebody else, I’m going to document the solution here.

The problem was that the document browsing control buttons, which look like the following:


<img src="/blog/browse_controls.png" />

They were implemented by doing something similar to this:


<a href="javascript:void(null);" onClick="javascript:openNextPage();" class="nextpage"><img src="/images/nextpagebutton.gif" alt="Next page" /></a>

And then inside the openNextPage function, I swap the image by changing the src attribute of the image tag. Pretty standard, and works perfectly under Firefox.

Long story short, the javascript:void(null); bit is what is breaking Internet Explorer (IE6 on this case). Changing the XHTML code to look like the following fixes the problem completely for me:


<a href="javascript:openNextPage();" class="nextpage"><img src="/images/nextpagebutton.gif" alt="Next page" /></a>

I found out the culprit by (obviously) searching Google for a long time, and then finding this thread on WebDeveloper.com.

Alert Logic Threat Manager rated “Best Buy” by Security Magazine

Since I wasn’t really blogging back then, I forgot to mention that Alert Logic received a great review at Security Magazine in its April 2007 issue. We got a “Best Buy” rating when compared against some of our competitors.

We were all very proud of the new releases of Threat Manager over the past year, so it was very good to be recognized for the work. A perfect score, no less! All 5 stars.

Velocity conference coming up in June 2008

Velocity is the new O’Reilly conference aimed at discussing topics related to scaling web sites and applications on the Web. It seems really interesting, and I will try to attend.

Having access to some of the industry’s experts in scaling web sites will be really useful. In fact, Steve Souders is one of the program chairs of the conference, and he is also known as the creator of the very popular YSlow extension to Firefox.

« Previous Page« Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries »Next Page »