We’re currently reviewing a number of our sites for IE8 compatibility and as such, I needed to install it on my MacBook After some quick Googling I found a great post on getting IE8 running on your Mac.

It is an interesting tact for Microsoft to enable testing on multiple versions of Internet Explorer via virtualisation as opposed to running multiple versions on the same OS.

As for the setup, I used Qemu on an XP VMWare instance to convert the VirtualPC Hard Disk to be VMWare compatible. Initially I had some errors in getting Qemu to work, and I had to cd into the qemu/bin directory, rather than the qemu directory itself (as per the instructions). I also had to copy a required .dll into the bin directory and then it all converted smoothly.

I didn’t try it out, but some people had success using Q on the Mac to convert the VirtualPC Hard Disk rather than using Qemu on the PC.

We had to decide between fudging the font into the website design, or not. We try to follow standards at Enpresiv as much as possible, but from time to time that is not always possible.

We turned to the usual font replacement techniques:

• sIFR
• A List Apart’s Dynamic Text Replacement
• a new comer: cufon
• facelift

But I also wanted to dream a little, and take a look at what the future might hold. I made a few examples using the new @font-face css3 capability, and thought they might be useful for others.

The @font-face rule allows you to use TrueType and OpenType fonts directly in your webpages. Browser support is VERY limited at present, but Safari Version 4 beta does a really nice job at rendering the custom fonts.

I can see a whole new ‘licensing’ problem arising out of this new capability. Its going to be so easy to add any font into your website, but whether or not you’re allowed to is something entirely different.

I’m also a little scared of what the web might turn into. Despite the low number of web fonts being very limiting for professional designers, those with little design skills tend to turn to ‘fancy’ fonts and colours to try and spice up their designs. With so many great programs making building webpages within reach of the every day person, I can only imagine what we’re in for.

You can use a custom icon to great affect, making your map ‘look and feel’ more like your brand. I’ve thrown together a quick example showing a custom icon on a Google Map.

After you’ve created your custom icon, it is relatively simply to define the custom icon:

// create the custom icon
var customIcon = new GIcon(G_DEFAULT_ICON);
customIcon.image = "wsimages/marker.png";
customIcon.iconSize = new GSize(109, 28);
customIcon.iconAnchor = new GPoint(30, 27);

and then use the custom icon:

var marker = new GMarker(point, {icon:customIcon});
map.addOverlay(marker);

Go and check it out, or download the example directly.

Day to day I run a business and project manage RIA projects, but at heart, I’m a programmer. I keep a libraries of reusable code and a bunch of snippets; some of those snippets I use regularly and others are as close to genius as I’m going to get, so I keep them.

Other than my programming team at Enpresiv, my libraries and snippets largely remain private. Until now!
I’ve found a fantastic website that can manage my snippets and improve my online presence by automatically adding to my output streams on Twitter and my blog at WordPress.

snipt.org is kind of like delicious, only its for code snippets; and you can share your snippets in the ‘social collective’. It saves each of my snippets with their own URL, and sends that URL to my Twitter account as I create new ones.

You can also download Cloud Coder, a nifty little Adobe AIR application that integrates directly with the snipt.org API. Now all I need is direct TextMate integration like snipt.orgs competition Snipplr has.

Having been away for the office for a while, I Googled for any developments on Chrome for Mac. While I didn’t find exactly what I was looking for, I did stumble across Crossover Chromium!

Even though its not the same as the Mac version of Chrome that Google are working on, at least its something. It doesn’t look so great (it still contains the Windows-based chrome), but should prove useful for browser testing; and besides, it’s all us Mac users have at the moment.

I received my invitation to the Stax beta today, and was a little too keen to get my hands dirty.

I gave myself a quick 15 minutes to write a simple weather application, and deploy it to the Stax Cloud (I had already created my application and downloaded a local development version via the Stax SDK). In short, Stax is a breeze to use and I think it will become a very compelling platform in the future.

The Stax Cloud allows you to easily deploy web applications straight to Amazon EC2. You can deploy many popular Java based technologies including ColdFusion and Flex.

It’s the first platform I’ve seen allowing you to deploy the Adobe ColdFusion application server to the cloud. Other than Stax, I’ve only heard of Railo being deployed to Amazon EC2 because of all the licensing problems with Adobe ColdFusion. I still haven’t investigated how Stax are overcoming the licensing issues (that’s on my todo list).

You can visit my weather application, and I managed to get it done within 15 minutes.

I really like the Stax Cloud. It makes it so simple to get an application up and running, which essentially is an Amazon EC2 instance. I’ll definitely keep playing around with this technology.

Not quite sure how it is going to work yet, but the process seemed simple enough. I guess this will be the first blog post that automatically reaches Twitter!

The strip of cloud appears directly on top of the location we’re interested in, and it is proving rather annoying!

Google hasn’t updated this part of the world (or specifically this strip) for quite some time, so I thought I’d dig around to see what I could find out about the frequency of updates to the satellite imagery.

I found some interesting information, but in short, I didn’t find any real public information about how and when Google update the imagery, or what the selection criteria is (blurry vs obstructed, etc). It all seems rather random.

• Google Earth FAQ : Age of satellite imagery and data
• Google Earth Community page, apparently where Google provide information about updates to their Primary Database
• A Google Lat Long Blog post about updates to Google Earth and Maps

I should probably use the database report page, maybe Google might pay attention to this one silly strip of cloud? I can’t even imagine how many reports they receive to fix insignificant strips of the earth.

I’ve read a fair bit about Microformats in many blog posts, and the microformats website itself is very informative. While I understand and appreciate that microformats are important for the greater good of the internet infrastructure, as a business owner and manager of the development team, I’ve been struggling to find a business proposition as to why we should start using them in our website development.

I assumed they would make coding more complex and perhaps increase client budgets (through development time) for no real gain for the client. I’m still tossing around the idea in my head, of how can the client really benefit from the use of microformats on their website.So I decided to play with a few microformats and dreamed up a hCard and jQuery combination (or mashup?).

Using jQuery it was really easy to dig into the body of the page and pull out address information, which is exactly what microformats are all about, creating markup that firstly humans can read and second computers can read.

Once you have the data using jQuery, your imagination is the limit really. I came up with a few trivial examples. The first example demostrates mining for the address and simply linking it to maps.google.com.au. The second example mines for the addresses and then as you click on them, plots them on a Google Map. I was amazed at how quickly and easy it was to program these examples using jQuery.

With this expirmentation I’ve found the business proposition and argument as to why we should start programming using microformats where possible; they make development easier and faster all the while increasing the infrastructure of the web!

You can download the source for the microformat and jQuery examples.

Most of us use captchas daily; simply put, it’s an image containing a smudged word in which you need to type and get it right before you can move forward. It’s used in blogging applications all the time (when you’re posting a comment for example) and is used to determine if the user is a human or a computer (computers struggle to decipher the word in the image correctly).

Anyway, reCaptcha is a project in which the captcha image is a word from a scanned book that the computer can’t recognise and therefore needs to be deciphered. Humans can do this, computers can’t. We’re deciphering things for the sake of security anyway, so why not put our deciphering skills to some use!

It’s an interesting read, and there’s more to it than you first think. One of the problems they had to overcome was, if the computer couldn’t read the word, how would the captcha system clarify if the user got the decipher right?

What’s even better is that it’s completely free! It’s one of the better captcha implementations I’ve seen too, as it allows for audio challenges. There’s a few platform specific implementations of it including a nice version in ColdFusion by Robin Hilliard.

technorati tags:recaptcha