Monthly Archives: July 2006

Capture full page screenshots with firefox

Ever wanted to capture the entire page you are viewing in firefox instead of just what is shown on your screen? Ever need to do that from a command line? Here are two extensions that let you do just that.

Page Saver

The first extension is called Page Saver and comes in two versions. The pro version you have to pay for but the free version does a good job all by itself. Here is an example of a fullpage screenshot:

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Virtualization gaining speed

At work we jumped on the virtualization wagon some time ago first when User Mode Linux and then later with Xen. UML was pretty good but Xen has been great. We had a few reasons for moving from physical machines to virtual ones:

  • Rack space is a recurring cost so maximizing the use of space is important. I have a philosophy of breaking up a lot of functions into their own servers. That is web servers shouldn't be also doing email for 1000 people.
  • Lots of people don't need the full power of a physical machine.
  • You can get a console for a virtual machine without having to visit the datacenter.
  • There is hope that at some point you may never need downtime since Xen and VMWare have the ability to do live migrations from one set of hardware to another. Upgrading a machine couldn't be easier.

Now it seems that more people are starting to move towards virtualization and Xen seems to have pushed things over the edge. I think a lot of that was interest generated because Xen was free and people could get their feet wet. That is probably what also drove VMWare to make part of their suite free. Xen is still not VMWare but it is gaining ground. There is support coming for Windows and Solaris with support for NetBSD already. The main gap I see in Xen's support is in the storage area. Before they can compete with VMWare at the highest levels they need to add better support for SANs or other distributed disk setups.

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SQL Beautifier

I pulled a large amount of SQL out of some existing code and wanted to have it formated nicely for me. I figured there had to be some type of pretty printer for SQL available outside of applications like TOAD. I have access to TOAD but it would have required a reboot so I figured I would ask google what to do. There seem to be a number of different formaters out there. I found a couple people talking about current options a list here and here. The following list is a summary of the options I found:

I decided that since SQLInform was mentioned a lot I would give it a try. I was suprised at how well it did. I gave it a huge amount of SQL to re-format and it gave it back to me formated. There is a limit on how much you can ask it to format at once but that shouldn't be a big issue. I didn't see that it choked on anything that I gave it and there were all kinds of nasty things going on in the SQL.

One interesting thing to come from this is that it seems there are no open source or truely free unix based formaters out there. It seems like it would be easy enough to get going since the SQL grammar is available for a number of different parser generators.

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WordPress permalinks with lighttpd (lighty)

WordPress out of the box works just fine with lighttpd. But you will run into issues if you want nice looking and search engine friendly URLs. To get that you need to turn on the non-default permalinks. Most of the information out there on how to set your webserver up to handle this is written for apache so if you are using lighttpd it is a little harder to find the correct way of doing the URL re-writing.

For more information about why you should use custom permalinks look here or here.

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Easier scrolling images with Yahoo UI

This is a great article about the yahoo ui tools. I mention it mainly because they have a nice scrolling widget a lot like what I put together as an example of the things you can do with script.aculo.us (see Smooth Scrolling Image List).

A link to the demo: Sliding demo

The entire article: 15 things you can do with yahoo ui

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