Grupenet

One of the great features of Ubuntu and other Linux distributions is the ability to include third party application updates alongside regular operating system level software updates. Both Windows and Mac OS X are somewhat lacking in this area, with Windows as the higher-lacking of the two.

Fortunately on the OS X side, software developer metaquark has released an application by the name of AppFresh which aims to fill the gap of the need for a central application updater.

Currently, AppFresh is available as a Development Preview, so it is recommended that you back up all of your applications before using AppFresh if you intend to use the built-in update installer. If you’d rather stay on the safe side, AppFresh can still be used to check for and download updates excluding the automatic update installer process.

AppFresh also includes integration of iusethis.com. This allows AppFresh to also check for updates to applications that are not natively supported but are listed in the iusethis database. It also allows you to easily add new apps to your iusethis profile without having to search for each app beforehand.

Another interesting feature is the ability to take a “snapshot” of an application, which captures the current version of the application along with the application data and preferences. It’s basically Time Machine for your apps.

More information can be found at the AppFresh website.

For the most part, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard has been received very well by users compared to its rival, Windows Vista. Though this is all fine and dandy, Leopard is not without its flaws.

I’ve noticed that every time I install a new application, the icon does not show up in my Applications stack. So, in order to fix the broken application icon, we have this temporary solution:

Open up Terminal (found in the Utilities folder), type killall Dock (make sure “D” is capitalized) and press enter. This will restart your dock and fix the application icon. You will need to do this every time you install an application and find the application icon broken.

If you’re reading this, I appreciate the fact that you’re actually reading my blog as I haven’t updated it in a loooong time. Unfortunately, with my new work schedule at my new job and keeping up with school I just don’t have the time I used to.

Also, in my free time I’ve been writing hardware reviews over at my friend’s site, Tech Gear. Go ahead and check out my Antec notebook coolers review and my new Antec A/V Cooler review. I’ll continue to write reviews regularly over there, so if you miss me enough, you can hop over to Tech Gear and see what I’m up to until I post here again, which may or may not happen in the near future.

In other news, I finally got a MacBook and have been enjoying playing around with it. You’ll probably see many more Mac OS X tips and tricks on here than before. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still be doing Windows articles, just not as many. I’ll try my best to balance out all the Windows, OS X, and Linux articles I write.

That’s all for now!

And sorry to those of you who have been getting errors on my site. I completely forgot to re-activate all my plugins after updating WordPress.

Being a new Mac switcher, I of course found myself installing Windows using Boot Camp so I can run those couple applications that are only available in the Windows world. The first time I booted out of my Boot Camp partition and back into Mac OS X I noticed my time had been offset by about 5 hours. After a bit of googling I found that Windows uses a different time scheme and thus changes the internal hardware clock every time I boot into Windows which ends up screwing up the time displayed in Mac OS X the next time I boot into it.

I found a quick and easy little hack on how to fix this problem thanks to a commenter on this blog post.

First, boot into your Boot Camp partition. Open up Notepad and copy and paste the following:

@echo off
net time /setsntp:tick.usno.navy.mil
net stop w32time
net start w32time

Save this as a .bat (batch) file. Now find your saved batch file and drag it into your “Startup” folder in your Start menu. Now every time you start up Windows, it will fix the time offset automatically.

On a side note, sorry for the very long delay in posts lately.

In an attempt to further speed up loading times for Grupenet, I decided to compress (remove spaces and comments) my CSS stylesheet. However, instead of applying compression directly to the original file, why not add some PHP code to the stylesheet to compress the CSS dynamically when it is loaded on the server? This way all readability is maintained when editing the original file. This way you can add as much commenting as you need to keep your CSS more organized.

Step 1

Create a new file called .htaccess in the same directory your stylesheet is in. Open your newly created .htaccess file and add the following lines:

<Files style.css>
SetHandler application/x-httpd-php
</Files>

(Replace style.css with the filename of your stylesheet)

Step 2

Open up your stylesheet and add the following to the top of your stylesheet:

<?php
header('Content-type: text/css');
function compress($buffer) {
$buffer = preg_replace('!/\*[^*]*\*+([^/][^*]*\*+)*/!', '', $buffer);
$buffer = str_replace(array("\r\n", "\r", "\n", "\t", ' ', ' ', ' '), '', $buffer);
return $buffer;
}
ob_start("compress");
?>

Now add this to the bottom of your stylesheet:

<?php ob_end_flush(); ?>

Step 3

That's all there is to it! Now open up your browser and point it to your stylesheet. All the comments and spacing should be removed, and it should look something like this.