A few things I’ve discovered today that look potentially useful in the future:

• Antenna House Formatter V5 – converts HTML and CSS to PDF, including support for MathML. Heck, supporting CSS well is a plus – most HTML to PDF conversions don’t. Hat tip to one of our clients for finding that.
• jQuery Tools – there are plenty of JavaScript UI libraries around, but this one looks better componentized than most. It’s also a good, small set of components that normal web pages are likely to want, rather than being more specifically useful in web applications, though it could be used there too.
• FlowPlayer – actually I knew about this one but only just got around to looking at the details. Handy looking open source flash video player. They’ve somehow converted the GPL into a license that requires attribution which is really odd, most likely to keep their commercial licensing option open. It’s their license so they can do what they want with it but I would have thought there’d be a better fitting license.

Note to self: the nu.validator has a really handy looking SAX handler that serializes the XML.

Hat tip to Henri Sivonen for pointing this out along with a bunch of other useful XML generating tips.

When installing most if not all versions of IBM Portal on Linux, to get the installer to run you need to install a couple of extra packages:

• openmotif
• compat-libstdc++

Depending on the options you chose when first installing Linux there may be more – the easiest way to find them is to know that the graphical installer sends it’s error messages to /tmp/wpinstalllog.txt. It’s usually fairly easy to match the error messages up to the package you need to install to fix it.

Don’t be put off by the fact that it prints an error about not being able to connect to the X server to the terminal – that’s usually a red herring. Open an xterm instance to confirm the connection to the X server works and then go back to tracking down missing packages.

I have far more tabs open in NetNewsWire than I can handle, so here’s all the stuff that’s open more so I can find them again if I need them than because I actually want to comment on them or do something with them right now:

When Can I Use? – Useful page for getting a rough idea of the current state of support for web stuff in browsers.  Not perfect but definitely a very good starting point.

HTML 5 Rendering Section – Actually the entire draft spec is a good reference for anyone parsing or rendering HTML.  Since EditLive! does both this is likely to be useful.

Factors That Improve Online Experiences – Interesting research on how user’s navigate web sites and the misconceptions designers have about how usable their sites are.

Replacement iPhone Earphones Review – since my standard set seem to be dying this looks handy.

Google Mobwrite – Interesting looking JavaScript real-time collaborative editing implementation. The theory section is particularly worth studying.

How To Unlock the Huawei E220 HSDPA modem – can’t really see that I’ll need to use this, but useful to know it’s possible.

This one should be obvious but well, it wasn’t… When you upgrade to the latest Debian stable (Lenny at time of writing which was released 14 Feb 2009), it will upgrade PAM and a few other really important login-type modules.  At the time it will tell you that you have to restart any services that use PAM or they mightn’t authenticate properly and offer to restart a number of services for you so everything seems happy.

Sadly, since VMWare isn’t installed as a Debian package, it’s not included in that list of services to reboot so it will suddenly stop allowing you to log in. The fix is to simply restart the vmware management services:

sudo /etc/init.d/vmware-mgmt restart

This won’t restart your VMs, just the web access and other management components. You can now log in to the web access console using the appropriate OS accounts (by default I think only root is enabled).