Technobrief #12

Summary: Recent findings of software, articles, and more.

CSS

• The 30 CSS Selectors you Must Memorize
  Jeffrey Way describes CSS selectors (includes demos and browser compatibility matrix).
• Shadow Boxing; CSS3 Glossy Buttons
  Five-step tutorial on building cool-looking buttons.
• Quick Tip: You Need to Check out LESS.js
  Jeffrey Way explains how to use JavaScript implementation of the LESS library that offers greater flexibility when creating style sheets, including the use of variables, operators, mix-ins, and nested selectors.

Design

• Best Practices of Combining Typefaces
  A close look at some the best practices for combining typefaces — as well as some blunders to avoid.
• Warm Gun: the Age of Experience
  Luke Wroblewski offers his notes from Jared Spool's The Dawning of the Age of Experience: How to Build A Killer Design Team talk at the Warm Gun Design Conference in San Francisco, CA (there are some excellent points).
• 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers
  Useful utilities for web designers and developers.

Firefox

• InstantFirefox
  Add-on that enables instant (Chrome-like) search in Firefox.
• Syphon
  Keeps your favorite extensions synced with all your computers.

Humor

• Simplicity
  Great illustration of what a typical Apple product, Google interface and your company's application look like (funny, and so true).

Icons

• 50 New Free High Quality Icons Sets
  Most of the listed freebies may be used for commercial projects as well, some of them may not.
• Gcons
  Comprehensive collection of 100 creative, open source and multi-purpose icons in 12 colors for the web and desktop applications.

Interviews

• John Sculley On Steve Jobs, The Full Interview Transcript
  Offers awesome insights into how Steve Jobs does things; it’s also one of the frankest CEO interviews you’ll ever read (Sculley talks openly about Jobs and Apple, admits it was a mistake to hire him to run the company and that he knows little about computers).

JavaScript

• The Essentials of Writing High Quality JavaScript
  Stoyan Stefanov offers an excerpt of his book (JavaScript Patterns) detailing the essentials of writing high quality JavaScript, such as avoiding globals, using single var declarations, pre-caching length in loops, following coding conventions, and more. This excerpt also includes some habits not necessarily related to the code itself, but more about the overall code creation process, including writing API documentation, conducting peer reviews, and running JSLint.

jQuery

• Composition with jQuery Templates: Why and How
  Dave Ward offers an example of template composition using jQuery templates.
• jQuery Templates, Data Link, and Globalization Accepted as Official jQuery Plugins
  Scott Guthrie (ScottGu) introduces new Microsoft's contribution to official jQuery plugins.
• Progressively Enhance a Form to a Modal Form
  Erik Wurzer offers a tutorial (with demo and samples) explaining how to implement a modal dialog (form) using progressive enhancement: start with baseline, usable functionality, then increase the user experience for those who have browsers to support it.
• Commonly Confused Bits Of jQuery
  Andy Croxall clears up some of the confusions about jQuery functions, methods and syntactical peculiarities that appear similar but differ in some ways.
• Web Delicious jQuery Plugins
  A nice collection of jQuery pligins, including date picker, checkbox tree, context menu, scroll tab, and calendar.

Opinions

• Laborers versus Professionals
  Jan Van Ryswyck offers a frank look at typical corporate application development practices (fear-driven development!).

Software

• Diffuse
  Tool for comparing and merging text files.
• FotoMix
  Allows you to crop, resize, rotate, mix and manipulate different pictures,
  to create a wide variety of images.
• Hamster Free Video Converter
  Converts video and audio files between various formats.
• Free Video Converter
  Converts video between formats (AVI, MP4, WMV, MKV, SWF, 3GP, MPEG), creates custom presets, converts to devices, rips & burns DVDs, and uploads videos to YouTub.
• JD-GUI
  Java decompiler.
• xSearch
  A free search tool that offers more features than Windows Search, including searches for special words in files (any of the words, all of the words, exact phrase, without the words, etc), search for hexadecimal values, search for words in Unicode or UTF-8 format, and more.
• CPU-Z
  Displays information about the main devices of your computer including CPU, graphics card, motherboard, memory, etc.
• Rasterbator
  Creates rasterized versions of images, which can be printed and assembled into enormous (or smaller, if you prefer) posters.

Web tools

• GMX
  Pretty decent web-based email.
• Crime Mapping
  Shows recent crime activity in your neighborhood.
• Your Tax Receipt
  Explains how your tax dollars are allocated between different government program.
• Glyde
  Allows you to buy and sell electronic games, DVDs, CDs, and books.
• VolunteerSpot
  Free online sign up sheets and volunteer scheduling tool.
• The Most Powerful and Feature Rich Web-Based Code Editors (IDEs)
  A collection of web-based IDEs for various languages, including JavaScript, CSS, ASP.NET, PHP, and more.

Web development

• The Footer’s the Menu
  James Edwards suggests ways to address usability and accessibility problems with drop-down and fly-out menus.

Windows Live Essentials 2011 error [SOLVED]

Summary: Why can't I install Photo Gallery and Movie Maker?

This is what an installation error should not look like:

Two hours of frustration, searching the web and support sites for possible hints, following any remotely close suggestions, and the only thing I get is:

An unknown error occurred.
Error: 0x80096005
Source: D3DX9

Thank your Microsoft, kids!

UPDATE: Okay, after getting a number of hints from troubleshooting posts, I was able to fix the problem. It looks like my system missed the original DirectX 9 DLL (D3DX9.DLL). I don't know why it's missing. Maybe some program removed it when it was not supposed to (I did not see any errors related to DirectX 9, though). So, I just made copies of the latest version of the DirectX 9 DLL (D3DX9_XX.DLL) in the System32 and SysWow64 folders and renamed the copies to D3DX9.DLL. Problem solved. Hope it helps someone.