Australian dictionary for Firefox

As most of you Firefox users are probably aware, the latest version has a built-in spell checker which is really useful in web forms. But if you prefer a proper spell checker (rather than the default American one), you should download the Australian Dictionary extension from Cameron Roy instead.

Forget Adobe, Foxit instead

For those of you who are still using the over-bloated Adobe Reader to view and print your PDF documents, seriously consider uninstalling it and replacing it with Foxit Reader instead.

Unlike the ubiquitous Adobe product, Foxit Reader is around 10 times smaller in size, loads much faster and it won’t freeze your computer. It’s probably the only PDF reader you’ll ever need, unless you’re planning on doing some serious editing of your PDF documents.

Saving web pages as images

Recently, I needed to write some documentation for a web application and I needed a way to create screenshots of web pages which are longer than one screen.

While there are several shareware applications which can do this, I stumbled on a Firefox extension which does exactly this in such a simple and elegant way.

Screengrab allows you to grab a screenshot with a simple right-click of a mouse. You can grab the complete page, visible portion or your own custom selection, and copy it to your clipboard or save it as an image file.

VMware design stupidity

Here’s proof that sometimes software designers make really, really stupid decisions.

Like a lot of other web development professionals who use Linux for their development environment but also need access to MS Windows applications, I run VMware Server to access the corporate MS Office applications, including email.

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Stupid browser, V7

I’d like you to hover your mouse pointer over the mugshot on the left. What does the tooltip text say?

1. Ivan’s blog posts
2. You are using a stupid browser

If it’s the former, congratulations on using a smart browser. If it’s the latter, then I know you’re using Internet Explorer, even though you might be on the latest version.

From the HTML 4.01 Specification, Objects, Images, and Applets:

“The alt attribute specifies alternate text that is rendered when the image cannot be displayed (see below for information on how to specify alternate text ). User agents must render alternate text when they cannot support images, they cannot support a certain image type or when they are configured not to display images.”

So, is anyone else other than Microsoft confused by this? It seems pretty simple to me: Your browser will either show the image or the alt text, but never both.