Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

Transit – format and libraries for passing values between programs written in different languages

Transit:

Transit is a format and set of libraries for conveying values between applications written in different programming languages. This spec describes Transit in order to facilitate its implementation in a wide range of languages.

Validating website HTML, CSS, and links from the command line

When working on a long running projects, it’s easy to lose track of HTML and CSS standard compliance.  Also, link rot is a common occurrence.  Gladly, there are command line tools that can be executed on a regular basis (think weekly or monthly cron jobs), that would check the site and report any issues with it.  Here is one of the ways.

Installation on Fedora:

yum install linkchecker
yum install python-tidy
yum install python-cssutils

Example command line:

linkchecker -t20 --check-html --check-css https://mamchenkov.net

Obviously, check the manual of linkchecker for more options.

Useful Skype commands, roles, and emoticons

Just by accident I came across this list of Skype commands and roles.  I only knew two or three.  Apparently, there is much more.  For those of us who use Skype on multiple devices, checkout /showplaces and /remotelogout :

  • /showplaces – Lists other instances where this Skype name is currently signed in.
  • /remotelogout – Sign out all other instances except the current one. This will also stop push notifications on all other instances.

And while we are on the subject of not so well-known Skype features, have a look a the complete list of emoticons (smileys) that you can use in the chat.  These include some more additional icons and country flags.

Platforms trump products

Platforms trump products – an excellent view on the trend of vendors to create platforms rather than just products or services.  The world is getting larger and scalability becomes a problem fast – platform, it seems, is a viable solution for now.  Interestingly, lessons learned in the digital world can be applied to the real world.