Some icons for webpages

A list:

• Glyphicons
• Fontawesome
• JQuery UI (how do you make them bigger? maybe use this?)

Client-side web design frameworks

A short list:

• Foundation - doesn't work in IE8, and doesn't even degrade gracefully
• Bootstrap - from Twitter. Works in IE8
• Alternatives are available

Good enough software

There's so much software available these days, it's difficult to find which is the best without laboriously downloading, installing, configuring and testing, which I don't often have time for. Unfortunately a large proportion of software is simply not good enough, or its features are poorly described.

Here is some "good enough" software I've found for Windows:

• To diff directories, e.g. sync music or photos: FreeFileSync 6.3
• To diff the content of files, e.g. source code: WinMerge
• Windows Explorer alternative: xplorer 2
• To encode mp3s: LAME
• To see where your disk space is being used: Treesize
• To remove spyware: Spybot: Search & Destroy
• Torrents: qBittorrent
• N64 emulator: project64
• Programmer's text editor: Notepad++
• ebook management: Calibre
• Manage iPhone music outside iTunes: Media Monkey
• Graphics maniplation: GIMP
• Rename files: Bulk Rename Utility
• Macro recorder: Autohotkey
• Media player: VLC, or MPC-HC (not tried)
• Music player: Winamp
• Documents and spreadsheets: Microsoft Office
• (LibreOffice and OpenOffice are NOT good enough)

Ubuntu graphics drivers decided to break

HP EliteBook 8460p

Apparently I have an ATI Radeon graphics card, I only know this because Ubuntu 13.04 failed to use it to display X11 after an update one day. I could get to a command prompt but X11 would not start.

After much research, I concluded that I had to run this to get it working again:

sudo apt-get install fglrx fglrx-amdcccle

But after that my second monitor didn't work, and also whenever I disconnect the laptop from the docking station, the screen shows a mess of wiggly lines and I have to reboot.

(source, source, source)

UPDATE: Someone suggested using the built-in Intel Core i7 Pro graphics card instead, one way is to disable the ATI driver in the BIOS, another is to disable via modprobe blacklist, apparently there are easy instructions on the Ubuntu wiki.

When I tried this, the functionality was even worse: No multiple monitors.

Vector graphics editors for linux

Vector graphics files can be saved as .svg, and stay in high resolution no matter how far you zoom in. The source data is XML/text and can be committed to version control.

• Gimp - full graphics but no vectors
• Karbon - vectors
• Inkscape - vectors
• SVG Edit - vectors. Basic, but browser-based. Can't zoom out. Things were misaligned.

Automatically generated diagrams of Perl code

• Use UML::Sequence to diagram your method calls - Looks cool but couldn't get the module's tests to pass.
• Write your own code to produce a Graphviz spec file - Good choice if you want a data structure diagrammed, e.g. State transitions.
• SchemaSpy works well for database tables.

Untried:

• UML::Class::Simple - class diagrams, not methods?
• Devel::Diagram - class diagrams, not methods?
• Devel::DProfPP

Make a layer transparent in GIMP

• Create a blank layer, filled with white
• Right-click on the layer and choose 'Add Layer Mask'
• Select 'Grayscale copy of layer'
• Fill or draw on the layer with any colour (e.g. shades of gray)
• the darker black you go, the more transparent the layer will become