So says Donnie Garvich
Archive for September, 2007
7-Zip – Archiving for the masses
0There was a day when the only way to create ZIP archives was to purchase a copy of WinZip. The software was definitely ahead of its time… on Windows. *nix users had been playing with compressing and archiving files for quite some time prior to that.
Then, Microsoft decided to begin including the ability to create and manage simple archives directly into the Windows Explorer. This decision really brought archiving to the masses. However, many of us still have a need to do more… more quickly… with our archiving utility.
Today I was attempting to unzip 1,000 or so very small files (a set of PNG icons) into a directory on my machine. When I began the process using the built in Windows tool it told me it would take 19 minutes. Using what I can only assume is Microsoft’s patented time tracking algorithm the timer then proceeded to continue calculating backwards until I stopped it at 36 minutes with only 300 of the files copied over. This was after a 5 minute period of waiting on it to finish, figuring that things would eventually just speed along.
After a moment of frustration I went and got 7-Zip, an open source archiving tool that I had used in the past a limited amount. I figured this would be a perfect opportunity to test the speed and abilities of 7-Zip against the convenience of the Windows tool.
Well… the 7-Zip archiver took less than 5 seconds to complete the same job.
I really shouldn’t have to say any more than that to sell you on how good this tool really is.
DOCTYPE affects iframe scrollbar styles
14 years ago
An application I am currently working on has been specifically targeted towards Internet Explorer and a technical design requirement is that the browser window the application is being run in is a fixed size. So inevitably, there will be scrolling.
As part of the design we decided to use a document divided up into sections using DIV tags and absolutely positioning rather than using frames all around. This leaves the primary content area of the application as an iframe taking up the majority of the page.
A week or so ago I put some styles in my CSS which were intended to color the scrollbars on the iframe. Oddly… this didn’t work. I didn’t really attempt to follow up on it until today, at which point I found an interesting solution.
Before, I had the following document definition in my HTML:
1 | <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> |
I changed the definition to:
1 | <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> |
And now things work great. I’m not sure why, maybe when I get some time to look it up I’ll modify this post to reflect whatever reasons I find.
However, if you are having problems with your iframe scrollbars not taking your styles, this could help.