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Windows Clipboard Inspector

News /

When working on copy&paste features, it is useful to be able to inspect the current contents of the Clipboard. Unfortunately, at least Windows 7 does not include a clipboard viewer which shows the current clipboard data in all available formats, but Free Clipboard Viewer seems to do the trick. It automatically updates whenever new content is copied into the clipboard and updates the list of available formats accordingly on the left side, while the content itself is displayed on the right side. The following screen shot shows how the tool displays a part of its own web page after some content has been marked and copied into the clipboard with CTRL-C:

New site layout

News /

The new site layout is finally online! Besides the modified look, I have improved the site navigation, especially

  • The content area is now flexible and adjusts to the browser width. There is a minimum width defined, if the browser window is less wide than this minimum width then the browser should display scroll bars.
  • There is now a root path displayed on top of the page.
  • The articles and tutorials now have a chapter wise table of content on the right side, so that they are easier to navigate.
  • Each page has individual social share and like buttons.
  • All images are clickable and are zoomed within a popup when clicked.
The primary layout is using div elements which are layouted using CSS tables (display: table and display: table-cell). I tested it with the major current browsers, but if there are any issues with the new layout, please let me know.

New Look

News /

I have switched to a real content management system, instead of using some home grown scripts to manage the content. Together with the technical shift, the look of the web page has also been improved. Enjoy it!

Java browser plugin on Ubuntu 10.04

Java, News /

Since a while (I think since I upgraded my Linux installation from Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04), my Mozilla Firefox (3.6.3) did not recognize the Java plugin anymore. The interesting learning is that this does not really affect day-to-day internet usage – even though I am regularly browsing through the web, I noticed the missing applet functionality only very seldom, and it has never been a blocker for me in the last couple of months. I never really liked Java applets on web pages, and it seems that this technique has now almost been superseeded by other technologies like flash. Nevertheless, yesterday I was forced to make the Java browser plugin work on my installation because the german postal service DHL requires it for printing out stamps. Earlier they used a scripted PDF document which could be printed with Acrobat reader and which connected to the DHL web site to ensure it is printed only once, but due to customer complaints they switched to a Java applet based solution (at least, the PDF approach also worked in Linux 😉 ) So, I did two things to make the Java plugin work again:

  • Ubuntu has removed the SUN (now aka Oracle) java packages from their repository. Since I suspected an installation issue, I installed the current JDK from the Oracle web site (Ubuntu now only contains OpenJDK, but I do not yet have experience with it)
  • Installing the JDK was not sufficient. Additionally, I had to link /etc/alternatives/firefox-javaplugin.so to the library libnpjp2.so below the jre/lib/i386/ directory, instead of the library libjavaplugin_oji.so below the jre/plugin/i386/ns7 directory.
This finally made the browser plugin work.