Friday, April 27, 2007

cute technique for decrease loading time of web pages with multiple images

This post is really to highlight the following article which describes a clever (read CSS magic) way to download one image and display multiple ones.

This news maybe old for some, but I'm keeping track of it, I'm sure I'll make use of it.

So, what's all about: if you have 30 images (small ones, like icons) to display in the page, what to do: create one big image out of them, then use the background attribute of the img tag to specify the same image and assign CSS class of each of the img tag which will split the big image and get what you want.

Clever, though it is best suited for icons. But it will for sure decrease the loading time of such pages. The first thing it came to my mind when seeing this is that the idea could be well appllied to the online editors (FCKEditor, my currently favorite).

Monday, April 23, 2007

tons of passwords to remember ? here is my password manager of choice ...

Folks, it's been some time since I've last posted to my blog. This was caused by my schedule, a one week vacation and some delivery date approaching.

We're all abused by many many usernames/passwords combinations used in our life: intranets, internet accounts, corporate accounts, applications X, Y, Z .... damn ! While SSO (Single Sign On) is something else to talk about, I found a FOSS application which recently I find it's of major usefullness for my memory: I only have to remember one password to be able to recover/remember my login details to whatever account I have.

The name is keepass and is good. In fact, for me, is "THE" Password Manager of choice these days. The beauty of it is that I carry all these passwords with me wherever I go. This is because it gets installed on my external 80GB removable. Available there are version(s) for Mac/Linux, though I did not play with these.
update: the portable version of keepass (which I currently use) can be found here: http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/keepass_portable


Talking about Password Managers, I accidentally run across https://www.passpack.com (I read about it somewhere, sorry for not remembering where). Worth mentioning it, an online Password Manager, if you prefer this alternative.