Simple Software|Haider Sabri’s guide to painless coding.

Last week I walked into a huge tech company that had 30" Dell monitors on every developer’s desk. The obvious reaction was temptation on my part. Anyhow, I started to wonder whether my Mac Pro & Macbook Pro would suppor the high resolution it offers. Turns out the monitor needs a graphics card that supports dual-link DVI. Well, I found a really cool tool named MacTracker that helped me make sure that my older Mac Pro would support it. This will help if you just want to know more about how different versions of Macs work.  Check it out.

Powered by Qumana

I recently purchased an Amazon Kindle DX because I really like to read books, and I have a ton of eBooks, articles and larger websites I’d like to read through but don’t have the discipline to sit behind a screen to read. I also find it far less enjoyable to read a book (as opposed to short articles, news, blogs, etc.) on a computer screen and my work station. I really need to have a book wherever I go to finish it. So for some time i tried using my iPhone for portable reading, but the screen is just too small for reading a book.

I was really happy with the DX, but I found myself unable to read PDFs in Arabic. Every file I would put on my Kindle wouldn’t open, or it would render incorrectly. At first i assumed the DX didn’t support Right-To-Left texts like Arabic and Hebrew, but then i was wondering why. It made no sense to me, so I started messing around with the PDFs to see if I can fix them. I wasted time trying to export to a word document, RTF, anything really…my goal was to "re-pdf" the source so i can test what the problem was. Well, I was lucky to have tried something that worked out of the box! Using Acrobat Professional 8.0 (might work on previous versions. idk), just click Document->Reduce-File-Size. Make sure click the setting "Make Compatible with Acrobat 8.0 or greater". Save, and move to your DX and you should be able to read Arabic (and Hebrew) PDF files now.

I’m much more accustomed to doing development on a windows machine. On windows, there is an invaluable tool that all web developers use (or should be using) to help them understand what’s happening on the HTTP pipeline. That application is called Fiddler.

Since I started doing more development on my Mac, i have struggled to find a good, simple HTTP sniffer like Fiddler, till today. I’ve tried Charles, and I didn’t like it. I downloaded the trial to HttpScoop and so far its simple, easy to use, no need to set up proxies. I like it, and I think i will end up purchasing it.