Education & Skills Development

USEFUL RESOURCES:   Tools, Embedded, Mobile/Handheld, Flash Player, Web Dev, Training, Security

Useful Tool Resources:
C/C++/Others Language Resources:
 

Embedded Resources:
ARM Embedded Resources:

Texas Instruments Tiva LaunchPad Info:
Texas Instruments Tiva LaunchPad Boards: (price varies)


These 3 edX.org classes, UT 6.10x, UT 6.20x and UT 12.01x
(described here), require these TI boards (above) for their labs:
  • UT 6.10x  : TM4C123G LaunchPad
  • UT 6.20x  : TM4C123G LaunchPad, CC3100 (optional)
  • UT 12.01x: TM4C123G LaunchPad, BoosterPack MKII,
    CC2650 Bluetooth LE BoosterPack
 

Mobile/Handheld Resources:

Android Development


webOS / Palm OS Development


 

What Happened to the Adobe Mobile Flash Player and ... ?


What Steve Jobs, former CEO of Apple, said about the Adobe Flash Player


What is Pre-Multiplied Alpha in Adobe Flash Player?

  • Article: The Dirty Secrets of Pre-Multiplied Alpha, by Quasimondo (4/5/08)
    Flash Player uses pre-multiplied alpha to optimize for speed but at the cost of performing lossy image transformations affecting R,G,B channels as well when modifying the alpha channel (extremely lossy for small alpha values).

 

Web Development Resources:

CSS

 JavaScript / jQuery

ActionScript 3.0, MXML, Flex 4, Flex 4.5, and Adobe AIR


XAMPP / Xitami Web Servers


HTML and CSS Validation


PHP


MySQL


Java Development


Joomla! and WordPress


Down-Grading Software To A Previous Version


Browsers and Add-On Tools


Email Client: Thunderbird and Managing Email Folder Compaction

  • Thunderbird ( features ) ( older releases ) ( full list of downloads )
    ( How to go back to earlier release ) ( importing and exporting your email )
    Thunderbird (TB) email files will become HUGE over time (many gigabytes), even if you've been careful to delete all of your old emails regularly. This is because TB doesn't reclaim the space used by deleted emails by default. Reclaiming the space used by deleted emails is done by performing the "compact folders" TB command. You can fix this default TB configuration problem by either manually telling TB to reclaim the space every now and then, or you can configure TB to compact your email folders automatically based on a threshold value.

    When a user deletes an email, Thunderbird (TB) only marks the email for deletion. Physical deletion only happens when TB compacts the folders. This is because all the emails for a folder are stored in one file and each email is stored as a variable length record. Consequently, the way that TB recovers the space in the file used by deleted emails is to rebuild the entire file, leaving out the deleted emails during the rebuild operation, reindexing the file during the rebuild. Users can reclaim deleted space manually by telling TB to perform the following command: File--> Compact Folders, but especially if you've never done this command before, BACKUP your TB profile before you compact folders for the first time. Also, be sure to take TB off-line before doing the compact folders operation manually. The steps to manually compact folders are as follows:

    How to compact folders used by Thunderbird to save space
    1- Take Thunderbird (TB) offline: File--> Offline--> Work Offline
    2- Backup your Thunderbird profile in case you might be one of the rare few that ends up with corrupted files as a result of the compaction operation (read about complaints here, and the same author believes that even the most recent version of TB ver 16 may in rare cases be causing permanent data loss when compacting).
    3- Manual: File--> Compact Folders   The currently selected email address folder and sub-folders will be compacted, with progress shown in the status bar down below. This operation can take a while.
    4- Upon completion of compaction of the email address you've chosen to compact, browse to see that your emails still look good and that the total email count (shown at bottom of window) is unchanged for the email address. Then do the same for any other email addresses that you have.
    5- Put TB back online (opposite of step #1)
    6- Note that TB can be configured to do this periodically automatically based on a threshold value.

Installing Multiple Versions of Firefox on Windows (for testing, etc.)


Regular Expressions


 

Training: (online video and books)


 

Security:




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