While toying around with the flash maps from ammap.com I tried to create an interactive map that groups all countries by their respective timezones and automatically displays the current time each of them. I did not finalize all the little difficulties with it as I did not have a customer for it but I have to say that the flexibility that ammap provides is very impressive.

Your browser does not support iframes.

You can see the result in the iframe or check out the big version of The World’s Timezones. If somebody …

You should not do that .. but I did. But as I said, YOU should not, so read on.
I installed phpDocumentor on XAMPP 1.6.8 using PEAR. The PEAR phpDocumentor documentation for version 1.4.2 said: To be able to use the web interface, you must set PEAR’s data_dir to a subdirectory of document root. If browsing to http://localhost/index.php displays /path/to/htdocs/index.php, set data_dir to a subdirectory of /path/to/htdocs:

$ pear config-set data_dir /path/to/htdocs/pear

When in a Windows environment the path separators are backslashes so I entered:

$ pear config-set data_dir c:\xampp168\htdocs\pear\

The I installed PhpDocumentor:

$ pear …

They come under the name of Lightbox, Thickbox, Slidebox or Greybox.
And its true, they rock. But what is all the buzz about them?
Lets start with Thickbox 3 from the jQuery libary. This demo page is already quite impressive but don’t get distracted by the many fancy effects that developer Cody Lindley presents here, most of them have nothing to do with thickboxes.
I had the problem that jQuery thickboxes somehow won’t work in combination with the prototype library. Therefore I searched for solutions on this issue or alternatives. If you just …

It has always been the wish of every webmaster to get rid of those edgy design one can create with ordinary CSS declarations. So since the very beginning people have been trying to round the corners of boxes.
Rounded corners in the old days were most often created by using images that were placed at the correct position within
Tags. That was unpractical, especially when using many different coloured boxes and overlays. I found this funny site where you can generate HTML, CSS and corner images for the oldschool aproach.
Nowadays …

When upgrading to Xampplite 1.6.1 I had this MySQL error:
Unknown initial character set index ‘48′ received from server. Initial client character set can be forced via the ‘characterEncoding’ property.
More information on my MySQL settings:
MySQL charset is UTF-8 Unicode (utf8)
MySQL connection collation is set to latin1_general_ci
I solved this issue by commenting this in line the file my.conf (residing at xampplite/mysql/bin):
#collation-server = latin1_general_ci
More information on this issue can be found at:
http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=780244
I actually don’t know what the reason for this problem is, so if you know, just leave a comment.
Link Listhttp://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=780244

Playing around with prototype and scriptaculous I created a little GUI that will be the frontend for a TV guide search that is part of my diploma thesis. Here you can see what I came up with until now. The screenshot displays the functionality I build into the GUI quite good:

Drag and Drop (for genres)
Autocompletion (for actors, titles …)
Some button and overlay effects

Integrating scriptaculous was kind of easy but creating exactly the effects I wanted still needed some javascript knowledge. Still I am impressed what these two libraries can do …