Category: Ryan’s Internet Technology, and Web Design Blog

I am working on building some 508 Compliant/Accessible web sites and am testing out how well the navigation works using only the tab key.

Under Mac OS X with Firefox, Opera, and Safari, by default, the tab key does not cycle through all of the links on a web page.

Firefox:

• Go to: System Preferences/Keyboard/Keyboard Shortcuts
• Click on the ‘All controls’ radio button towards the bottom of the dialog under the text that says: ‘Full Keyboard Access: In windows and dialogs, press Tab to move keyboard focus between:’

Safari:

• Enabling the aforementioned setting does not do it for Safari
• Go to: Safari/Preferences/Advanced
• Under ‘Accessibility:’ click on the checkbox next to ‘Press Tab to highlight each item on a a wepage’

Opera:

• Go to: Opera/Preferences/Advanced
• Click on ‘Shortcuts’ in the left-hand nav of the dialog
• Select ‘Enable single-key shortcuts’
• Opera does not implement keyboard navigation the way most other browsers do.  To step through the links on a page, press the ‘Q’ key to go forward, and ‘A’ key to step backwards through the links on the page.  ‘W’ and ‘S’ keys you to navigate between headings <hn> tags.

Chrome:

• Go to: Chrome/Preferences
• Scroll all of the way down to the bottom of the settings page and click on ‘Show Advanced Settings’
• Scroll down to ‘Web Content’
• Check the box next to ‘Pressing Tab on a webpage highlights links, as well as form fields’

If you want to allow a popup from a file accessed via file:///home/rchapin/some_dir/somefile.html, open FireFox’s Preferences, click on the Content tab, and click on the ‘Exceptions’ button adjacent to the ‘Block pop-up windows’ check box.

Then enter ‘<file>’ in the ‘Address of website:’ field and click the ‘Allow’ button.

I am installing Eclipse on Mac OS X Mountain Lion.  Unpacking the
.tar.gz was no problem, however, when I went to run it for the first
time I got the following error message:

Your security preferences allow installation of only apps from the Mac App Store and identified developers

To add Eclipse to the list of ‘approved’ applications run the following command in a terminal:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /path/to/Eclipse.app

A few websites and articles by professional programmers about writing code and computer science:

• Technical papers, essays, reports, software, and other materials by Peter Norvig
• Steve Yegge’s internal Amazon blog, 2004-2005
• How to Design Programs, Second Edition
  

If you are running both VMWare (in my case VMWare Fusion 5) and a VPN that uses the 192.168.203.0 subnet you will may need to update the ip range that is used for the vmnet.

In my case, vmnet8 was configured to use 192.168.203.0 and so was a VPN connection that I was using.

As a result, if I fired up VMWare first and then attempt to make a connection to the VPN, I could not route to any of the 192.168.203.0 hosts.

Following is what you need to do on a Mac running OS X:

        . Shutdown VMWare Fusion (simply quit the program.  It must stop the vmware_* services)

        . edited: /Preferences/VMware Fusion/networking
                . Updated answer VNET_8_HOSTONLY_SUBNET 192.168.203.0 -> answer VNET_8_HOSTONLY_SUBNET 192.168.247.0
                . /Preferences/VMware Fusion/vmnet8/dhcpd.conf and /Preferences/VMware Fusion/vmnet8/nat.conf will be automatically updated by VMWare with the config change

        . Fire up VMWare Fusion:

# netstat -rn
Routing tables

Internet:
Destination        Gateway            Flags        Refs      Use   Netif Expire
default            10.1.10.1          UGSc           27        0     en0
…
172.16.19/24       link#8             UC              1        0  vmnet1
192.168.247        link#9             UC              1        0  vmnet8

        . Connect to VPN:

# netstat -rn
Routing tables

Internet:
Destination        Gateway            Flags        Refs      Use   Netif Expire
…
172.16.19/24       link#8             UC              1        0  vmnet1
192.168.12.156     192.168.12.156     UH              5        0   utun0
192.168.200.120/32 192.168.12.156     UGSc            1        0   utun0
192.168.201        192.168.12.156     UGSc            0       11   utun0
192.168.202        192.168.12.156     UGSc            0        0   utun0
192.168.203        192.168.12.156     UGSc            0        0   utun0
192.168.247        link#9             UC              1        0  vmnet8

Here is a very cool static analysis tool for Java code called FindBugs that comes from my alma mater.

A great article on feature detection in browsers with JavaScript.

Recently I have started working on some projects where the use of Maven has been mandated.  However, since these projects are in the early stages it has got me doing some searches for alternative Java build systems.

I found a interesting article on the topic written by Jess Johnson entitled ‘Java Build Systems: A Sad State of Affairs’.  From there I found some other links to Java build systems and some other articles written on the topic.

I’ll come back to this article and update it as I do some more research and try out some of the other projects listed below.

• Java and Makefiles
• Comparing ant and make as Java build tools
• ant – Why is no one using make for Java?
• Rake — Ruby Make
• Make in Java (jmk)
• APB

I am starting some new projects and am going to integrate a complete set of JUnit 4 tests from the get-go.

In the process of doing so, I found a resource that provides a great introduction to Junit 4.

If you want a quick way to lock your screen on your Mac do the following:

• Go to System Preferences/Security & Privacy
• Click on the checkbox next to “Require password … after sleep or screen save begins”
• Select “immediately” in the dropdown within the aforementioned selection.