I bought two refurbished (?) HP SFF computers from Amazon. They were older computers fitted with Win10 Pro. I have been pleased with my purchases.
I developed a problem with one of the computers that I could not correct. A system restore would have corrected the problem, but I could never get a successful system restore. I decided to reinstall Win10 but I did not have an installation disk.
I went to the MS site and downloaded an ISO image of Win10. Using Rufus set to MBR, I burned a bootable copy of Win10 to both a thumb drive and an SD card. They both work well as installation media.
I reinstalled Win10 using the SD card over a year ago, bypassing the request for a CD key. During that year, I have never been asked to produce a CD key. Now, when I boot the computer, I get this message:
The key that you are using is either not entitled for this PC or has been modified. Please recreate the key and use it for the designated PC. (By the way, this is a Dell message. Why would it appear on an HP PC?)
The only key I have is the one that came with the computer It is the one I paid for when buying the computer. Apparently, this key was satisfactory to MS for the 8 months I owned the computer before doing a reinstall and for a year after doing the reinstall.
I have no other key and have no idea how to comply with the request of MS. What should I do?
Whether you want to advertise a sale, your newest product or a specific landing page a notification bar is the way to go. This simple addition to your site commands attention and helps drive traffic to your money making pages. But even if your WordPress theme doesn’t include this feature, it’s easy to add a […]
DNS stands for domain name system which, you guessed it, is a system used for controlling your domains. DNS can be an intimidating topic if you are not a developer, I should know, years ago I used to dread having to make changes to DNS! There are lots of different records with numbers, names and […]
Two weeks ago, Justin Tadlock published a proposal on behalf of the Theme Review Team to create a set of standardized packages that theme authors can drop-into their themes. This week, the team has released two feature packages that illustrate what the project is trying to accomplish.
The first is an Autoloader that provides the means necessary for theme authors to autoload PHP classes. While Composer is recommended, the team has created a PSR-4 compliant autoloader as an alternative for those not ready for Composer.
“This is a foundational package that will allow you to use any other packages that we create,” Tadlock explained. “You could even use it for autoloading your own theme classes if you choose to do so (assuming they follow the PSR-4 autoloading standard for class and folder names).”
The second package provides a Customizer Section Button that enables theme authors to create a link or button that points to a URL. This feature was originally developed to allow developers a standard way to display a Pro/Upsell link within the customizer. However, the package is generic enough that developers can use it to link to any URL.
Tadlock also provided feedback on a number of ideas that were proposed. Packages up for consideration include, Breadcrumbs, Sliders and Sections, Mobile Navigation, Color Control with Transparency, Appearance > Theme Name Page, and Standard Template Hooks.
Running a developer survey like the State of CSS is a multi-stage process. First, you need to collect the data. Then, you process it into a usable shape. Finally, you come up with nifty ways to visualize it and release it to the world.
But then, once the dust settles and the traffic dies down comes my favorite part: actually thinking about the data. By taking a deeper look at our data, as well as observing how the community discussed our findings, three unexpected trends ended up coming into focus.
But first, some background for those not already familiar with the project.
I first started the State of JavaScript survey three years ago in 2016 as a way to answer my own uncertainties about the future of web development. At the time, JavaScript fatigue was running wild and I thought a comprehensive developer survey could prove itself the antidote.
The original State of JavaScript 2016 edition
Turns out I hit a nerve: that first survey turned out to be very popular, and our audience has grown each year since, along with the scope of the survey. (I was also joined by Raphael Benitte, creator of the Nivo.js dataviz library, to help me with data processing and visualization.) This year marks the first time we're pivoting out into a new dimension, namely the not-so-simple world of CSS.
Taking on CSS
Prediction 1: CSS still has a lot of unexplored territory
One of the things we wanted to quantify with the survey was how much of CSS was still left "unexplored." In other words, what CSS features are developers either unfamiliar with, or else hadn't yet used. For that reason we decided early-on to focus our Features section on new CSS properties, like shapes, masking, or scroll-snap rather than “boring” floats or tables.
The resulting data paints an interesting picture: it turns out that when you look at it this way, CSS morphs from a familiar landscape to a wild, unexplored jungle.
A look at comparing Flexbox vs. CSS Grid provides a good illustration of this trend. While nearly everybody who's heard of Flexbox has also used it, only 55% of developers who are aware of CSS Grid have actually tried it. That's a big gap, especially for a technology as important as CSS Grid!
Layout Features
Or take CSS Shapes: 68% of developers are aware of them, only 31% of that group has actually used the feature.
CSS Shapes
This all points at a big gap between what we collectively want to learn and what we actually know. It's that potential for growth that is exactly what makes CSS so exciting in 2019.
Prediction 2: Functional CSS will keep rising
If you're old enough to remember the CSS Zen Garden — or to have actually learned CSS through it (in which case I know how you feel, my back hurts when I get up in the morning as well) — then this next trend might seem weird, or even downright wrong.
CSS Zen Garden: one page, many themes.
Functional CSS rejects the platonic ideal of pure, untainted markup free from any styling concerns and embraces "functional" (aka "atomic" or "utility") classes. Think <div class="text-red text-medium border-1">...</div>.
Adopting this approach means you can't magically update your stylesheet and change your entire design without modifying a single line of markup. But be honest, how often does this happen anyway? Compared to the often theoretical elegance of the Zen Garden philosophy, libraries like Tailwind and Tachyons provide tangible, real-world benefits, which explains why they're so highly regarded. In fact, those take the #1 and #4 spots, respectively, in terms of satisfaction ratio in the CSS Framework category.
Awareness, interest, and satisfaction ratio rankings for CSS frameworks.
Tailwind especially seems to be picking up speed, at least judging by the Twitter engagement from its community in response to the survey results. Having just hit version 1.0, it's definitely a project to keep an eye on!
Prediction 3: The battle for CSS has just begun
Looking at our data, I can't help but wonder if "JavaScript fatigue" will soon be replaced by "CSS fatigue."
When evaluating technologies, it's important to look not just at raw usage numbers, but also at user satisfaction. After all, you don't want to jump on the latest bandwagon just to find out its current occupants can't wait to hop off it.
This scatterplot chart that's divided into quadrants is perfect for this. It plots usage against satisfaction, making it easy to isolate popular, high-satisfaction tools into their own quadrant.
Usage vs. Satisfaction
What's apparent in this chart is that the most densely populated area is the "Assess" quadrant. In other words, the low-usage, high-satisfaction technologies that are still battling it out for supremacy. This is exactly the state that the JavaScript ecosystem finds itself in as well. Many contenders, but few decisive winners as of today.
This is not necessarily a bad thing: yes, it does make the average developer's life harder when it comes to picking the right tool, but hey, this is why we do what we do! Additionally, competition can only be good for the ecosystem as a whole. Once the dust settles, we'll hopefully end up with the best possible options having survived!
CSS in 2019
Overall, the State of CSS survey shows that this is not your grandpa's CSS anymore. For years, we developers have loved to complain about the inadequacies of CSS and its lack of powerful features. But in 2019, CSS is challenging us to put our money where our mouthes are: here's all the features you've always wanted. Now what are you going to do about it?
I, for one, am very excited to dive even deeper into this new world of styling. And, of course, to tune back in 2020 to see what new trends we find then!
During his presentation at GraphQL Conference 2019 in Berlin Germany, Stan Chollet (Lead at Tartiflette.io) announced after two years of work that the company has released Tartiflette for Python 3.6+. Tartiflette is an implementation of the GraphQL specification.
The framework is targetted for use by Python developers who want to take an “SDL First” when creating a GraphQL API under Python.
Facebook software engineer, Kewei Qu, presented 5 GraphQL deployment principles that the company follows during her talk "How to Move a Mountain? GraphQL Migration Best Practices" delivered recently at the GraphQL Conference 2019 in Berlin Germany.
Gutenberg 6.0 was released today with a major update to the Columns block. Users can now select from a set of pre-defined layouts for their columns, with additional features that address many long-standing complaints regarding the block’s usability.
Although many plugins are already doing more advanced things with columns and grid layouts, WordPress core’s current implementation of the Columns block is so confusing that it is barely usable. It has a sliding control for selecting the number of columns but it is difficult to see the column boundaries.
Gutenberg 6.0 gives users the ability to select from multiple pre-defined column options, which include some commonly-requested layouts with variable widths. Users can also elect to skip the layouts and start from scratch. Below is a video demo Gutenberg phase 2 lead Riad Benguella shared in the release post:
The column settings also include a sliding percentage width control, so users can further customize it, whether starting from a template or from scratch.
In adding pre-defined layouts to columns, the Gutenberg team enhanced the InnerBlocks component, allowing developers to extend it to create their own sets of template options to appear upon inserting a block. The Columns block serves as an example implementation of this.
In an effort to meet the needs of businesses that are serving customers across multiple digital channels, Adobe announced the launch of a headless commerce capability for its Commerce Cloud platform.
You will be making a potentially expensive mistake if you think that hosting your website and optimizing it for search engines are two different things. To a large extent, your choice of web hosting will affect the success of your website’s SEO efforts. Most website owners, especially those with limited budgets and startups, are always [...]
Cyberattackers are targeting ConfigMgr more often and in more ways than ever. In this podcast, MVPs Tom Degreef and Kim Oppalfens share their tips, tricks, tools, and techniques for securing ConfigMgr itself.
In this post I want to share my observations during my implementation of an interactive YouTube Video selection in Vue. Maybe this can save you some time, if you plan to do the same.
Let’s start with my motivation. It came from the improvements of the #BlueCloudMirror game UI. We decided to provide the #BlueCloudMirror users a recorded YouTube LiveStream of us. This video provides an awesome overview of our major technologies.
Critical Uncertainties make planning for the future a little bit easier.
Liberating Structures are a collection of interaction patterns that allow you to unleash and involve everyone in a group - from extroverted to introverted and from leaders to followers. In this series of posts, we show how Liberating Structures can be used with Scrum.
Scrum is a framework that thrives on complexity. This could be complexity related to software development, product development, or something else in which there is more unknown than known. By working empirically, the unknown is discovered by building small increments in an iterative rhythm, continuously validating assumptions about what to build and how to build it.
This complexity should also be taken into account when defining the strategies -- the sequence of steps - - we follow to be successful. Although everyone agrees that it's difficult (impossible?) to predict the future, strategies are commonly defined in a way that ignores this reality.
The CSS Locator in Selenium is one of the most important aspects of writing a script. If you cannot locate an element by using any CSS locator in Selenium, then being proficient at Selenium automation will be a tough task. Selenium provides multiple ways of locating an element.
I have written a complete guide to help illustrate the practical demonstration of CSS locator in Selenium.
Microservices communicate significantly over the network. As the number of services grows in your architecture, the risks due to an unreliable network grows too. Handling the service to service communication within a microservices architecture is challenging. Hence the recommended solution has been to build services that have dumb pipes and smart endpoints.
There's no single PaaS for everyone. Even the definition of this cloud computing service model is quite vague today. Commonly, it is described as a cloud hosting platform with a set of deployment and scaling automation, application management, and DevOps tools that can be run on shared infrastructure or on-premise. Also, PaaS eliminates the complexity of building and maintaining the underlying infrastructure. Let's see how PaaSes differ through the prism of their use cases and supported technologies, and how to determine which one will meet specific needs.
Let's take a closer look and analyze Platform-as-a-Service solutions from several angles:
You're in the park going for a run, and your wearable device is tracking your performance, your heart rate, and various other aspects of your physical health. Pooling this data over a period of time gives you a strong idea about your physical fitness. Combine that data with your diet, your genetic data, and your electronic medical records, and you can paint a comprehensive picture of your physical health.
Making sense of this data, together with any symptoms you volunteer, is increasingly the preserve of autonomous technology that can absorb vast quantities of data at a time when doctors report inputting data into electronic medical records as a key source of stress. Would you trust the diagnoses of such autonomous systems or would you prefer to have a human doctor have the ultimate say in the recommendations you receive?
Do you think summer is reserved for flying to warm places and hanging out at the beach? Sure! But it’s also a great time to learn new skills that you haven’t had time for.
If you recently graduated from high school and want to get a head start on computer programming for college, learning SQL over the summer is a great opportunity. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain — SQL is easy to learn, especially with so much free time over the summer.
Whether you want to advertise a sale, your newest product or a specific landing page a notification bar is the way to go. This simple addition to your site commands attention and helps drive traffic to your money making pages. But even if your WordPress theme doesn’t include this feature, it’s easy to add a […]
DNS stands for domain name system which, you guessed it, is a system used for controlling your domains. DNS can be an intimidating topic if you are not a developer, I should know, years ago I used to dread having to make changes to DNS! There are lots of different records with numbers, names and […]
