As a webdesigner (and technologically savvy user of the Internet), there is no excuse for you not to be using Firefox as your primary web browser. If you aren’t using Firefox yet, you need to go and download it right now. Not only does Firefox provide a top of the line Internet browsing experience, but it also provides an endless amount of functionality that you simply won’t find in any other Internet browser.

Because third parties can develop add-ons for Firefox, by downloading the best add-ons that are available, you can transform Firefox into a tool that dramatically increases your productivity and saves you a countless amount of time.?? Since there are so many different add-ons available to download, it can be a little overwhelming to pick out which ones you should be using.

Therefore, I decided to do all of the legwork for you and compile a list of the six best Firefox add-ons for web designers.

1. Web Developer
2. Firebug
3. Colorzilla
4. Fireshot
5. CSS Validator/HTML Validator
6. Browser Window Resizer

In traditional JavaScript coding, if you want to get any information from a database or a file on the server, or send user information to a server, you will have to make an HTML form and GET or POST data to the server. The user will have to click the “Submit” button to send/get the information, wait for the server to respond, and then a new page will load with the results.

Because the server returns a new page each time the user submits input, traditional web applications can run slowly and tend to be less user-friendly. With AJAX, your JavaScript communicates directly with the server, through the JavaScript XMLHttpRequest object.

With an HTTP request, a web page can make a request to, and get a response from a web server, without reloading the page. The user will stay on the same page, and he or she will not notice that scripts request pages, or send data to a server in the background.

In the next steps we will see how to create an XMLHttpRequest and receive response from the server.

1. Create XMLhttpRequest

Different browsers use different methods to create the XMLHttpRequest object. Internet Explorer uses an ActiveXObject, while other browsers use the built-in JavaScript object called XMLHttpRequest.

To create this object, and deal with different browsers, we are going to use a “try and catch” statement.

function ajaxFunction()
{
var xmlHttp;
try
{
// Firefox, Opera 8.0+, Safari
xmlHttp=new XMLHttpRequest();
}
catch (e)
{
// Internet Explorer
try
{
xmlHttp=new ActiveXObject(”Msxml2.XMLHTTP”);
}
catch (e)
{
try
{
xmlHttp=new ActiveXObject(”Microsoft.XMLHTTP”);
}
catch (e)
{
alert(”Your browser does not support AJAX!”);
return false;
}
}
}

2. Sending request to the server

To send off a request to the server, we use the open() method and the send() method.

The open() method takes three arguments. The first argument defines which method to use when sending the request (GET or POST). The second argument specifies the URL of the server-side script. The third argument specifies that the request should be handled asynchronously. The send() method sends the request off to the server.

xmlHttp.open(”GET”,”time.asp”,true);
xmlHttp.send(null);

3. Writing server side script

The responseText will store the data returned from the server. Here we want to send back the current time. The code in “time.asp” looks like this:

<%
response.expires=-1
response.write(time)
%>

4. Consuming the response

Now we need to consume the response received and display it to the user.

xmlHttp.onreadystatechange=function()
{
if(xmlHttp.readyState==4)
{
document.myForm.time.value=xmlHttp.responseText;
}
}
xmlHttp.open(”GET”,”time.asp”,true);
xmlHttp.send(null);
}

5. Complete the code

Now we must decide when the AJAX function should be executed. We will let the function run “behind the scenes” when the user types something in the username text field. The complete code looks like this.

One thing I really love with the Python programming language is its incredible extensibility. Here’s a list of 50 awesome modules for Python, covering almost all needs: Databases, GUIs, Images, Sound, OS interaction, Web, and more.

Graphical interface wxPython http://wxpython.org
Graphical interface pyGtk http://www.pygtk.org
Graphical interface pyQT http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/pyqt/
Graphical interface Pmw http://pmw.sourceforge.net/
Graphical interface Tkinter 3000 http://effbot.org/zone/wck.htm
Graphical interface Tix http://tix.sourceforge.net/

Database MySQLdb http://sourceforge.net/projects/mysql-python
Database PyGreSQL http://www.pygresql.org/
Database Gadfly http://gadfly.sourceforge.net/
Database SQLAlchemy http://www.sqlalchemy.org/
Database psycopg http://www.initd.org/pub/software/psycopg/
Database kinterbasdb http://kinterbasdb.sourceforge.net/
Database cx_Oracle http://www.cxtools.net/default.aspx?nav=downloads
Database pySQLite http://initd.org/tracker/pysqlite

MSN Messenger msnlib http://auriga.wearlab.de/~alb/msnlib/
MSN Messenger pymsn http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/Pymsn
MSN Messenger msnp http://msnp.sourceforge.net/
Network Twisted http://twistedmatrix.com/
Images PIL http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/
Images gdmodule http://newcenturycomputers.net/projects/gdmodule.html
Images VideoCapture http://videocapture.sourceforge.net/

Sciences and Maths scipy http://www.scipy.org/
Sciences and Maths NumPy http://numpy.scipy.org//
Sciences and Maths numarray http://www.stsci.edu/resources/software_hardware/numarray
Sciences and Maths matplotlib http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/

Games Pygame http://www.pygame.org/news.html
Games Pyglet http://www.pyglet.org/
Games PySoy http://www.pysoy.org/
Games pyOpenGL http://pyopengl.sourceforge.net/

Jabber jabberpy http://jabberpy.sourceforge.net/

Web scrape http://zesty.ca/python/scrape.html
Web Beautiful Soup http://crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup
Web pythonweb http://www.pythonweb.org/
Web mechanize http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/mechanize/

Localisation geoname.py http://www.zindep.com/blog-zindep/Geoname-python/

Serial port pySerial http://pyserial.sourceforge.net/
Serial port USPP http://ibarona.googlepages.com/uspp

Parallel Port pyParallel http://pyserial.sourceforge.net/pyparallel.html

USB Port pyUSB http://bleyer.org/pyusb/

Windows ctypes http://starship.python.net/crew/theller/ctypes/
Windows pywin32 http://sourceforge.net/projects/pywin32/
Windows pywinauto http://www.openqa.org/pywinauto/
Windows pyrtf http://pyrtf.sourceforge.net/
Windows wmi http://timgolden.me.uk/python/wmi.html

PDA/GSM/Mobiles pymo http://www.awaretek.com/pymo.html
PDA/GSM/Mobiles pyS60 http://sourceforge.net/projects/pys60

Sound pySoundic http://pysonic.sourceforge.net/
Sound pyMedia http://pymedia.org/
Sound FMOD http://www.fmod.org/
Sound pyMIDI http://www.cs.unc.edu/Research/assist/developer.shtml

GMail libgmail http://libgmail.sourceforge.net/

Google pyGoogle http://pygoogle.sourceforge.net/
Expect pyExpect http://pexpect.sourceforge.net/
WordNet pyWordNet http://osteele.com/projects/pywordnet/
Command line cmd http://blog.doughellmann.com/2008/05/pymotw-cmd.html
Compiler backend llvm-py http://mdevan.nfshost.com/llvm-py/
3D VPython http://vpython.org

Setting up mysql password is one of the essential tasks. root user is MySQL admin account. Please note that Linux / UNIX login root account for your operating system and MySQL root are different. They are separate and nothing to do with each other (indeed some admin removes root account and setup admin as mysql super user).
mysqladmin command to change root password

If you have never set a root password for MySQL, the server does not require a password at all for connecting as root. To setup root password for first time, use mysqladmin command at shell prompt as follows:

$ mysqladmin -u root password NEWPASSWORD

However, if you want to change (or update) a root password, then you need to use following command

$ mysqladmin -u root -p oldpassword newpass

Change MySQL password for other user

To change a normal user password you need to type (let us assume you would like to change password for adam):

$ mysqladmin -u adam -p oldpassword newpass

Changing MySQL root user password using mysql sql command

This is another method. MySQL stores username and passwords in user table inside MySQL database. You can directly update password using the following method to update or change password for user viral:

1) Login to mysql server, type following command at shell prompt:

$ mysql -u root -p

2) Use mysql database (type command at mysql> prompt):

mysql> use mysql;

3) Change password for user adam:

mysql> update user set password=PASSWORD("NEWPASSWORD") where User='adam';

4) Reload privileges:

mysql> flush privileges;
mysql> quit

Android Developers Blog annouced today the availability of Android 1.5 SDK. Although this version seems to be complete and finish, Google warns it might change few APIs.

The Android 1.5 platform will include many improvements and new features for users and developers. Additionally, the SDK itself introduces several new capabilities that enable you to develop applications more efficiently for multiple platform versions and locales. Following are list of features Google has added to new Android 1.5.

* – On-screen keyboard support, with support for auto-correct, text prediction, user dictionaries, and third-party keyboard layouts
* – Live folders (Auto-updating folder shortcuts for things such as YouTube favorites, Starred Contacts, and, with the API now available, whatever else developers conjure up)
* – Video Recording
* – MPEG4 and 3GP Video Playback
* – Stereo Bluetooth
* – Browser enhancements: New ultrafast “Squirrelfish” javascript engine, search within a page, copy and paste, UI changes
* – New Linux Kernel
* – Google Application enhancements: View Google Talk friend statuses in contacts, SMS, MMS, Gmail, and Email
* – New frameworks for developers to build upon: Widget creation, Live Folder creation, Raw audio recording/playback, Video recording, Speech recognition
* – Faster GPS, Faster camera startup, faster Gmail scrolling, and smoother browser scrolling

For full feature list, check Android’s Developers page .