Lately I have been rewriting the dashboard that I use to monitor the health of my business to a GWT application running on the Google App Engine.

ipsCA, a Spanish certification authority, ended 2009 with a bang. Their root certificate expired on December 30th and they had to scramble to send all customers new SSL certificates.

One of the scripts in my bag of tools to check whether a site is still up and running is content-check.pl. This little script compares the hash of a web page against a previously created reference hash. If the content of the web page has modified, this script will detect it and send an email.

You have to be very careful which page you check because even the slightest difference in the HTML source will be detected.

Earlier today I had to rotate an animated GIF. I thought I was in for a tough ride but it turns out to be pretty easy to do.

All you need to do is to open the animated GIF in GIMP. Each frame of the animation is shown as a separate layer). Next you can rotate the image using "Image > Transform > Rotate" and save it. During the save GIMP asks whether you want to flatten the image or save it as an animation.

Straightforward.

Internet Explorer 8 is available. Even though it includes a number of important enhancements (like the default use of a standards compliant rendering mode) this new release of IE is not going to end the suffering of web developers around the world.

As long as IE 6 remains supported by Microsoft, web developers will continue to spend a considerable amount of time to work around the numerous bugs in its faulty implementation of web standards.