Of you will find that all you need to do is add a line similar to the following to your .htaccess file:

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/css text/xml application/x-javascript text/javascript application/javascript
Source: StackOverflow

However, if you’re on a GoDaddy shared hosting account you may have realised that this doesn’t work. GoDaddy’s help page recommends that you paste this code in all your PHP pages:

<?php if (substr_count($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING'], 'gzip')) ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); else ob_start(); ?>

That’s fine, but from my understanding this will not cache your CSS or JavaScript. However, I found a solution here, which involves some .htaccess trickery to compress all your CSS and JavaScript files automatically. Enjoy!

The Problem

You’re using LaTeX, and have a small image which you want to display inline with the text (i.e. not a float). So, you use something like the following:

...indicate whether the phrase you've constructed is valid (\includegraphics{tick.png}) or not (\includegraphics{cross.png}}). To make things...

This works, but often the vertical alignment is not quite right, as shown in the images below:

Inline images, non-aligned

Zoomed (x600)

The Solution

After some searching and experimenting, I found the best solution to be using the \raisebox command with a negative value, like so:

...indicate whether the phrase you've constructed is valid (\raisebox{-1mm}{\includegraphics{tick.png}}) or not (\raisebox{-1mm}{\includegraphics{cross.png}}). To make things...

The additional code is minimal and it works perfectly (as far as I can tell). Results as below:

Inline images, properly aligned

Zoomed (x600)

CSAI Final Year Projects Guidelines (B.Sc.IT)

I’ve been asked many times how to enter Maltese characters on a computer – i.e. ċĊ, ġĠ, ħĦ and żŻ.
It turns out there’s a lot of misconceptions out there, and many people think that typing Maltese and other non-Latin characters requires a special keyboard and/or specially installed fonts. This is completely not true, and all users with a moderately modern computer are able to enter such characters by simply adding a selecting a different keyboard layout from their OS.

Below is a short explanation of the misconceptions, if you just want to see the steps for selecting a different keyboard layout, click here.

“Maltese Fonts” and why they’re such a bad idea

A few years ago, everyone thought these so-called “Maltese Fonts” were the solution to entering Maltese characters into your computer. These fonts are just copies of the usual fonts we all know (Arial, Times etc) but with certain characters redrawn, such that when you type a [ it is displayed as a ġ, } becomes Ħ and so on. Now if all you're doing is typing into a word processor and printing directly from the same computer, the solution seems to work.

But what happens if you want to send a Maltese document to someone who doesn't have these fonts installed? Well, they will still be able to open the document, but in place of the proper Maltese characters they would see different punctuation symbols. So the phrase Għażiż Ċali would become something like:

G]a\i\ `ali

People just accepted this, and would say to each other “you need to install the Maltese fonts in order to read the document”. But, it gets worse. What if you’re entering text somewhere which doesn’t allow you to change fonts? I you were filling in a form on  a web page or even writing an email, you would just forget the use of Maltese characters altogether.

To summarise, “Maltese Fonts” are a very short-sighted and inelegant solution. Thankfully, due to a little something called Unicode, all modern computers today will allow you to enter (and read) Maltese and other non-Latin characters, simply by changing your keyboard layout settings (see below).

“Maltese Keyboards” and why you don’t need one (but might still want one)

Another misconception I’ve heard is that in order to enter Maltese characters, you require special hardware — i.e. a “Maltese Keyboard”. This is not true, because all a Maltese keyboard really is is a standard US/UK keyboard with different symbols printed on the keys. Circuitry-wise, everything else is identical. In fact any keyboard can be used to enter any type of character, simply by changing your computer settings.

However, that being said, users may find that having a Maltese keyboard is helpful since they don’t need to remember that they need to press the [ button to produce a ġ and so on.

How to select the Maltese keyboard layout on your computer

The screenshots below are taken in Windows 7. Steps for Windows Vista and Windows XP are very similar, almost identical. Steps vary for Linux because of all the different distributions, for Mac OSX refer to the linked article above.

1. Start → Control Panel
2. "Change keyboards or other input methods"
3. Click "Change Keyboards..."
   
4. This shows all your installed keyboard layouts. Click Add.
   
5. Choose one of the Maltese keyboard layouts:
   
   • If on your keyboard, the @ symbol is above the number 2, choose Maltese 47-key
   • Otherwise, if the " symbol is above the 2 key, choose Maltese 48-key
6. You can also preview the keyboard layout:
   
7. After clicking OK to everything, you should now notice a new icon in your taskbar next to the time, called the Language bar with this icon:
   
   Click on it to change the desired input language. After changing it to Maltese, try pressing these keys on your keyboard:

[ { ] } `¬ \ | # ~

You should now see our lovely Maltese characters on your screen (The last 4 will vary depending on whether you chose the 47 or 48-key layout).

Note that this setting is per-application. So, if you’re in Microsoft word and change it to Maltese, then switch to your email client, you will need to set the language again for that application. If you always want the Maltese keyboard layout to be the default active layout for all your applications, you can set it from the screen in point 4 above (under default input language).

This is very annoying and there’s no direct setting to turn it off. However this guy has come up with a great solution, by basically creating a Gmail filter for emails containing the words in:buzz

Specifically, I am talking about converting something like ' to ‘ or & to & directly in Javscript.
This function does exactly that! Note how it adds a function to the prototype for String, so is called in the following way:

"Hello José".unescapeHtml()

Find the code here: paul schreiber » Blog Archive » JavaScript: how to unescape HTML entities.

The full error message is:

You don’t have permission to modify files in this network location.
Contact the administrator per permission to make these changes.

(I thought the “per permission” looked a bit funny…)

Anyway, after looking at this thread, it seems it this issue is NOD32-related. The solution I tried was disabling the “Scan on File Creation” option within NOD32, found under Setup → Antivirus and antispyware → Real-time system protection.

You could argue it’s less secure, but it seems to have worked and it’s a price I’m willing to pay.

Hope this helps anyone having a similar problem.

So I switched to another external disk and tried the whole thing all over again.. and it worked! Well, almost. For some reason it still kept complaining about a non-existant directory, C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\Web Development

Anyway this site gave me an obvious but useful solution: just create the empty folder it’s looking for! So I did and now it works properly without complaining. It’s still not my only backup, but it’s good to know I at least have it in case I need it.

Like lots of people who use Thunderbird, I was getting irritated when receiving emails from Outlook users with the smiley’s replaced by J’s.

Unsuprisingly, it’s Microsoft’s fault because they just simply don’t care about other clients and standards. Anyway, here’s how to fix it:

j’s in Thunderbird emails Outlook smiley faces | The Swan Song.