Well I’ve gotten a copy of the 3.1 beta I mentioned in the previous post and I’m going to be doing a review of it for the Web Tech SIG sometime within the next couple of months. My initial impressions of the program are very good. The user interface is really well done. I’m going to start putting it through the heavy paces later tonight. My approach to reviewing this product is going to be to just throw my self into it, so I’m associating it with all the files it can possibly edit, I’ve edited the registry to make it the default source view for Internet Explorer, and I’m going to be using it for all the coding I’m going to be doing. I’ve found in the past that this is the best way to really get to know a product and its quirks. Wish me luck :).
Category Archives: Tech
ieSpell
ieSpell is a must have for people like me who are severely crippled by years of spell-check conditioning. I’m generally a pretty good speller, but there are some words I just alway mess up, and in formats such as this I usually don’t proofread anything too closely. ieSpell adds spell checking to all text boxes in Internet Explorer, so basically you have an web-application–independent way of checking your blog entries, forum posts, anything. Though some excellent web apps like b2/cafélog have spell checking built-in, I find this is much faster. Also I appreciate the ability to define my own custom dictionary for words that I use often and have it accessible across websites. Best of all, it’s only free dollars.
RoboForm
I like software that just works, is set up once (or not at all) and forever goes about its tasks, quiet and unassuming. Right up there with the Google Toolbar, some of my favorite browser software is RoboForm. What does it do? It makes the tedious process of filling out the hundreds of forms web users are presented every day a breeze. I’ve tried form fillers before, but I was always turned off by them not , being flexible enough, not recognizing a form element if it didn’t have the exact same name as one you’ve filled out before. The Internet Explorer Autocomplete feature is the same way. RoboForm fills out whatever personal details you want to put in the form, remembers your logins and passwords, generates good passwords, and best of all has no adware or spyware like some of the other products in this category. I’ve set up multiple profiles that I use depending on what information I want to give where ever I’m signing up, for instance I have a “Spam” profile that gives the form my throwaway email address and no personal information.
RoboForm is free for personal use, and the free version is more than good enough for pretty much everything you do. I plan to buy the full version soon not so much because I need the features it offers, but simply because I want to support the authors of this software. My main warning with this software is that it can have the same effect on your online buying habits as the Amazon one-click system can. In the past filling out those forms gave me a little time to consider my purchase, but now you can having something being Fedexed to you before you know what happened :). This is another one of those products that goes in my “Indispensable Web Software” category, so check it out.
Google Toolbar
The Google Toolbar is always one of the first things I install when I work on a new computer because it is simply one of those tools that is so elegant, well done, and useful that you can’t imagine how you functioned without it. Unfortunately it is only available from Google for Windows users running Internet Explorer version 5 or over. You can use it straight “out of the box” and be quite happy, but I tweak it a little to make it fit my experience best. If you click on the Google graphic it will bring up a menu where you can select “toolbar options.” This is where they hide the good stuff.
Once you’re in there it actually loads a page that lets you customize your toolbar experience. The first thing I do is change the search box size to wide, because I’m running at 1600×1200 and have plenty of screen real estate, I also uncheck the box that keeps a search history because I don’t like the dropdown box, and I also seldom search for the same thing twice. Next I kill the descriptive text for all the buttons; they’re pretty well designed and even if you haven’t used the toolbar before you can figure out what they mean in a few minutes. The text also takes up too much space. Then I add the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, because that’s just fun :). I add the voting buttons, which adds two buttons that let you vote up or down for whatever page you’re browsing. I don’t know if that actually makes any difference to anything, but I’m all about spreading Google karma to good pages so I use them anyway when I find something nice. Finally if you go into “experimental features” you’ll see an option to suppress the onUnload javascript event, which I think is annoying and also kills a few popup ads. Isn’t that cool?
One of the more useful features of the toolbar is that it lets you type things into the search box and then search for those terms within the current page, even if it hasn’t been indexed by Google. This can be a huge help on big pages that I know have the information I need, but it could be buried anywhere. I can just jump right to the spot on the page that has the information I need. It’s functionally identical to the “Find (on this page)” function under the Edit menu, but much easier to use. Optionally using the highly button you can also highlight your chosen terms on the page, which works just like if you look at something in Google’s cache and it highlights the terms you searched for. If you ever look for stuff on the web and you meet the system requirements, you should get this. It’s going to be an invaluable tool in helping me rebuild my computer.
Good News
The good news is that I got my laptop working again, and I found a Sony Support page that has all of the drivers I need. I’m going to give SP1 another try. (I want the Bluetooth stuff.)
The better news is I saw an amazing concert at the Wortham with Roy Haynes, Kenny Garrett, Nick Payton, David Kokoski, and a bass player. It was really, really good. More on that later, with pictures!
Best Blogging Software?
I used a neat tool to compare the features of b2/cafelog and Movable Type. As someone who currently uses b2, used to use Movable Type, and deals with MT on a daily basis, I don’t think I could say which was “better,” they’re just different. I think MT has a more robust archiving system with nicer URLs, but with b2 I can post to the blog with email, which has got to be one of the coolest features I’ve ever heard of. In terms of hackability, which I mean in the best way, I like how everything is updated live without having to rebuild anything, but of course that has a trade-off in speed. It really comes down to personal preference and experience. If Michel stopped developing b2 tomorrow, I would still use it because it just does everything I want it to do, plus I have a pretty good familiarity with the code, which helps a lot. Of course just knowing about something helps, for instance Kathy just switched to pMachine, which until she talked about it I hadn’t even heard of. I think what we need is a good google fight.
Since I wrote this I began developing my own software, WordPress, which runs this site and what I believe (having surveyed everything out there) to be the best blogging software available.
This Explains It
How and Why the Internet Broke—while it scares me that so much of the internet could be affected by one company, particularly one controlled by WorldCom, it’s good to know why I couldn’t get to my own site through SWBell the other day. While this is obviously a huge blunder on their part, overall I still like UUNet. Last summer I got a personal tour of their network operations center and I was very impressed with the people working there and the infrastructure they had. It was also humorous how obviously some parts of the NOC were for show, such as the windows that turned opaque with the flip of a switch and the extremely large big screen televisions overlooking the main room which “are more for you [visitor] then them [workers].” The one they did say they watched closely was the one on the Weather Channel, because apparently weather can have a large effect on their operations.
History of Tilde and Google Change
I’m a little behind, so I’d like to point out two very interesting articles over at Mark Pilgrim’s weblog. First he has a nice summary of the change to Google’s ranking algorithm. There are links to all the threads and articles I’ve seen around the web; it seems Mark has an uncanny ability to find relevant links quickly. I do not agree however that this is the “beginning of the end” for Google, it’s just an adjustment phase; they’re still committed to having the very best search results possible, and they’re merely responding to an obvious and well-known exploitation of their previous system. If relevancy is temporarily suffering, just them a little time.
Mark’s History of the Tilde also piqued my typographical interest. One of my Human Situation professors remarked the other day that the Greek alphabet wasn’t even finalized until several years into their war with the Spartans, meaning that at the beginning of what would be a thirty-year war, they still found time to debate and codify a standard of writing. He then asked what new characters were in the western alphabet lately. The first thought in my mind was the euro, but that was a little too obvious. A examination of my keyboard yielded three characters—~, @, and *—that I can’t really see a use for before the time of computers. I’m going to look into it.
Met4Filter
kuro5hin.org || technology and culture, from the trenches – True? If only.
Linus says goodbye
Linux-kernel mailing list archive 2002-13,: Linux needs new leadership. – Look at the time on this one 🙂
New springboard
visorcentral.com >> Preview: Springtooth – Not as good as their effort last year, but still alright.
Google’s new technology
Google Technology – Absolutely beautiful
Online Game from IRS!
From the mind-numbingly exciting category: Braintaxer – “the mentally taxing game show from the IRS”
I couldn’t make this stuff up 🙂
Ellen Rony on ICANN
Interesting observations:
This presents an interesting conundrum for the DOC-ICANN MoU, notwithstanding the pesky issue of who gets to determin what content is “kids-safe”–and how.
Consider:
* ICANN rejected four .KIDs applications in its new TLD process
* New Net launched a .KIDS in its first round of alternative TLDs
* A .KIDS TLD already exists in the parallel root server system http://root-dns.org/VueDig/VueDig_tld.php?record=NS&tld=kids&submit=SubmitAll hail “Internet stability”.
Searching for Religion
“Scientology” as a search phrase analyzed by the VisIT softare – interesting article, if just from a web design/search engine standpoint. Before you make any judgements about Scientology, however, please note that this guy is a very ardent critic of it.
Peekabooty aims to banish internet censorship
New Scientist has a very nice article about the latest from CoDC, the people who brought us the inimitable BackOrifice.
Photoshop 7
Photoshop 7 leaked information – the healing brush looks very interesting. I can’t wait to play around with this once it comes out. Thanks to Kel for the tip.
Many businesses respect me
“It’s a sign of respect that someone sends you an electric business card. It means he wants you as a customer,” – open relays are bad. The people running the ISPs in question do have some valid complaints though, such as the manuals not being written in their language. It should be interesting to see where this story goes and if politics end up playing a part in it.
Programming tip of the day
When evaluating logical operators, put the constant on the left so you have no chance of forgetting that extra =. For example:
if (5 == $id)
{
do stuff
}
Think about it; it’s very logical and if it even saves you a single bug in your code it’s worth it.
operating systems for dummies
Well at least you can’t say Microsoft isn’t helpful.