Cloud Pictures

Gallery, Travel

When I was young I would go on trips to exotic locations and come home with nothing but pictures of the clouds in various cities, states, countries. Looking back I would say that clouds are certainly a unifying aspect of global scenery. 9-4-2002–Going back to my roots. You can never have too many cloud pictures :). Actually I really enjoyed the way the light and dark clouds contrasted in some of these pictures. Grab a full size if you feel like replacing that boring cloud backgroud that comes with Windows 95 and on. Tip: when viewing a photo you can click on it to see a really big (2048×1536) version, which usually varies from 300-600k in size.

Topstyle 3

Software

I’m still on my eternal search for the perfect editor I’ve come across Topstyle 3 again. Topstyle has always been my favorite CSS editor by far, but I’m not sure how it would work for other things. It is from the creator of Homesite, which has been my favorite editor thus far. What has really caught my eye is the 3.1 beta includes PHP syntax highlighting, which might be the killer feature for me. Like I’ve said before, I actually really like the PHP editing in Dreamweaver, but I hate the rest of the junk that comes with using that program. I might just end up using what I do on the server, GNU/Emacs in PHP mode. Or even better yet, Pico :). Does anyone have any favorite editors? I probably spend the most time with PHP code, but I like a robust HTML editor, and long walks on the beach. Will I ever be happy?

TopStyle 3 again

Tech

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 :).

Block Those Ads

Personal

I’ve seen some pretty good host files in the past, but this one looks like the most thorough. Not sure where the name comes from though. “. . . so quite simply this file tells your computer to try to access itself whenever a banner advert is requested from a server that is in its ‘black’ list, so instead of contacting the advert server your computer simply tries to request itself and as your machine doesn’t contain any adverts (if you are not running a web server on it) nothing will be shown.”

Periodic table usage

RSS

Brian Alvey on periodic table usage. His problems sound like nothing that couldn’t be fixed with a little overflow and some non-float layout tricks. The WIN sites really need a makeover, or a markover, because it looks like tag soup to me. “My readers are more important than the year I’ll spend in purgatory for using a single table in an otherwise modern layout.” Say three Our Zeldmans and you should be alright. (Another note: WIN sites don’t support pingback or trackback yet?)

TheOpenSource

It’s very cool to see Theo / t3.gg‘s open source arc.

Just in general, with people creating more software than ever, it’s so exciting to see an explosion of open source and a growing understanding of why working together on open source makes so much sense for the future we want to build.