Category: development

Do you use a Mac and Mozilla? Are you slightly embarrassed to use the ugly old themes? You have been saved!! Check out the Pinstripe Theme for Mozilla, RIGHT NOW!! It’s gorgeous and will make Mozilla purdy again.

Gizmodo is my new crack. All the gadgets I’ll never own with pretty pictures and enticing descriptions. Excuse my while I go salivate.

I love gadgets. I just can’t afford all the ones I want. So many toys, so little cash. I need to work for a tech magazine or some place that gives them away. I’d write reviews, I promise. Really really I would.

There’s so much I could be doing right now that I’m not going to do. There are things I could do to get ahead for work this week. There are things I could do to improve myself, learn something or be “constructive”. Am I going to do any of them tonight? Nope. I’m going to sit here and watch TV, or maybe go play Civ 3 and forget that I have to work next week, and it’ll be crazy. Avoidance wins tonight. Avoidance wins almost every night. Work will be there tomorrow…

Action Tin Toy has the coolest freebies. The wallpaper and icons are retro-gorgeous. The icons alone are reason enough to switch to a Mac (ok, grasping at straws, but you really should think about it).

I’ve got some new things I want to try here. I want to write longer entries, but still keep the short “Ooh, go check this out” option open. There are lots of ways to do this, and a lot of people do it… It’s my turn. Look for some changes around here in the next few weeks (you know, as I get time).

In other good news, I got a new Powerbook! It’s the same model as I had before (TiBook 550), but it has more RAM! Things run so much better now that I’m not running out of RAM all the time. Good good stuff.

In related news, and another fine reason to use OS X, it is extremely easy to restore all your crap in OS X. First, just backup the Library directory from your home directory. Then, when you get your new Mac, install all your apps, create a user with the same name as the old one, and copy the contents of the old Library folder into the new Library folder. Voila, all your saved passwords in Mozilla, all your old mail, and bookmarks! How cool is that?

If you use one e-mail application to send both Work and Personal e-mail, make sure you choose your work address before sending a big long technical e-mail to the world… Today just gets better and better.

People at work give me a hard time about the number of computers I have under my desk. Honestly, I think they’re just jealous. Here’s the rundown:

• Dell Precision P3-733 running Windows XP – the former home of most of my work computing. No longer, since I switched to…

• Apple TiBook – G4-550 – it’s not as fast or as beefy as I’d like, but I do like taking my work home with me (Jen doesn’t).

• Apple Quicksilver – G4-867 – It’s fast, but I’ve got everything installed on the TiBook. I’m thinking of coming up with a neat-o rcp syncer so I can work on this beast and still take everything home… BUT, I have the TiBook hooked up to an external monitor and I’m really loving the wrap-around workspace.

• Dell Precision – Dual Xeon 1.7ghz running RedHat 8 (soon to be 9, hopefully) – This is the uberbox. I love it. It hosts my big intranetEmpire and runs some really funny daily reports. It has two giganimous hard drives and fuels my evil plans.

• Sun Ultra 10 – 400 – Bleagh. It’s not even turned on, but it’s still here under my desk. It used to be the bane of my existence until the day I was able to turn it off. Sweet monitor came with it though…

That’s not too many, really! I use all of them on a daily basis to get my work done (well, the Quicksilver may be overkill, but it has my 8.7 days worth of music on it – that I own… really, I do. I swear). The XP box may get demoted to 2000, because XP makes my buttcheeks clench. XP is evil.

I have no idea where this is going… only that I need more computers. I want a crash PC that I can reformat whenever I want and install goofy stuff on it. It has nothing to do with my job, so it’ll never happen – but it would be fun. When I was on the phones, I had what we called “The Crash Mac”. It was a beige G3 that I installed every flavor of Linux available for the Mac (all of two, LinuxPPC and YellowDog) on and learned all kinds of wicked things you can’t do to Macs on it. It was fun, and a great learning tool. I think everyone should have at least one crash machine. I may go out to Wal-Mart and buy a \$200 crap PC right now just so I have one. Yeah… just try and stop me.

So, I get Dawson to start a blog and now what’s happened? They’ve gone and started a blog commune. They’ve got nine little baby blogs on their site… I’m so proud.

Miss Mea-Mea won the best Amazon Wishlist category in this year’s Anti-Bloggies! Her prize (from yours truly) was something from her Amazon Wishlist less than \$25. Her choices (since I thought randomly choosing something was kinda mean) were Pulp’s This is Hardcore and Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic Ties The Knot. They’ve both been ordered and are now wending their way through the Amazon ordering system on their way to her door. Congratulations to her and tough luck to the losers with crappy wishlists.

I want to build another CMS. Why? I’ve built two already (for work, a loo-ooong time ago), and there are already so many good ones out there. For blogging alone, there are several that people should look into. I know you know what they are. But, I’ve got some ideas for one that could include not only a web interface, but I think provide some features not available in the other personal publishing tools.

I’m not sure when I’ll have time to start it, but thinking about it kept me up all night. I want to create something easier to use than the ones out there now, and more flexible. It’s a tall order, especially with Movable Type doing it so well already. As good as Movable Type is, it’s a little beyond the typical Blogger user. The features lacking from Blogger are legion, but it is the easiest to get started with (at least that I’ve seen – if someone has one that’s easier to get started with, please let me know). How do you combine Trackback, Comments, flexible templates including the ability to make “other” pages, more flexible archiving formats, a WYSIWYG editor, etc and make it easy? It’s a huge problem, and it’s keeping me up at night.

I’m not even sure why it’s keeping me up, but it is. Maybe I just need to start drinking. Or take TylenolPM. Yeah, that’s the ticket.