Caption Contest October 26, 2006
Posted by Al Castle in : PRWeb, Squirrels, Insider , 3commentsTerry Kaye of Snewz, an outstanding PRWeb editor and interviewer for PRWebPodcast, is having a caption contest.
So far my competition consists of an unemployed Italian editor and a Virgo. I’m not worried, but would like to see a few more entries, to make my crushing victory all the more sweet.
Although, being one of the first entries I do fear I’ve given too much inspiration and direction to those who will compete.
IE7 Makes Me Swear October 26, 2006
Posted by Al Castle in : Puter Stuff, gnash-teeth, OSX, Web Design & Dev , 1 comment so farI’ve never been a fan of Internet Explorer and while MS bashing is always a fun pastime, the shape of the industry and the technology we enjoy today would not be the same without Microsofts creativity and influence. I can respect that, which what allows me to say IE7 is crap very annoying.
My most recent cause for rapid, boisterous, expletives was spawned as I realized IE6 did not recognize my valid, expensive, Verisign wildcart SSL certificate for my fourth level subdomain - URL like so: this.sub.domain.com
A third level subdomain was recognized, woohoo, but nothing deeper. Opera, Mozilla, and Firefox had no problem. Safari did complain, but since it’s market-share is much more limited and contains several other rendering and compatibility issues I don’t sweat it.
Thinking that MS has had plenty of time to copy all of the great features Opera, Galeon, and Firefox users have enjoyed for years, hopefully one of them would be to support a wildcard certificate for a fourth level domain. I decided to download the upgrade, which prompted for a few updates and the requisite rebooting.
What’s worse is the interception that IE7 takes. Making a point of stating that this site should in no uncertain words be trusted. I get agitated just thinking about it’s ugly little interface.
This graph seems to be appropriate.
Big Heads October 20, 2006
Posted by Al Castle in : Squirrels , 2commentsA friend of mine has an unusually shaped noggin, being supportive of this I started searching for more information on helping this person cope with their condition. Two search results seemed helpful, the first “How to Live with a Big Head” seems to have some good answers, “Headwear for the Cranially Endowed” also looked good.
Technically the noggin in question is oddly shaped, which gives the appearance of enormity. Without actual measurements it’s difficult to say if we’re in circus-freak classification or just oddity. However as a good friend I could careless and am merely thankful for the fine company.
OpenSouce for OSX October 16, 2006
Posted by Al Castle in : Puter Stuff, OSX , 2commentsOpenSouce Mac is site listing a few must have applications that are opensource and run on the Mac. On this list I’ve found a few applications worth mentioning.
Instant Messaging
First is an application called Adium which sounds similar to what I use on Linux and Windows for multi-protocol Instant Messaging, Gaim. Having just now installed this application, it appears to have quite a few options and settings. Off-hand I also notice it can handle the OSX Bonjour protocol.
Down on the second page they quietly list Fire. Oooo. I like this one a little better. Seems to have fewer options or perhaps they’re just laid out better (screenshots). I’m giving this one a try for awhile.
Image Manipulation
Another interesting application is called Seashore. Apparently it’s based on GIMP, which as everyone knows is an excellent opensource application for Windows and Linux which provides some of the features as Adobe Photoshop along with a few extras of it’s own. Unfortunately you can only get Gimp to run on OSX with X11 running. I was going to download Seashore, but after some searching it sounds like it’s a bit too green to be used yet. It also sounds like it’s a massive undertaking.
I really can’t believe there’s not a simple image editing utility that comes with OSX. Preview allows me to convert to JPEG at least, but converting to other formats, resizing and cropping aren’t as easy.
RSS
While I do have ThunderBird installed on all my machines and use it as my primary email client on my Linux and Windows workstations. I found that OSX Mail, despite all of it’s numerous failings and much fewer features is awesome for offline viewing and searching through my gigs of email via the integrated Spotlight. My RSS reader of choice is ThunderBird and I’m not going to fire it up on OSX just for it’s RSS capabilities, which has left me hanging, as everything else I’ve seen is a gross mockery of a decent reader. Listed on the site is Vienna, which after installing and using appears to be more of an extension of Safari than anything else. Blah.
As an alternative on the list I see a cross-platform application called RSSOwl. It’s Java based which I’m not crazy about, but this thing looks full featured. In it’s tools repository is a search utility which looks online and can discover feeds that match your criteria - sounds neat, but the results are unimpressive. The layout is very similar to Thunderbird, I think I’m going to give it a try for a few weeks and see if it grows on me.
If anyone has input on quality applications to try that aren’t commercial I’d be interested in hearing about them.
CrossOver Revisited - OSX October 15, 2006
Posted by Al Castle in : Puter Stuff, OSX , add a commentMy previous post inspired me to check-in on how the CrossOver team at Codeweavers is doing. I’d purchased a few licenses from them in the past and have a bit of experience in a corporate environment, with their strengths and numerous shortfalls for the monumental task they are attempting.
For those that aren’t aware, CrossOver is a commercial version of Wine, and does include numerous things that make your life easier. The big catch is to search the CrossOver compatibility database for what applications you want to run, and see if and how well they are supported.
For example MS Office 2000 is given a Gold star which means it runs as if it was on MS Windows. Two issues with that, one is I don’t think you can even buy MS Office 2000 anymore and the second being it does not run as well as on Windows. I had a rather large test bed environment and while the applications did technically run on Linux, MS Word and Excel did not run well for the power user.
Despite my own problems with it, I’m still interested in their work and was excited to see they have a new product offering - Crossover Mac. It’s currently beta and available for pre-order and trial 60 day download.
I decided to take a peak at the compatibility database and see if anything new was being supported. The two big applications for the small and home business have always been MS Office and QuickBooks. It looks like, those two are still problematic with outdated versions being supported for Office and QuickBooks having no Gold support. In the past I had to support numerous QuickBook users and versions including Intuits “Enterprise Edition”. QuickBooks is quirky enough running natively on MS Windows that supporting them via CrossOver has to be incredibly difficult.
My own problems with CrossOver which were MS Office specific aside, many people have been quite satisfied with the features and abilities CrossOver offers.
Running IE on Linux October 15, 2006
Posted by Al Castle in : Puter Stuff, gnash-teeth, OSX, Web Design & Dev , 1 comment so farOver at UnixTutorials there’s a post on howto run IE on Linux (via wine) using a no mess hassle free script called IEs4Linux. I haven’t tried this out yet, but it sounds pretty interesting, apparently allowing you to install and run three different versions of IE (5, 5.5 & 6). The only reason to run IE is of course to see how your website behaves in a prevalently non-standards compliant environment.
Back in my day I was a user of qemu and Crossover for my MS Window needs on a Linux workstation. I was primarily looking for a business solution to run the MS Office suite without the headache and hassle of managing Windows Workstations. We had mixed results and that’s probably a post for another time.
This howto sounds like a good solution to try if running IE is your only MS itch.
Renaissance October 5, 2006
Posted by Al Castle in : Squirrels , add a commentThis movie, Renaissance looks awesome. I somehow doubt I’ll be able to find it at my local cineplex. I don’t care for MySpace, but in this case I recommend you go and watch the short preview, very well done.
Did You Get The Memo? October 5, 2006
Posted by Al Castle in : Squirrels, Science , 2comments
Update: Several people have commented on this. Unfortunately I do not know who the original creator is. If anyone does know, I’ll put the proper attribution. As is, it’s still linked directly to it’s spot on ImageShack.
Wise Friends October 5, 2006
Posted by Al Castle in : Squirrels , add a commentA bright young lady, with evil tendencies that I know - who also happens to be a very poor judge of character had this great quote.
“I don’t give compliments to those who will use them for evil.”
I have no idea what she’s talking about, but it sounds like a good policy.
