everyday

It may just be me, but it seems as though Linux has been in the news with increasing frequency. It seems like a giant snowball is beginning to form and may have the potential to be a serious game changer. With the upgrade to Vista looming in a dark corner for most organizations, it seems like once passed over alternatives are looking considerably more viable. As one who works in the IT industry, I am all for it! While I don’t dislike Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system, it is definitely lacking. The next version of Microsoft’s operating system, entitled Vista does offer some new features, but it is a fear of the unknown security flaws that makes me less than enthusiastic about it. Being a complete Linux noob, I have quite a few questions and concerns, most of them concerning integrating Linux into our existing server environment. I am sure that these questions all have answers, I just don’t know them yet!

Thanks to iTunes’ new “Cover Flow”, I think there may be a resurgance of beatiful and artistic album cover art. Kudos to Apple! The neat thing about this little addition to iTunes is that it wasn’t initially programmed by Apple, they purchased the code from a third party Apple developer, kudos again.

With the advent of tabbed browsing (thanks to Firefox!) I have learned that I really do not like new windows popping up, no matter what the reason. When I click on a link in Gmail, I do not want a whole new browser window opening, I just want the linked item to appear. I think it is a control issue, I do not want the person making the web page to decide for me how content will appear. That being said, here is a tip on how to get Firefox to behave like I want it to!

1. Open Firefox
2. Click on “Tools”
3. Click on “Options”

This will bring up the various options for Firefox. The main categories of options in Firefox are:

• General
• Privacy
• Content
• Tabs
• Downloads
• Advanced

As you can probably guess, we will be choosing “Tabs”. Once opened, the “Tabs” options can be seen. Find the checkbox that is labelled: “Force links that open new windows to open in:” and select the radio button that is labelled: “a new tab”. That’s it! Now whenever a webpage attempts to open a new browser window, it will be forced to open it as a new tab in the current window.

Another tip for eliminating annoying windows is to use Microsoft’s Tweak UI to disable any program from setting itself as the current focus of the desktop (warning: downloading Microsoft’s programs may require you to validate your current Windows installation). When set properly, the program trying to focus itself will simply flash it’s placeholder in the taskbar alerting you that it requires some attention. I for one find it extremely annoying to have a window pop up and grab the OS’es focus right when I am in middle of some task that I really do not want to be interrupted from. Tweak UI is part of Microsoft’s “Power Toys” for Windows XP. These are small collection of programs that make Windows a little more useful.

Someone, somewhere may need to install Apple’s Quicktime without installing iTunes. I personally don’t use iTunes at work, but I like to have Quicktime installed for viewing videos and whatnot on the web (especially screencasts of how to program in RubyOnRails!). So, without further adieu… here is a link to a standalone installation of Apple’s Quicktime.

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/standalone.html

via: Slashdot

Slashdot has an article about Google launching another web application, Google Spreadsheets. Many see this as an affront to Microsoft’s Office suite of applications, and I tend to agree. Google already has an online word processor, Writely; now all they need is an online database to make their collection of applications complete.

I showed up to work today, fired up my weblog in Internet Explorer (IE) and lo’ and behold it looks like 100% crap! Why can’t things just work right? Why can’t IE be standards compliant? Why? So now I have to figure out where those 5 pixels need to be removed from, what CSS hack I will have to apply, what re-structuting I will have to do. Good times!

On a completely related note… GET FIREFOX!!!!. I have blogged about this before, so everyone one of you should already have Firefox, because you always listen to me, right?

I was looking around MySpace (which in my opinion is still a waste) and one of my friends profiles had an embedded Flash music player from MySpace. As with most of MySpace’s user interface designs, this one sucks. The default for the music is to play. In this particular case, it was inordinately obnoxious because it was a death metal song. Normally I am browsing the internet with iTunes playing a random selection from my music library, so a loud death metal infusion is most certainly not welcome.As soon as this happened, I thought to myself “There must be way to mute anything coming from the Flash Player.” Enter the subject “FlashMute“. It installed in a few seconds and works flawlessly. I highly suggest this if you have ever found yourself wondering “where the hell is that damned music coming from?”

via:

• Mute the Darn Browser : Raymond Camden’s ColdFusion Blog
• Flashmute - Arve Bersvendsen

I am contemplating changing my development enviroment from Visual Studio.NET to Visual Web Developer 2005 (Express Edition). The reasons, well Visual Studio .NET only works with ASP.NET 1.0 and ASP.NET 1.0 is not capable of generating standards compliant web pages. Also, I think it is always good to keep up with the Jone’s when it comes to this sort of thing. Especially if anyone is looking to hire a web developer. Unfortunately, this will require me to learn a new programming language, Visual C# (pronounced “C Sharp”). Currently I do all of my programming with Visual Basic, which is quite a bit different from Visual C#. Now this isn’t all bad, most of the examples and tutorials available for ASP.NET are provided in Visual C#

Now I know you are all asking, “What the hell does this have to do with me?”. Hopefully nothing, if I migrate properly, you will notice nothing (except for changes I may make to this weblog). If I do it wrong, the weblog may not operate at all!

Via /.

Slashdot has an article about a Florida court hearing an argument that breathalyzer manufacturers should have to make public their source code so that a defendant may challenge the source code’s accuracy. If succesful the defense may lead to a large number of similar defenses including all sorts of computer based forensic machines and possibly any other computer driven machine that is used by the public at large (ATM’s, voting machines, credit card terminals, etc…)

I for one hope that the court decides that the breathylizer manufacturers must open their source code to scrutiny, and by extension every other tool in “The Man’s” belt. A free and open world is a better one!

I think the following quote from Julie Larson-Green, who is the group program manager for the Office User Experience at Microsoft, answers the title’s question rather nicely. The quote is from Q&A: Microsoft Showcases New User Interface for Office 12 Core Applications”:

Word 1.0 only had about 100 commands, and you could go through the menus and see everything you could do. But Word 2003 has over 1,500 commands, many of which are harder to find.

Clearly, 1500 commands is too many. How many people do you know (feel free to include yourself in this number) insert space between paragraphs in Microsoft Word by hitting the ‘Enter’ key a few times? I think Microsoft may have misjudged the problem by trying to make it easier to find the 1 command in 1,500 that you were looking for. The problem, as it seems to me, isn’t the fact that it is hard to find the 1 in 1,500 thcommand. Rather, the problem is simply the fact that there are 1,500 commands!

I may be biased coming from a web based world, but I would have done a better job at seperating the content of the document from it’s visual representation. I would have incorporated the web’s idea of XHTML and CSS to traditional paper document creation. And I would have spent considerable effort making the GUI more adaptive and selective by utilizing contextual menus and other visual clues. For instance, placing the mouse pointer between two paragraphs should pop-up a graphic in the ruler that allows you to change the distance between the paragraphs in increments of the specified font-size, with an option to alter all paragraphs to match.