Archive for May, 2007

What Version of Ruby Am I Using?

May 30 2007 Published by Kevin Francis under Brilliance

You want to find out what version of Ruby you’re using? I’d like to present my rather simpler version:

seraph@aerie:~$ ruby -v ruby 1.8.5 (2006-08-25) [i486-linux]

Version, release date and platform all at once!

I’m just kidding, but I couldn’t resist poking at a Ruby fan :P

No responses yet

Towel Day

May 25 2007 Published by Kevin Francis under Asides, Brilliance

From Wikipedia:

Towel Day is celebrated every May 25 as a tribute by fans of the late author Douglas Adams. The commemoration was first held in 2001, two weeks after his death on May 11, and since then has been extended to an annual event. On this day, fans carry a towel with them throughout the day. The towel is a reference to Adams’s popular science fiction comedy series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. — Towel Day

I didn’t notice that it was Towel Day today, and yet, I’ve (coincidentally) been carrying a large towel around in my backpack all day long :) Unconsciously, I’ve fulfilled my duty to geekdom.

No responses yet

The Fully Functional Office 2007 Trial

May 18 2007 Published by Kevin Francis under Morons, Reviews, Software

Much like jhall’s problems with the office 2007 trial, I downloaded the Office Standard edition 2007 Trial. Now, on the website it has this to say:

Trial programs contain the same functionality that you get when you buy the perpetual versions — but only for a limited time.

Well, something is seriously wrong with their activation process because even after activation, and getting an expiry date (sometime in July), I couldn’t do anything but view files, email etc.

How can they get something like this wrong? This is a really bad experience for anyone evaluating Office 2007 for their company (like I am).

Update: Well, it works now. Uninstalling it and reinstalling fixes the problem. Same thing on another machine. This is most odd. I quite like it so far though…

No responses yet

No Squint

May 18 2007 Published by Kevin Francis under Brilliance, Design, Reviews, Software

If you use a high resolution display, like me you might find your eyes starting to water as you read all these trendwhore websites that use tiny tiny body fonts, like Verdana at 10 pixels. I’ve always solved this by Ctrl + Mousewheel up or down, but doing that for each and every site is a tad bit tedious.

Enter No Squint. I’ve fallen in love with it. No Squint allows you to select a default zoom level (I chose 110%, a slight bump up) and also remembers if you changed the zoom level while browsing a website. So now pages with ridiculously large fonts, or ridiculously small fonts are tolerable.

The best part? I’ve not noticed it at work except that my eyes are less tired now.

Thank you Jason Tackaberry. You did a good job on this one — so much so that I had to add a new category to this journal to post this in: Brilliance.

2 responses so far

Outlook IMAP Threading

May 17 2007 Published by Kevin Francis under Asides, Software

Anyone managed to get Outlook to do email threading (like we get in Thunderbird etc.) at all with IMAP?

Despite following several guides online, enabling threading on my IMAP server, reading the help etc. I cannot for the life of me figure out how it works. Sigh

No responses yet