I was going to write an eloquent entry about how my life has changed in the past year, but after considering the changes I’ve been through, I can’t find the words. One thing is for sure though — change has been good to me.
You want to find out what version of Ruby you’re using? I’d like to present my rather simpler version:
seraph@aerie:~$ ruby -vruby 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
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.
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…
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.
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
Definitely one of the most interesting acts of vandalism I’ve seen in a while…
I was looking at the Google Zeitgeist, and Malaysia produced some fairly standard searches, but one of the results stood out indeed. Here’s a screen capture for posterity:
I really had no reason to write about this, but I find it amusing that amidst all those legitimate, serious searches, we find Kirsten Dunst at position #8… Apparently more than a few people have a liking for her, though with Spiderman 3 on the horizon and building up a ton of buzz this isn’t unexpected.
As taken from the CodeIgniter website:
CodeIgniter is a powerful PHP framework with a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications. If you’re a developer who lives in the real world of shared hosting accounts and clients with deadlines, and if you’re tired of ponderously large and thoroughly undocumented frameworks
I must say that after looking through the documentation, watching the introductory screencasts and then experimenting with it myself, it really does live up to it’s claim of real-world thoughtfulness. CodeIgniter flexible and clear when it comes to the MVC pattern, and all through the tutorials I never once felt that I didn’t quite understand what was going on. Even reading the documentation, it’s all amazingly well explained.
I’ve so far not felt mystified by something in the framework, and haven’t yet had to ask any questions on the forums of IRC channels — something I’ve had to do numerous times with CakePHP, a similar open-source project. This of course isn’t to say that Cake is bad, but good documentation is king when it comes to programming.
Overall, the first impression you get when you run CodeIgniter is that of confidence. This is of course the benefit of having a commercial entity backing a project — little things like the documentation that typically don’t get done with a non-commercial project get taken care of.
Best of all? CodeIgniter comes with a license that qualifies as ‘Open Source’.
Lookout CakePHP, you may have the major portion of mindshare right now, but CodeIgniter is a serious contender.
You just have to appreciate the irony of this paragraph in the CakePHP manual:
Now, in order to help you understand this, let’s use a practical example. Imagine, for a moment, a computer system used by a group of adventurers. The leader of the group wants to forge ahead on their quest while maintaining a healthy amount of privacy and security for the other members of the party. The AROs involved are as following:
- Gandalf
- Aragorn
- Bilbo
- Frodo
- Gollum
- Legolas
- Gimli
- Pippin
- Merry
Indeed, a practical example :P
