Monthly Archives: May 2007

Ultimate Race Day

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Today is the All-American race day, the annual 1100 miles of racing during Memorial Day weekend.

Both the Indy 500 (the Indy Racing League Series) and the Coca-Cola 600 (the Nascar Nextel Cup Series) are today – making today one of my favorite days of the year.

I’m cooking today – beer brats, corn on the cob, potatoes on the grill, salad, homemade fried apple pies, and homemade ice cream.

PS- I’m pulling for Danica Patrick in the Indy race, and I’m pulling for my driver, Jimmie Johnson, in the Nascar race. The Coke 600 is at the Lowe’s Motor Speedway, also known as Jimmie Johnson’s house, mainly because he has won 5 of the last 7 races at Lowe’s (and his sponsor is Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouse).

And one of my favorite quotes has to do with Lowe’s Motor Speedway (it is from Nascar.com):

Jimmie Johnson, driver of the Lowe’s Chevy has made the Lowe’s Motor Speedway his own personal improvement warehouse.

Time to Upgrade

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If you haven’t already (and you blog), you need to upgrade to WordPress 2.2.

It’s not an option, but a mandatory security fix.

I just upgraded myself, so if you notice any strangeness on the site, hit me up in the comments or here.

The new version is alright, but I don’t like that they moved the post preview window off of the write a post page. I used that preview window everytime I wrote, so this new upgrade will take a little getting used to.

Thanks, and don’t forget to upgrade!

Pidgin IM Client Updated

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My new favorite IM client Pidgin has been updated (to version 2.0.1). You can go here to download the new packages.

Pidgin avatar

Now, I don’t know what is contained in the new version (and there are no release notes on Sourceforge) or what has been updated or fixed. The developers of Pidgin (formerly GAIM) have long had issues with communicating to their user base. I’ve been trying to keep up with Pidgin’s development on their mailing lists, but even that is hard to keep track of.

ThinkFree Office Portable

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A while back I submitted my name to recieve a USB drive from ThinkFree and IT|Redux as a promotion to get bloggers to review ThinkFree Office. I recently received the U3 drive loaded with ThinkFree Portable. Overall I liked that ThinkFree looks and acts just like Micro$oft Office, but it lacks one major feature that is a deal-breaker for me: ability to open and save to the OpenDocument formats.

ThinkFree Office looks and acts just like Micro$oft Office, except it looks like it is being run on Windows 95 (see the screenshots at the bottom). I think this is done for a reason (because it runs on Java), but the look does detract from application.

Using ThinkFree I was able to open and edit Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations without any problem.

Something ThinkFree needs is support for the OpenDocument formats (.odt, .ods, and .odp). Many companies and individuals are trying to get away from vendor lock-in, so they will always have the ability to open their documents, no matter if Micro$oft still supports its old formats.

Myself, I have been using OpenOffice.org this entire school year and I’ve been saving all of my papers in the .odt format. ThinkFree cannot open these files, which has been a major pain for me testing this out. Google Docs and Spreadsheets supports the OpenDocument formats (see here), which makes Google Docs a ThinkFree killer.

Also, ThinkFree Online does not support the OpenDocument formats.

Overall, I really liked ThinkFree Office. I especially like the ease-of-use, since all of the menus and dialog windows were just like the ones in Micro$oft Office. But ThinkFree Office (both the Portable and Online versions) does not support open formats, and that is a deal breaker for me, as I would always like to have the ability to open my documents, no matter how old the documents’ format.

Here’s some shots of the ThinkFree Office 3 Portable (click to expand the thumbnails):

ThinkFree Write
ThinkFree Write

ThinkFree Calc
ThinkFree Calc

ThinkFree Show
ThinkFree Show

ThinkFree’s Options Dialog
ThinkFree’s Options Dialog

Disclaimer: ThinkFree and IT|Redux sent me a U3 USB drive with ThinkFree Portable and a license to write this review.

*Update – 9pm, May 21* A member of the ThinkFree team has sent me this statement regarding ODF support: “As for ODF support – ThinkFree Online will support ODF within the next few months or so. This will make its way into the rest of the product lines in the second half of the year.”

Summer Internship

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Gwinnett BOC Logo

I haven’t told that many people, but this summer I am interning with Gwinnett County Government. In fact, I started this morning with orientation.

I am working in the Department of Planning and Development, with a cool group of planners on rezoning applications and long-term planning.

I think I am going to enjoy working at Gwinnett County this summer, and hopefully I can learn a few things to get me into a good MPA program (like UGA’s).

PS- These opinions are my own and not necessarily those of Gwinnett County.

Brand New IM Client: Pidgin

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Well, not completely brand new, but rebranded.

Pidgin logo

You see, there was an open source instant messaging client called Gaim. Gaim had been around for a long time, and then AOL sued them. Gaim (the word) includes the letters ‘aim’, which AOL trademarked (you know, AOL Instant Messenger), but only after the Gaim team named their software.

Just last week the Gaim team changed the name of the project to Pidgin, a pretty cool name that hints on the interoperability of the Pidgin client, which connects to almost every im network. According to Wikipedia, a “pidgin is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups who do not share a common language.”

Pidgin supports most instant message networks, including AIM, Gadu-Gadu, Novell Groupwise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, QQ, SILC, SIMPLE, SameTime, XMPP (known as Jabber, and includes the ability to connect to Google Talk), and Yahoo! Messenger. This means you can connect to any network you want to talk to your friends and business colleagues, whatever network they use.

Pidgin is really cool software, and here are some screenshots of the new look:

Pidgin main dialog

Pidgin chat dialog

The new release is called Pidgin 2.0, because the Gaim project was working on their 2.0 release. The project website is here, and you can download Pidgin 2.0 here.

PS- To run Pidgin on Windows you have to install it with the GTK+ toolkit (which is included with Pidgin). For Mac OSX, use Adium, which is a native Mac client based on Pidgin’s underlying toolkit (libpurple).

For kicks, here’s a review of Pidgin 2.0 on Ars Technica (it’s a pretty in-depth review) and here’s another.

This is Feed Reading

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Here.

The guys over at Common Craft have created an incredible resource for those that don’t really understand feedreading.

Feeds are an amazing. Seriously. Instead of having to go around to every web page I want to check everyday (trust me, there are a bunch), I simply go to my feed reader and see all the updates in one spot. I use the Newsgator online feed reader, but other popular ones include Bloglines and Google Reader.

Continue reading →

Now Displaying Redoable 1.2

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Frequent readers probably noticed that I recently switched themes. I was using Hemingway Ex, a theme I still love.

But Hemingway-based themes are best when you don’t post all that often. This is because they typically just show 2 posts on the front page (better if you post less frequently), but if you post more often, you have relevant posts that readers can’t see very easily. And, it being finals time and everything, I have been posting more frequently (a trend I hope to keep up!).

The current theme is the newest version of a theme I have used before, Redoable. Now, I am using Redoable 1.2, which is indeed an incredible theme, created by deanjrobinson.

Redoable is an adaptation of the venerable K2 theme, which means it has many of the same flaws. The major issue with K2 (and, thus, Redoable) is something with the Sidebar options panel. In some cases, and of course mine, the K2 sidebar options panel doesn’t display.

My solution: install the sidebar modules plugin (which k2 bases their sidebar off of), and voila, a sidebar modules options panel should be available. You’ll probably want to copy over any modules from the /themes/redoable/modules/ folder you want to use, and put them in /plugins/sbm/modules/ folder.

I only have one other major issue, and that is the Firefox banner located at the top of the page, which is only visible if you are using Internet Explorer. Now, I hate IE (really badly; ask any of my friends, I want to convert them all to Firefox), but I don’t want to tick off possible readers who like IE by having the big banner at the top.

Supposedly you’re able to turn off the Firefox banner in the Redoable options panel, but I have the banner off right now, and it is still visible in IE (which bugs me). I really would like to find a solution to this problem, and the sooner the better.

*Update – May 3, 2007* I was able to fix the issue with the Firefox banner still displaying after turning it off in the Redoable options panel. I had to rig it, but it works, and hopefully didn’t tick off too many IE users. If you want to fix the same issue, remove (or comment out) lines 106 through 113 from header.php. I wanted to post the code here, but it wanted to display the html, not the code. Oh well. I guess one fix a night is good enough.