Nonsequittal Rumblings

Jeff just called me into his office, and asked me if I’ve heard or read about the story on…
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/asiapcf/06/21/japan.blood.reut/

What a sick story. And to see that it happened in Japan…

Don’t think that this kind of punishment is acceptable in Japan. It’s just that teachers like to escalate the disciplinary action, and often too much that it becomes abuse.

Of course, the other thing we can see in this story is how the victim did not ask for any more disciplanary action taken to the teacher either. And the school is willing to put this teacher back to work in a few days. I really don’t see exactly whose fault it is. Is it the fault of the system who don’t take these things seriously enough, or the fault of the students who don’t stand up for their rights?

After a long wait, and extensive Beta testing and a series of Release Candidates, Mozilla 1.7 is out.
http://www.mozilla.org/releases/

As of late, I like how mozilla has adopted BitTorrent with their releases. Finally, this practical P2P is gaining acceptance. I wish FireFox would adopt BT soon too. I’m sure that many FireFox users have adopted BT as well.

Otherwise… you know, I don’t hold my breath too much for Mozilla releases. I am now very fond of FireFox. There are just enough differences between the two to really bother me to use Mozilla as my main browser any more. (Most notable is the different keyboard shortcuts.) I still use Mozilla while I’m doing testing etc. Alas, no BT at work…

As a person who likes to explore the ways to improve my programming life, one of the things I do from time to time is to look for new text editors. In fact, I’ve noted one of those I’ve tried in this blog once before.
I’ve finally come up with the one I’m extremely happy with. The program is called SciTE. I can only compare it with the programs I’m familiar with… There are things I really like about this editor. It has pretty good windows interface, unlike gvim for windows. It still has the extensive syntax highlighting like vim or Ultraedit. It’s pretty configurable like gvim, but not as heavy. The configuration is based on text config files, so it might not be for weak at heart. It has the text folding feature like Macromedia Homesite. It can save the file in UTF-8 unicode. Basically, it has a lot of the features I was looking for, without sacrificing any gimmicks.
It’s not like it’s perfect either. For the time being, I will be using both this and Textpad side by side. Textpad still has some other features I haven’t figured out in SciTE, such as macro, and easy font configuration, with which I can even edit Japanese text files (including Unicode).
Now, with this, editing PHP on windows is easier than ever. SciTE, WinSCP, and PHP.net, that’s about all I need.

When I do a lot of things, I go through the phases. Like dinner for instance, I go through the noodles phase, rice & stir fry phase, spaghetti phase, etc. Well, on the technical side, I’m going through the RSS phase. It started with a discovery of the convenience RSS brings. Find the RSS feed I like, and just drop it in the aggregator, and I’m done. Neato!
Then came the re-build stage. When certain aggregated announcement site took a plunge recently, I decided, I will make my own script, so 1) the stuff I create with Froth-Bite will be on our own feed; 2) to take the data displayed at another web site (baka-updates.com), and create my own feed. Both of them were pretty simple task, and the effect is great. I love doing the simple programming that simplify the life.