Nonsequittal Rumblings

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.

If you’ve ran any version of Windows, you’ve seen the message “Please reboot your PC” plenty of times. It happens mostly when you install a new software, or when you change some core windows settings. Windows XP requires fewer reboots, but you still get those. (On the other hand, Unix type of environment, you can make just about any changes to your system, and it won’t require a reboot. About the only time you need those are when you upgrade the kernel, or when you upgrade your hardware.) Or, when you call a tech support for your PC related stuff, I’m sure plenty of people got the same answer/question, “have you tried to reboot your PC?”
This morning, I had a bit of time to kill, and I decided to boot up my cell phone’s games. Lo and behold, I get the error message, “The application could not run.” ?!?!?!?! Why?! Well, I thought maybe these games were some shareware, and I had to register them somehow? So, I called Emily, who has the same phone, and got it at virtually in the same time period…. “It’s working fine for me.” …weird.
4 hours later, it just hit me. Maybe I need to reboot my phone. So I did. I turned it off, then turned it back on. Then tried the game. Well, what do you know, it’s working again. So, indeed, the modern cell phones are toned down computers. Scary… One of these days, we’ll receive a message “Fatal Error – phone unoperational” even while we’re just talking on the phone. Or even worse, blue screen of death on the cell phone…

I was just in the bathroom, sitting down, minding my business. I also took my cell phone with me. And there, I just found out how to turn off the sound for the phone for the games loaded on it. This is cool! I can now play the game quietly.

It finally feels like I’ve caught my groooooove again, here at work.

I’m no longer surfing the web at random… I claim those hours as my “learning time”, but that’s a big BS. Yes, I’m learning new things here and there, but I don’t have a specific target on what to learn.

Actually, I found couple new softwares while I was exploring. Both were interesting, but I got tired of them pretty quickly.

MyIE2

Internet Explorer with tabbed browsing. It even has built-in ad & popup blocker. At first, I thought it’s pretty cool. It works well. It’s fast. And it’s really not annoying. But after a while, I started going back to my old browser, Firebird. The performance sometimes get sluggish, but it’s still a good browser. Add the Adblock plug-in, and it’s excellent. (For those who want to use Adblock, you might find this list of filters useful.)

PSPad

A freeware text editor that doesn’t suck! Really, it’s a good piece of software. It just doesn’t fit within my taste, after getting used to TextPad (for Windows) or Vim (for unix/linux (I still use Vim on windows from time to time. It’s also free too.)). Some people might just find it as the text editor of the choice.

---

P.S.
While writing this entry, I found out that Mozilla doesn’t like HTML class name that starts with numeric character. Bleh.