Archive for March 15th, 2006
I haven’t used WordPress much, but so far so good (mostly). The install page mentioned “the Famous 5-minute install.” I didn’t time it, but I bet it was pretty close to that. I am pretty amazed at how easy it was to setup. And the options and customizability is great, far better than blogger.
I was very surprised by the number of plugins available. I knew WP had plugins, but you can find one for just about anything. The only problem is many are not up to date with the latest release just like Firefox’s extensions. But unlike Firefox extensions, nothing blocks the install of non-working extensions except the PHP errors you will get when you try to use it.
I am finding the “rich” post editor a bit annoying. In Firefox the cursor is a bit jumpy sometimes. I am used to writing post HTML by hand so I have switched to the non-rich mode. In rich mode I keep having troubles with extra tags or not enough tags and constantly have to edit the raw HTML to fix it.
I already mentioned what I think of the default WP themes in my second post. Since there is only one decent default theme it is way overused by bloggers so it gets boring. And I wonder why the Dashboard skin is nicer than the default blog skin anyway. I like the simple blue theme of the admin pages.
And where is the spell checker? I was pretty surprised to not be able to find the spell check button when I first started using WP. I figured it must be there somewhere. How could they release it without one? My spelling isn’t that good and I would prefer not to look like an idiot who can’t spell when I post. Firefox not having a spell checker I can understand (but in 2.0 they are supposedly adding one), but this is like Thunderbird not having a spell checker. That would be insane. It probably isn’t as critical to spell correctly on your blog as it is in business emails, but still any publishing tool should have a spell checker installed by default.
As I said before, there are lots of plugins for WP so now I have Live Spell Checker. It also works on comments which is pretty nice. But it doesn’t work quite right with the rich editor. It was about the only one I found that said it worked with WP 2.0. It uses Google for spell checking so the spell check interface is very similar to Gmail. But it wrapped lines and caused the raw HTML to display in a box above the rich text editor. At least the comment checker part doesn’t even work right on the author’s webpage (with Firefox). It does work ok with non-rich mode though.
March 15th, 2006
I don’t use Linux much (I used to use it more than Windows at the labs at school) but rather than just install a pre-setup desktop distro, I decided to go with Gentoo for my own box. I have learned a lot about Linux this way. There is no better way to learn about it than to setup things mostly manually. Sometimes it is a major pain though.
I don’t use the Gentoo box directly often, but I have Samba and SSH setup and store some files on the machine so I can access them from anywhere. Amazingly (coming from Windows) I have had the machine running for 175 days without reboot. Windows XP I can sometimes keep going for around 30 days before it gets really unstable.
A while back I upgraded KDE and it stopped working. But since I mostly used command line I didn’t care much. So recently I decided to upgrade stuff again and see if I could get the new KDE 3.5 to work. Well, it turns out that the reason I couldn’t solve the problem was I had no mouse plugged in so now I actually have 3.2 working. I needed the mouse on a different computer for a bit and never reconnected it though it was sitting there. I am not sure if that was the original problem. I hope not, that seems too dumb not to figure out when it says something like mouse not found.
Then I found that KDE 3.5 is not ready on Gentoo yet, it is masked. Not being satisfied with not having the latest version, I went in search of how to force it to install. So after some package.keywords magic and cleaning up some other problems I got the compile started. Well, somewhere along the way the compile failed. So I gave in started emerging KDE 3.4. This was not a fast machine back in 2003 when it was new, its an Via EPIA M9000 Mini-ITX, so compiling takes a while. I didn’t write down the 3.5 error, but this one died too with something that looks a bit familiar. It seems to be a gcc upgrade issue. Hopefully it is fixed now. I am going to give 3.5 another shot.
Long ago I had Windows XP on this box. I didn’t want XP on my main machine because I was being stuborn and sticking with Windows 2000. It ran XP ok, but I hardly ever used it since all my stuff was on my 2000 machine.
I like to play with Linux and I like a lot of the utilities (UnixUtils for Windows), but I am too addicted to Windows to actually switch yet. Speaking of switching, I am pretty interested in the new Intel Macs. They sound great from reviews and those that use Macs. But the couple times I have tried a Mac I get rather confused. The UI is so different from what I am used to with Windows. I would like to have one to try out though. The only problem is they aren’t free and I can’t really justify buying something that expensive if I likely won’t use it any more than my Linux machine. Anyway, I think I will wait till the second generation of Intel Macs to decide. Either they will work out some bugs or maybe I can find one of the first gen ones a bit cheaper.
My other problem with deciding to getting a Mac would be do I want a Mac mini, an iMac, or a MacBook Pro? There are major price differences between them. If I turn out to like it and use it a lot, the laptops would be great. But if not, that is a lot of wasted money. Though, I guess Ebay would be a solution.
With Windows Vista coming, maybe it is time to move on from Windows as my main OS. I will certainly give Vista a try, it looks so pretty. But I think they are hurting usability all over the place and it certainly is going to take a powerful machine
March 15th, 2006
Rob Cockerham decided to see what would happen if he tore up a new credit card application, taped it back together, filled it out, changed his address, entered a cell phone number, and sent it back. Assuming you accidentally tore your application into 16 pieces, he has good news for you. Chase will happily send you a card. But assuming you tear up applications you don’t want and throw them away, this is good news for identity thieves.
Even better news is that Chase says they did the right thing in an interview with MSNBC. It seems there is nothing suspicious about a taped up application using a different address. Admittedly the address was his parents house which was a former address of his, but isn’t that worse? If you move and your mail isn’t forwarded, the new occupant of your former residence will now have your credit card application (not torn up) and your former address. Sounds bad to me.
I have been the victim of credit card fraud (I don’t consider mine identify theft), thankfully it was a small charge. But because it was small (less than $10) it was not caught by the credit card company. I only noticed it because of the really odd company name on my credit card statement.
My brother recently got it a lot worse. Someone got his number and started charging hundreds of dollars worth on the other side of the country. Luckily in this case, the company called to ask if they were legit charges. They have even called a few other times on bigger than usual purchases he actually did make.
Clearly they are working to combat credit card fraud, but it appears they are not doing enough to prevent identity theft in the first place.
March 15th, 2006
Is anyone else tired of the default WordPress theme “based on the famous Kubrick?” I can’t stand it anymore. Its not that it is a bad design, it is that so many blogs use it. It gets boring after a while. There are lots and lots of themes available to choose from. But the only other choice by default is even more boring (not just from over use), it is now known as WordPress Classic and was the default on older versions. The default install should at least throw in a couple other nice skins for variety.
I noticed MediaWiki has a similar problem. They have several skins to choose from in the default install, but the other choices are all very plain. And there is a pretty obvious bug in the only other half usable skin, Cologne Blue, it says “The Free Encyclopedia” at the top. Not that it matters though, almost everyone that uses MediaWiki uses the default skin, MonoBook. That bugs me too, MediaWiki is getting so common and most everyone’s wiki look just like Wikipedia. Is that by choice or because there is no real choice?
I understand why projects don’t want to include many skin choices. Once you include a skin, users are going to expect it to continue to be in future versions. POPFile has a bunch of skins installed by default ranging from very nice to hardly usable. All but one skin author has abandoned their skins. That skin author happens to be me and that has evolved into a larger role as a developer which includes keeping the other skins up to date. In the next version though, we are finally going to drop some of the least popular skins. That should make the project look more professional and make maintenance easier.
March 15th, 2006
Hi. I am not really much of a blogger, but I wanted to give WordPress a try. And occasionally I have stuff I think other people might be interested in. For the few of you that might read this blog, you will likely find all kinds of off topic stuff. This blog will probably be more interesting to me writing it than you reading it, but then isn’t that true of most blogs. If you want better writing, go read your own blog. 
March 15th, 2006