The Daily Bits

The other day I decided it was time to take another look at Firefox Beta 3. It’s improved somewhat since Beta 1. The most notable change is the new Mac OS Theme.

There are still a few rough edges such as the speed of the javascript and flash integration but I hope this will be smoothed over in the release candidates and final version. The address bar and bookmarks system is greatly improved so that’s a nice plus. If it were to ship in it’s current state I would not be able to use it. For a more complete review head over to Ars Technica (the Windows look is horrid).On a side note I’m waiting for version 3.1 of Safari which will have the new faster version of WebKit.

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Right now I am writing this entry from Windows Live Writer on a Windows XP virtual machine running under VMware fusion on OS X.  I can say so far that Windows Live Mail and Windows Live photo gallery will be deployed through my household on the next reformat cycle.  Windows Live Photo Gallery appears to be almost an exact copy of the software that ships with Windows Vista.   

Anyways that’s all for the test of Windows Live Writer

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The blog has sort of gone dormant… but none the less I have taken another look at Firefox 3. So far memory usage isn’t anything astronomical like Jeff’s results.

This is a copy of the development theme that is being worked on for the mac version of Firefox 3. It’s about time to have a native UI on Firefox…

I still have two file menus as I posted before. Bit of a strange thing… I’m sure it’s isolated to me Ah well. Good to be unique.

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I have been programming for about 5 years. I’ve used quite a few languages in that time… some useful, some not too useful. I feel that I just want to get this list out here (like the Star Trek list). Here they are with their uses and listed in order of most to least favourite:

• C++: My first language. Useful with Object Oriented features and the ability to go back and code in pure C.
• PHP: Another one of my firsts. I still swear by PHP for web applications. I have seen code from Ruby on Rails and the time it would take me to learn it to use it effectively would not be worth the effort. I can throw stuff together in PHP rather quickly.
• C: Did my first real C programming last year. Definitely still useful seeing as most games and operating systems are programmed in it. C also works quite well with Unix.
• Java: Out of everything I have probably programmed the most for school in this language. It’s a good language for learning the basics of programming, data structures, and software design. It’s useful because it is very strict when it comes to programming standards. The Swing framework also allows for quick creation of GUI’s.
• MIPS Assembly Language. Once again this one has no practical purpose since a good majority of computers out there use the x86 architecture. It is however a fine language for learning about how the hardware of the computer works.
• Lisp. Lisp is actually still being used in various applications. It was an interesting language and takes a while to get a handle on. There are macros for loops but it is much more fun to use recursion. Personally I don’t think I’ll ever use it.
• Prolog. “Programming in Logic” Prolog can be used as a theorem prover. Personally I don’t see myself using it in this respect. It can also be used to build parsers which is no doubt interesting but I don’t think I’ll be using that either.

So there you have it. Another one of my lists

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Disclaimer: I do not include JavaScript, HTML, or CSS on this list as they are client side interpreted or not compiled.

I just tried playing around with the new VMWare Fusion and Counter Strike Source. I could not even get it to run with and without 3D acceleration disabled. Sure I could install Windows on here but that would simply be a waste of time. Why should I run CS:S with an ATi X1600 when I have a fully featured 7800GT from Nvidia? It would be better than nothing if I didn’t have my native Windows machine. This brings me to another matter…

I was quite astounded when I saw these benchmark results for a home built mac. This isn’t exactly legal by means of the EULA even if you bought a copy of Leopard. Personally I see this as an opportunity for Apple to come up with a sub-iMac mac. Something without a built in screen, but more powerful than the mini.

Make up your mind if it’s legal or not… but nothing beats the simplicity of buying a new mac

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Took quite a while… works for the most part (few little things, not bugs, but annoyances).

Also thanks to MQ for this excellent sig.

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Well yea… I have this assignment due on Monday and it’s slowly shaping into something…

New Shot…

For anyone wondering, it will be an image viewer made in Java with Swing

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Last week Mike showed me a program called Stellarium. Stellarium lets you take a look at the sky for your desired location. All you really need are the latitude and longitude of your position. Once those are inputting it will show you what is in the sky. This is a perfect application for seeing what will be coming up in the next few hours. Especially with it’s ability to speed up time.

The video is small, so why not just go try out the program for yourself

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With the RSBandB Event where I will get 99 Farming coming up rather quickly I needed to find a good mac screencasting appllication.

There’s one out there called Snapz Pro X but it’s $69 for a full version with video capture. The trial also seemed a little hard to use. Luckily I found iShowU.

iShowU is well worth the small $20 payment. There is a huge list of codecs to select from. It also can record audio from the system or record your own narration. What makes it really great is the support for the H.264 codec. I was able to make two decent looking movies using the ‘High’ option, I can’t even notice that they are compressed.

Demo 1 (Small screen, demoing eclipse and MSN.)
Demo 2 (Full screen scaled to 50% loading up RS in Safari.)

I think with this piece of software I’d be tempted to do all video recording on this machine even if I wanted to record a Windows application. Here’s the equation I see:
VMWare Fusion + CS:S + iShowU = A very good CS:S movie.

You can also talk about it on rsbandb.

Anyways… in the mean time it’ll be used for Sunday and maybe more RSBandB events.

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There was supposed to be another post in the works but I totally forgot what it was going to be about. I thought of it on Sunday night as I was going to bed… Anyways the title on this post “iWork != MS Office.”

Rougthly two weeks ago I installed the iWork ‘08 trial on the mac. It’s a great office suite and gets the job done. It just doesn’t feel right however to be using it seeing as I do most of my work in a Windows/Unix centric environment. The common document standard at my school is DOC. Sure you can export but I just like to be able to save out without doing any special exporting. It would be great if the new xml based document standard was widely adopted everywhere but it’s not. I’ve also come to learn my way around Office and iWork has significantly less features. Not to mention that I like the new and improved features and ease of use of office 2007. We were supposed to get a beta of Mac Office 2008 this summer but it has been pushed back to later this year/early next year.

So yea… back to my old PPC MS Office 2003

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Here’s an example of my multi tasking…

This includes updating parallels workstation (Windows XP), talking to Brad and Kelsey, editing R! Update 105, and watching the news.

I plan to add in logging on to rs to do some trading

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A few nights ago I was looking to start on a new project that involves a pretty big database However I didn’t want to draw out my database design by hand. The choices are: use an editor like Paint (can’t do that no paint on a mac), use Adobe Illustrator (ok but a bit of a hassle), or find something new, I chose the latter. After some googling and seaching digg I found two good utilities.

Omni Graffle - A Mac application that lets you create flow charts and mind maps. It also have a section for database modeling. I havn’t found out if it can span multiple pages yet… If it doesn’t I may have to go back to Illustrator.

OmniGraffle isn’t exactly that shocking…

What’s more amazing is this. It’s a web application made with AJAX that allows you to design database tables. It has the ability to create foreign keys (fields that point to a primary key in another table, a primary key is basically just a unique value in a table) but for some reason it lakes the creation of relations Relations are key to any database design. Visio can do this but there is no free or decent replacement for it.

So without a doubt I’ll be using both of these on this next project

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PS: Today is First Contact Day!

I am writing this post from Microsoft Word 2007. A few days back I discovered that the new version of Word has a publish to blog option. o_O Anyways on to some “Daily Bits”, which hasn’t happened for a long time…

This past week I’ve been mainly doing pest control and some farming on Runescape. For farming I got some more seeds which I should have enough time to plant for the Skill of The Month at Rsbandb. I’m currently level 86 and still going strong.

I’ve also been pondering the differences between pest control and actual combat training via Slayer. Pest control is boring and repetitive, you need something else going on in the background in order to make time pass quickly. I was talking on Skype and 50 points flew by rather quickly. Whereas if I’m not doing anything 10 points is very very painful. Slayer combat is probably a bit slower but it isn’t boring seeing as you’ve always got a different task and you have the potential of getting a good drop or level 3 clue item. (This is normally not the case for me, I have crappy luck.) I will probably stick with pest control for the time being.

I think the Mac Book vs. Mac Book Pro debate is finally settled for me. Probably going with the Black Book. Just seeing as the price difference is at least $245, the fact that I have a 7800GT for playing FPS games on my current machine, and that I can easily use a dual monitor setup when at home with it. It’s not like I work with 2560×1080 photos everyday…

Oh and Twitter is currently a dead end. I may start it up again once the new blog design is up.

If you’re seeing this then the MS Word post to blog works!!

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A graphic map depicting the epic struggle of Free and Open Source Software against the Empire of Microsoft!

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The Firefox Acid2 bug (bugzilla #289480) has officially been marked as FIXED and VERIFIED, and merged into the official development build (to be part of Firefox 3). Hurray! Thanks goes especially to David Baron for his hard work on the reflow branch.

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