I’m currently using Mozilla 1.0. Being a person that has been testing Mozilla (moz for short) for the last 3 years I have to say it’s come a LONG way. I remember cursing its existence only a year ago. It took over as my main browser around .90 or so and I haven’t looked back since. I highly recommend anyone who is looking for a good browser to check it out.
Keeping in line with my previous statements that I have too many computers, I sold a few of them and went shopping for a dsl/cable router (since one of them was my firewall). I was super impressed by the new prices on these little things. I got a 4 port 10/100 wireless router for 150.00. It took me literally 30 seconds to have wireless networking and my regular network up in running. Not bad.
Some of you might notice a new screenshot on miester.org. It features some of the newest from the Gnome front. I’ve spent the last few hours tweaking various portions of Gnome, Nautilus, and Evolution. Read on for my full review.
I’d like to first say that, in my opinion, the screenshot looks GREAT. Let’s start in on the review now.
Nautilus
This is Gnome’s new file manager and does it ever have potential! It supports ftp, http, nntp (not tested), and files without any problem. It’s snappy while loading my $HOME (with almost 800 items in it) and lods subsequent windows with ease. The theme I have is vector based, which allows you to resize icons, antialiased, etc. I haven’t got TTF working yet, but I plan on working on it. I’d really like to get some funky fonts kicking. My only complaint is that, even though it loaded ftp and samba shares fine, I could not a.) play mp3’s from my samba share or b.) edit files via ftp. This seems like something that would be standard – no?
Evolution
This is the contact manager/email client/calendar application created by Ximian. It’s got everything you’d expect in such a client and closely resembles Outlook. I haven’t used it much, but I like how it works so far.
Gnome
The Gnome team seems to have addressed most of the speed issues that once plagued the project. It loads up pretty fast (considering all the stuff it starts up with), works well integrating various applications, and is generally nice to use. My only beef is that I can’t find the keyboard shortcut editor.
I’d recommend everyone check it out.
I’m sitting at moonkhan’s house playing with his Apple Titanium. It’s probably the sexiest machine I’ve ever had the pleasure of working on. I think I might bite the bullet and make one of these mine. OSX is DEAD SEXY.
I’ve used the Enlightenment window manager (WM) for a few years now. I sometimes check out new WM’s, but haven’t found one that I liked more than E. One thing that E does lack is good documentation. While helping a friend out with an E proglem I came accross this HOWTO. It’s probably the best documentation I’ve found yet.
Here is a story about one man’s crusade to stop CD protected CD’s. Basically the story is that some CD producers are making their CD’s that will not play in computer drives that do NOT run on non-MS OS’s. Along with this topic is this story of Sony producing CD’s that actually CRASH your computer.
My old cell phone has officially been retired. With a battery only giving about 20 min of talk time it was time to get a new phone. I opted for the phone since a new battery cost more than a new phone (110.00 USD). The phone I chose was the Samsung I300. Read on for the review.
First of I just want to say this phone absolutely kicks ass. It’s a MUST have for anyone who carries both a phone and a PDA on a regular basis.
Features
The phone itself is powered by the Palm OS – even the actual dial pad is a palm application (wow your friends with a touch screen dial pad). It has flawless integration with standard palm applications (ie. your contact list). Despite reviews saying it was hard to dial one handed I found this to be the contrary – with easy to reach arrow keys it was pretty quick. The screen is color, which is a complete bonus. Another added benefit is that it comes with all the standard wireless Palm applications (including Handsprings browser) – so you get the web in 256k color at 14.4 speeds. Not great but fine for checking movie times, getting directions, etc. I would have to say what I like most about this palm is the fact that it’s form factor is REALLY small for a Palm Phone – it’s only slightly larger than my old Samsung and fits nicely in my pocket. Samsung was also nice enough to throw two batteries and two stylus in the box for me 🙂
Things I don’t like
The screen is a little small. I’ve also read it’s hard to read in sunlight, but haven’t had any problems with it so far.
The Price
I paid 349.99 (USD) at Best Buy. You can get a 50.00 rebate if you are a new Sprint customer (which I’m not). So for 349.99 I get a color Palm, a phone, and a big wow factor – not shabby.
Overall I’m very pleased with my purchase. If you know of anyone looking for a Palm V let me know – I’ll sell it for a song.
I use the wonderful MUA, Mutt, and suffer (like most) from spam. I often get reoccurring spam from the same address … here is a short HOWTO to make your email spam free.
As mentioned earlier I use Spam Bouncer to filter most of my email. However, some still gets through to my inbox … to help rid myself of this I did the following.
First here is what you’ll need on your system:
Next you’ll need to put the following in your .procmailrc:
@@@SMARTY:TRIM:PRE@@@
Next you’ll want to download this script and put it in your path somewhere.
You’ll also need to set DEVNULL to ~/.devnull (ie DEVNULL=~/.devnull) in your .procmailrc.
Finally, you need to create a small mutt macro to mark email as spam … put the following in your .muttrc.
@@@SMARTY:TRIM:PRE@@@
Now when you hit F1 the From: address will be added to the file ~/.devnull. This is when procmail takes over – all email addresses in .devnull will be sent to /dev/null. So if the email address appears in the From, To, Cc, Bcc, or Reply-To headers the email will never reach your inbox. Email me if you have any questions.
As you probably know VI hasn’t been around in ages, rather VIM with VI settings is used. I was always torn between the two and finally settled on VI because 1.) I was too lazy to make my own .vimrc catered to my needs and 2.) its copy and paste wasn’t screwed up like VIM’s seemd to be. Read more about how I rectified this.
First off you need to decide what’s right for you and your needs. I program mostly in PHP and HTML. I didn’t like VIM syntax highlighting, but the benefits of using it are evident (ie. it will highlight correctly spelled functions reducing dumb spelling errors).
Another problem was the cut and paste was always fux0red in VIM. There are settings to rectify this I found out. You will also want to set your tab settings to your specific tastes (I use two spaces). Another thing you might want to think about is setting VIM to use SPACES for tabs instead of the evil ‘t’ character.
So here were my desires ….
Here is what I came up with – feel free to use it for yourself …
set noautoindent set backspace=2 syntax on set expandtab set foldmethod=marker set tabstop=2 hi Comment ctermfg=Red guifg=#80a0ff hi Constant ctermfg=Gray guifg=#ffa0a0 hi Special ctermfg=LightGray guifg=Orange hi Function ctermfg=DarkCyan guifg=Orange hi Identifier ctermfg=DarkGreen guifg=#40ffff hi Statement ctermfg=white guifg=#ffff60 hi PreProc ctermfg=Gray guifg=#ff80ff hi Type ctermfg=white guifg=#60ff60 hi Ignore ctermfg=black guifg=bg
You may be asking me, “Miester I know how to store dates in mysql – you just use the date or datetime data type … duh.” I disagree on this format of storing data. For the following reason …
It’s not flexible. If I store my date in there as YYYY-MM-DD then I have to do a whole bunch of parsing to change how it is displayed.
Why not just store it as a timestamp? You can do the same sorting as you can with dates as well as doing comparisons. Plus this method allows you to know seconds no matter what.
How do you start using this new method, you ask? Use the int(11) data type and then insert time() to insert the timestamp.
Are there any limitations? Yes, as you know (or should) the Unix timestamp was born in 1970 – therefore you will want to continue to use the date data type for birthdays or any date field that might contain a date prior to Jan 1st 1970.
That should be it. It works great for news postings, logs, etc. and is much more flexible than the date or datetime data type.