If you’re not a regular WP user, then you might not have noticed there’s a large amount of anger and frustration happening in their support forums lately. Basically, some people in the community have spent a great deal of time and effort helping out WP users with layout problems that others ended up with due to quirks in the default layout and in some1 of the designs that were posted over at Alex King’s WordPress Style Competition. But that wasn’t the direct cause of the current mess in the forums; no the blame for that seems to rest with Michael’s announcement that a variation of his Kubrick style would be included with the next release of WordPress. This was the spark to an apparent holy war between WP’s community support leaders2 and WP’s developers, with a bunch of fanboys on the sidelines escalating things.
Tag: Software
Testing Meme Propagation In Blogspace: Add Your Blog!
This posting is a community experiment that tests how a meme, represented by this blog posting, spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs are most influential in the propagation of memes. The dataset from this experiment will be public, and can be located via Google (or Technorati) by doing a search for the GUID for this meme (below).
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Over the weekend, I started visiting some MP3 blogs and downloading some of the free tracks out there for extra listening material on my iPod. Today over lunch, I booted my home computer into Windows; so I could transfer those tracks to the iPod1. However it seems I’ve been biten by a bug in the iTunes/iPod software.
See, iTunes wouldn’t launch with the iPod connected; it would start in the background but wouldn’t display the GUI (at least it wouldn’t do it quick enough to satisfy me). If I disconnected the iPod, launched iTunes, reconnected the iPod then iTunes would continue to run but would fail to see the iPod. I tried dinking around with this for a while (rebooting, disconnecting, reconnecting, checking for updates and whatnot) but didn’t get any closer to having iTunes recognize the iPod. Though at one point an error message did pop-up telling me I needed to reformat the iPod.
I started searching Apple’s website, as I remembered hearing that there was an issue like this back in April when the last update for iTunes/iPod was released. The most info I could find basically told me to backup, reformat the iPod and try again. *sigh*
That’s not something I really wanted to hear. I guess tonight I’ll be booting back into Linux; backing up the data from the iPod to DVD-Rs and then trying some more drastic measures to get the iPod working right again.
Oh and the other reason I’m upset with iTunes; is that I forgot to go buy some songs from them over the weekend and hence had zero chance to win a free Powerbook. *double sigh*
1 For the record, I am familiar with gtkPod but it gives me errors everytime I try and get it just to read from my iPod which makes me disinclined to use it to write to the iPod.
As you might imagine, I’m bored at work1 and I’m trying to come up with something to keep my brain alive. So here’s another QotD2 for you; what are your favorite web development tools?
My response is slightly complicated because I use both Linux & Windows and use different tools under each. Note that these lists are presented in no particular order.
Linux Web Development Tools
- Quanta for editing HTML, CSS & PHP.
- Bluefish is another good tool for editing HTML, CSS & PHP but its interface just feels a lot more clutured.
- GIMP for editing images, though to be perfectly honest I hate using it because the interface is just wretched. Unfortunately, I’m not aware of another image editor that I can use under Linux which has the functionality that I need.
Windows Web Development Tools
- UltraEdit is the best text editor for Windows. Period. It’s not free but there is a time-limited demo. You can edit pretty much anything with UltraEdit and there are additional wordlists & dictionaries for it to make it even easier to use. Though as I recall CSS is not included with the default word list –this means UltraEdit won’t do syntax highlighting for CSS by default– but an additional wordlist can be downloaded to take care of that.
- Fireworks MX is the best image editing program, particularly for web work. It’s interface feels very well laid out, hiding options you don’t immediately need and grouping similar options together. Plus, it uses Adobe Photoshop’s plugin architecture allowing you to easily expand the functionality of the software. Again, this isn’t free software but there is a time-limited demo. Unfortunately, the Crossweavers version of Wine lists this program as Known Not to Run; so I won’t be running this under Linux any time soon. *sigh*
1 For the record, I am working right now. I’m trying to get the program I test to generate some errors so I can test some new functionality that the programmers added to the error handling. Naturally now that I want the program to break; it’s not. *sigh*
2 QotD (acronym): There are 2 generally accecpted meanings for this acronym,
- Quote of the Day
- Question of the Day
Unless otherwise noted, this site uses the 2nd definition.
Hi, I’m Mark (aka Manzabar1). If you want to know more about me; well, you’ll just have to keep reading this blog and see what you can learn as I go along.
I’ve had this domain for a short time now and finally plunked down the moolah to get a proper host for it (thank you Digital Sense Hosting).
I imagine if you’ve probably got some questions about the who/what/why of CoffeeBear.net, so here are some of the answers. If you have a question that’s not answered in this post; contact me and I’ll reply. Though if your question is too personal, then the reply might be no more than “I’m not going to answer that.”
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