Archive for the ‘stuffs’ Category
Blog updates
Several changes:
- Code syntax highlighter. I have been trying out a couple of WordPress and Windows LiveWriter syntax highlighter plugins, but couldn’t get any of them to work as I wanted it. Trolling some ColdFusion blogs, I saw some of them use: SyntaxHighlighter which is a pure Javascript solution (not a WordPress plugin, so you’d need to include the js package on your WordPress template).
- I added Social Bookmarks plugin, mainly because I want to publish some of my posts to facebook.
- I am started to use Feedburner to manage feeds subscription to my blogs.
- I did little CSS changes on the theme of this blog to make it readable to my own eyes, as I re-read my posts quite a lot.
I am also in the early stage of contemplating to try out several other multi blogs WordPress alternatives, as I found Lyceum has been quite slow to follow WordPress updates.
Changing XP theme + ObjectDock
Have started following LifeHacker recently. One of the recent posts was on the 6 slick Windows themes to dress up your desktop.
Downloaded some of them but couldn’t get them to work until I found an information on one of the downloads’ README file. Apparently to install a non-microsoft XP theme you need to patched a system DLL called: UxTheme.dll, for WIndows XP SP2, the patch can be found here: UXTheme Patcher Download
After applying the patch all the themes seem to work nicely. I am currently using: Razor 2 Final, it’s very pretty.
Also from LifeHacker, found out about ObjectDock, which basically provides a Mac-like Dock. Now I am not by all means a Mac fan boy, but I’m interested in trying it out, see how my work flow will be different and the ObjectDock does look very pretty anyway. Maybe I will like it and will be sold to the whole Mac thing or maybe not. So I’ve auto-hide my task bar on the left (I have put it on left since I use these widescreen monitors), my main mean to access my apps will be via ObjectDock on the bottom of my screen.
See screenshot:
Dual screens
Ah my new treasured toys (Acer X193W):
Replacing my faithful (and very bulky) LG monitor of 5 years.
Learning Management System?
Note to self: found out today that Todd Sharp has open sourced his application called iLearn. Also found out this sort of application is called Learning Management System.
Similar to what I am working on at the moment with cfexam, but obviously Todd’s one is functional 
.
Just one of those days
When I boot into my home computer today, I noticed an Adobe updater windows pops up, I clicked install all. There were some errors reported but I choose to ignore them and continue with the install. Now I am not sure the series of dialog windows that came next were actually caused by Adobe update or something else. The dialog box basically asked whether I am sure to replace the system file with something else. I think I chose yes for all of these dialog windows.. not very smart..
Then I noticed something strange, all of my icons on desktop were gone, my applications on the applications menu also went missing, I thought it was a glitch so I restarted the computer. I wasn’t able to get into my Windows XP, first message I encountered was hal.ddl missing. So naturally I tried to boot from XP cd but I wasn’t able to! The screen just froze. So I tried to boot into my Linux partition.. and it threw a kernel panic sigh.. Then I tried booting Kubuntu live CD, I can do this fine, I copied HAL.dll from my laptop.
Ok so now I tried boot into Windows again, hoping that would solve it. Sadly, I was mistaken, this time I got nrlstok.exe missing message. So I thought I’d repeat the same process as before. Just when I thought I got into the bottom of this saga, now my Kubuntu live CD won’t boot!!! It complained that the disk was damaged or something like that.
I am downloading a small live CD distro (Damn Small Linux) now… What an utterly waste of time.
Test post from Windows Live Writer
So what’s all the fuss with this Windows Live Writer? Will it be able to post to a Lyceum blog? Well why not, after all Lyceum is Wordpress.
Wow, it works! Ok, M$ might be on something here…
Holiday
I am having a week off during Christmas and New Year Holiday. I haven’t done much in this holiday period, haven’t touched ColdBox and Transfer much.
I did some re-organizing of my desktop computer though, updating my Eclipse to a proper development state just like the setup that I have on my laptop. So I install Eclipse 3.2 Europa, put Aptana, SubClipse, CFEclipse on, I have also installed both Flex Builder 2 (Education version) and Flex Builder 3 Beta.
I also come up with my own directory structure to organize projects from work as well as private projects and I think I am pretty happy with the structure, maybe I should re-organize the structure on my laptop as well. Before re-organizing the project folders were separated into at least 3 directories: Eclipse’s workspace, public_html directory and prj directory (company’s convention). I decided to follow the company’s convention and move everything on the public_html directory to prj directory. In prj directory I created subfolders fforesite, s3group, personal and uni.
I also upgraded my Apache server from 1.3 to 2.2 then upgraded ColdFusion from MX7 to 8. And now I am in the process of upgrading MySQL from 4 to 5.
Now after all of this done, I will have a dilemma, should I be developing on my laptop or my desktop? I think I want to be able to do both, if both then I should have some sort of central repository to synch projects on both environments.
I have also been looking for WordPress themes to be used for this techblog and Jet’s blog. I am very impressed with the quality of the themes on Node Thirty Three’s Free WP Themes. I’ve been playing with some of the themes and make them work for Lyceum (which is based on earlier version of WordPress).
Googling my company
Someone pointed out to me that my blog came up when someone googled my company name and this is actually not desirable
Although I think that I wrote nice things so far.. see here if you don’t believe me. So my boss should be happy if my blog comes up on higher ranking than some other links that.. let’s just say not putting my company at its best light.
Must resist criticizing..
Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium - Education Win
The student version costs $799.95 from Student Discount, quite pricey, but I will get:
- Adobe Dreamweaver CS3
- Adobe Flash CS3 Professional
- Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended
- Adobe Illustrator CS3
- Adobe Fireworks CS3
- Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional
- Adobe Contribute CS3
Now is spending that much of money worth it? Will I become more productive? More than me using CFEclipse and GIMP combo?
Also I am only student until the end of the year, after that I will no longer eligible for student price, well I can get a student to buy it for me (is this legal.. )
Felix Programming Language
I can’t believe that there is a programming language called Felix.
The system provides a scripting harness so the language can be used like other scripting languages such as Python and Perl, but underneath it generates native code to obtain high performance.
A key feature of the system is that it uses the C/C++ object model, and provides an advanced binding sublanguage to support integration with C/C++ at both the source and object levels, both for embedding C/C++ data types and functions into Felix, and for embedding Felix into exitsing C++ architectures.
The Felix compiler is written in Objective Caml, and generates ISO C++ which should compile on any platform.
This makes my day!
