Yearly Archives: 2007

Fun with Twitter

Stevie told me about Twitter sometime last week, but things have been so hectic I haven’t had a chance to try it until tonight. It’s pretty entertaining so far.

Twitter is sort of an RSSoCS – Really Simple Stream of Consciousness Syndication. It’s basically an SMS/IM aware blog or diary, written one line at a time. I’m sending messages to my Twitter diary with a slick little Mac app called Twitterific.

I’m not sure anyone will actually care to know my innermost, Tourettesiest thoughts, but hey, you’re reading this blog aren’t you?

Eek.

February 7, 2007Permalink Leave a comment

Setting Up the Mac Pro

I finally took possession of my new Mac Pro this week. Lovin’ it so far. So why the delay?

I’ve been using Parallels since I got my MacBook Pro last summer with a Win2k image I built myself. With the sudden proliferation of Intel Macs around the office, the last thing I wanted to do was to get into the business of building and maintaining VMs for everyone.

When I ordered my new system back in December, I made a deal with our IT group. They hadn’t yet gotten their hands on an Intel Mac of their own — they’d only processed the dozen or so that others had bought. So no time to play with Parallels…

So I offered to let them hold onto the machine for a while to build a standardized VM image (or images) for distribution with new Intel Macs as needed. They took me up on the offer, and everything was peachy.

With the start of the new semester, support queues dragged out, and what was admittedly a low-priority task got put off. The crew finally got back to my system last week.

Well, building a “stock” image is easier said than done. The more we talked about requirements for the image, the more we realized that the audience here is fairly diverse. Certainly, not everyone is going to need a SQL Server instance! So we agreed to revisit the whole VM issue in a couple weeks, but in the mean time I’d get my new system.

February 7, 2007Permalink Leave a comment

TortoiseSVN Lightning Talk slides

Here are my slides from my Lightning Talk on TortoiseSVN from today’s PSU Web Developers’ Lunch:

Quick and Dirty Change Tracking with TortoiseSVN

The last slide has several links to additional resources.

If you want the longer version, here’s my full 60-minute slide set from the Penn State Web 2006 Conference:

Web File Version Control with Subversion

The slides are in S5 format — an open slide show system based entirely in Web Standards: XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

January 16, 2007Permalink 1 Comment

Outlook 2007 to use MS Word to render HTML…. ugh

Talk about a step backwards. In a recent announcement, Microsoft has shared its plans to have Outlook 2007 use Word’s HTML rendering engine in place of Internet Explorer’s engine.

Now, I’m not really a fan of HTML email — I generally select plain text format for any mailing lists to which I might subscribe if I have the choice — but I think it does have a place in business. Some e-newsletters are very well done, such as Musician’s Friend or Marketing Sherpa.

But if you’re going to send HTML mail, at least you could be efficient and use CSS and Web Standards to their full potential. We’ve made great strides in the past few years moving away from presentational markup, inappropriate table tags, spacer gifs, and FrontPage-esqe code cruft in Web pages. Email support for rich content has always lagged a bit behind browser support, but now we’re looking to take a huge leap backwards.

With Outlook’s massive install base, this change is pretty much the same as if Microsoft were to declare that IE 8 would use the awful HTML engine from WebTV.

January 15, 2007Permalink Leave a comment

First Look at VMWare Fusion Beta for OS X

VMWare has finally released the promised version of their virtualization product for OS X:

http://www.vmware.com/products/beta/fusion/

I got the email notice about its availability just before the holidays, but I only got around to playing with it this week.

So far it seems to be a bit behind Parallels Desktop in features. I love the Private Networking feature in Parallels… I can have my VMs share a secret virtual network segment, keeping my Windows server VMs protected from prying eyes or probes when on public wireless networks. I haven’t found anything like that in VMWare Fusion.

If they’re going to catch up with Parallels, given the new beta features they’ve got their work cut out for them. They’ve had drag-n-drop file copy in VMWare for a while, though.

January 12, 2007Permalink Leave a comment