Archive for October, 2005

So apparently, Google is hiring programmers to work on OpenOffice. Microsoft has to feel threatened at the online search giant’s latest move in the office document arena. Google is the one company that Microsoft simply cannot figure out. And I couldn’t be any happier to see the folks up in Redmond sweat just a little. For too long they’ve been the bully on the playground. But a new kid has come to town, and he’s beginning to look a little bigger than ever.

I don’t have any facts on the matter, but Office has to be one of Microsoft’s largest revenue generators. To have someone announce that they will offer a competitive solution, for free, is quite an obstacle. And it’s Google’s way in to several markets which Microsoft has owned since what feels like the dawn of time. This will certainly be the first arena where Microsoft will face true pressure. Lots of people claim that Linux is a threat to Windows, but that’s just not true (at least not yet). The Linux world is too fragmented. There are too many flavors, everyone has his favorite, and no one wants to try another one. Until the Linux community can get that particular act together (not to mention the ease of use factor), the office application arena will be the main battlefield. And I’m glad to see another player has finally joined the game.

The whole thing should be interesting to watch. I question whether Sun’s involvement will doom the project (seeing as Sun has doomed virtually everything else they ever touched), but perhaps Google’s brains can prevent such a catastrophe. I, for one, salute our (hopefully soon to be) office application overlords.

According to Asa, this Wednesday might be “ship day” for the first Firefox 1.5 release candidate. Once it’s released, I think I’m going to replace 1.0.7 with RC1 as my primary browser. The beta releases weren’t nearly as stable as I wish they had been (I unsuccessfully tried switching to them shortly after their release), but the latest nightly builds have seemed very stable. All of the new features and bug fixes in 1.5 make it awfully hard to pass up.

One of the greatest things about our new house is the lack of light pollution at night. I’ve seen more stars here at this house than anywhere else I’ve ever been. Our last house was located in the land of cul-de-sacs, and all of the lighting made it nearly impossible to see dim objects. We were, however, able to see a number of fairly bright objects including the International Space Station, the MIR space station (before it crashed into the Earth), and the Hubble Space Telescope. All of this was thanks to Heavens-Above, an awesome website that helps you figure out when and where to look for satellites (and other celestial events).

I stepped outside tonight for a few moments and saw a total of three meteors crashing into Earth’s atmosphere. That’s something I never would have seen at our other house. Sometimes, it’s good to be in the dark.

There’s a fair amount of software that I’d like to buy, but every single product has a ridiculously high price tag. First on my list is Adobe Photoshop CS2. Retail price tag: $599. I have Photoshop 5.5 (a truly ancient beast), and I don’t think the upgrade (only $149) supports versions that old. My dad could buy it at the academic price (since he’s a professor), but the license is listed as “basic”; what exactly does that mean?

Next up is SlickEdit: retail price of $284. There’s no doubt this is a great editor (although a tad on the bloated side, one might say), but the price used to be $99! What’s up with that? I’m not sure any programming editor (regardless of how great it is) is worth three Benjamin’s.

Finally, there’s Dreamweaver 8. The upgrade edition (which is the route I would take) is $199. Two hundred dollars for an upgrade? Proof positive that Adobe does in fact own Macromedia.

All of the aforementioned products are great, but are they hundreds of dollars great? That’s an incredible hard call to make. It’s going to take a lot of thought before I drop that much money on something that consists of nothing but 1’s and 0’s.

I recently stated that I was looking at adding site search capability to Born Geek. And I have indeed been looking, but the solutions I have been able to find are (at least on the surface) somewhat lacking. As such, I have been giving a great deal of thought to moving Born Geek to a more automated content management system.

This blog is powered by WordPress (a great piece of software by the way), which is geared more towards dynamic web content. Seeing as the majority of Born Geek’s web content is static, I don’t think WordPress is the best fit. I have spent some time looking at potential solutions, but it’s so hard to decide what would best fit my needs. I definitely want something that produces well structured XHTML markup, using CSS for the presentation (web-standards are a must). Perhaps Movable Type is a decent solution, but it’s not free (although a free-version is available). Does anyone have any suggestions?

With Firefox 1.5 moving ever closer to an actual release, I am doing my best to keep Googlebar Lite up to date. The nightly trunk builds recently changed the maxVersion for installed extensions (it’s now 1.5). The bad news is that the latest version of GBL (3.0.1) only supports the 1.5 beta builds (maxVersion of 1.4). The good news is that I am working on Googlebar Lite 3.1 which will fix this problem. Other changes in this upcoming release include Google Maps search in the context menu, an updated about box (giving credit to all the translators), and other miscellaneous changes. I am aware that the Swedish translation is corrupt, and I hope to remedy that situation as well.

One of the great new features of Firefox 1.5 is the vastly improved extension manager. An article over at the MozillaZine Knowledge Base details how to use the new extension manager system to do dynamic extension development. I’ve given it a try with Googlebar Lite, and I can only say that I am truly amazed! I can now easily edit the XUL and JavaScript for Googlebar Lite and see the results in real time (no more re-packaging and re-installing). This change in my development cycle has streamlined things quite a bit, so I hope to have GBL 3.1 available very soon.

I occasionally watch any number of items up for auction at eBay (most recently, they’ve all been auctions for Prince Valiant books). And, almost as frequently, I forget to actually bid on the items I’m watching. This happened just today as I was watching five separate auctions, all of which ended this evening. When I left work, I reminded myself to check the items once I got home. Several hours after I actually got home, and well after the items had closed, I remembered my reminder to myself.

I would eventually like to write some sort of Perl script that would do the bidding for me. But, unfortunately, this would involve HTML scraping (the eBay API doesn’t support bidding, for obvious reasons). Such a script would involve a little more work than I’m willing to put into it at the moment, although it would be a neat project to work on. If you know of any (preferably free) services that automatically bid, let me know.