Blog and Updates
What twitter apps do you use?
I know there are many of them, in fact, take a look at Twitter Fan’s App list but I’m curious as to how everyone keeps themselves on the twitter grid as much as possible. Personally I use a few:
- Twhirl - Main client I keep open when I’m on a windows machine
- Twitterbin - I use it because its good and there twhirl runs horrible on Linux
- TinyTwitter - While on the go
Additionally, there are many services that connect to twitter available. Do you use any of these? If so, which? Out of the existing ones I have found myself using:
- HashTags - A great way to tag conversations and look them up later
- SnipUrl - Not exactly a twitter service, but plugs in right with that 140 character limit, also built-in to twhirl
So what do you use?
BarCampOrlando “One Sentence”
First of all, I would like to mention BarCampOrlando, a huge success! I only attended the dev day but I have to say it was great. I met a lot of people whom I had only previously seen or talked to through the internet (Twitter mostly), and heard great talks by great people in the area.
Now on to the topic of this post, I just read this from a local company, Less Everything: Find that one sentence… So I wanted to share my one sentence.
“An application should be the API, the web site or application should only be a marketing tool.” @sunir
Thanks @greggpollack, all the BarCampOrlando Sponsors, and everyone else who helped set up BarCampOrlando. It was great! I am excited and awaiting the next one.
Orlando Ruby User Group Meeting Tonight, Oh I’m So Late
I’m a bit late in announcing this but the Orlando Ruby User Group (ORUG) will be meeting tonight. I have asked myself a bit what I’m going to be there considering my Ruby knowledge is minimal. I have studied over the past two days because of a project I will be starting soon that I want to make in Ruby, because it makes more sense to do so. More about the project at a later date though. As for the ORUG meeting, I will be there.
Our next meeting is Thursday, March 27th, 7 PM at Devry in Room #121, sponsored by Veredus. We’ll have delicious dinner from Panda Express just like last time, and two talks that you don’t need to be a Ruby expert to understand.
Source: ORUG
I’m excited as I will be meeting quite a few whom I have shared conversations with through twitter. Hope to see some of you there!
Opera and Safari 3.1 Now Have Full 100/100 Acid3 Support (Sort of)
Acid3 is a browser test created by the Web Standards Project. It basically tests web standards for CSS and Javascript to see how the browser supports them and displays a rendered page with a score. Compliant browsers should see a smooth animation with a 100/100 score. The score is based on how many of these tests the browser passed. Currently no stable release of any browser fully passes the Acid3 test. The current scores are as follows:
- Firefox 3 beta 4: 68/100
- Firefox 2.0.0.13: 53/100
- Internet Explorer 7: 11/100
- Internet Explorer 6: 12/100
- Safari/WebKit: 75/100
- Opera: 36/100 - It seems that Opera currently crashes as well
Opera
Source: Opera Opera yesterday reported that it got a full 100/100 on the Acid3 test on their development version. It is the first browser to declare full Acid3 compliance. This is excellent news for the web community. But, today, the author of Acid 3, Ian Hickson, changed the Acid3 test to match the exact SVG specifications dropping Opera’s score to 99/100.
Safari
Source: Flickr Today, the WebKit team declared a full 100/100 score on the Acid3 test as well. On top of that, Safari is the first to publicly release a version of a fully Acid3 compliant browser. That means that you can download a copy of the test version from their SVN and run the Acid3 test yourself. On the other hand, Safari’s result is not completely smooth and very slow. On their blog post, the WebKit team has mentioned that they are working on fixing the animation problems.
Both browsers that have declared support for Acid3 still have their drawbacks. Opera’s now 99/100 support because of a previous bug on the Acid3 test and Safari’s speed at rendering the animation. I am happy that browsers are trying to compete neck to neck to be compliant though. This is great news. I cannot wait until the majority of users start using compliant browsers. Until then, we can stay excited about news like this and hope for the best!
BarCampOrlando is Approaching!
I’m really excited about BarCampOrlando. It will be the first of this kind of event I attend. The event is mainly a hub for developers and designers (and other media professionals) to get together and share. That being knowledge, time, ideas, and much more. It is also a great event to meet people around the area who do the same things you do. It will be happening on April 5th and 6th on Wall St Plaza in Downtown Orlando. Watch the video below for more info.
See you all there!
Hardy Heron, My New Window!
I upgraded to Ubuntu Hardy Heron today for the second time. My first experience was horrid. Also, it was back when Hardy Heron was still in Alpha, which explains why. Yesterday though, my upgrade was almost seamless. I ran the update manager, told it I wanted to update to Ubuntu 8.04 and let it run for about an hour. There is plenty of features to enjoy which you can see on the page for Hardy Heron but the ones I enjoy most are mostly aesthetic. With the inclusion of Firefox 3 beta, my browser now matches the rest of my application and the new background is awesome. I noticed icons that I had not seen before but that may be because I was using a different icon set.
The best feature thus far is the integrated weather to the clock, and multiple timezones. I know, there was a GNOME toolbar widget for weather, but this fits right in next to my time which is more useful. I call it my window to the world. Why? At work I sit in an office, well, a cubicle with no windows near me. So that little icon you see saying that it is partly cloudly allows me to imagine a more accurate view of the outside!
Great job Canonical! Until next time.
My New Best Buddy, TomBoy
I’ve made best friends with TomBoy. A simple, and I do mean simple, note-taking app/widget for GNOME (Linux Only, sorry). Its actually pretty neat. I started using it because I wanted to keep an inspirational quote somewhere I could easily find it. I had used TomBoy long ago when I first got back into Linux and was playing around with what was available. I didn’t have a use for it though. Or, I didn’t use it for what its meant to be used for. Well, I added back in my gnome-panel and I have found many more uses than just keeping quotes. I started making a list of topics for my blog (Yeah, I put this topic down on a note) and account logins (maybe not so safe, oh well). The feature that I love most its is Wiki style linking. You can basically link any camel case string to another note or any other keyword, and it will automatically link every other occurrence of that keyword to the new note.
I do assume anyone that has been using GNOME have already seen TomBoy, but if you haven’t be sure to do so. Its an amazing widget to keep handy. I think I may write something to back up tomboy notes. Or synchronize them, who knows what I have time to do.
Talk About Unexpected Support
I love the internet. I seriously do. Anyways, I was trying to sign up to Ma.gnolia today. I noticed they supported OpenID. I had kind of made a profile with one of the OpenID providers but I wasn’t happy with them. Well I found out Yahoo! had started supporting OpenID since last time I checked. Ma.gnolia wouldn’t connect to the Yahoo! OpenID servers though. I went on to post about it on my twitter, “ …Weird, I can’t use a Yahoo openid with ma.gnolia. It won’t work :(”
Well, neat to say, Ma.gnolia replied to my post from their twitter, telling me that “Yahoo required OpenID 2.0 and directed identity. We’re currently working to upgrade our implementation.”
I just have to say, I did not expect such a quick reply. In fact, I was not expecting a reply at all. I have to go on to repeat that the internet is awesome. Good job at everyone at Ma.gnolia (Gnolia Systems). I like your project–a lot.
On a semi side note, in a few days I’ll be providing my own little project that works with Ma.gnolia. I’ll let you know when I’m ready to release it.
RoundCube is Stable [Webmail]
So RoundCube is finally stable. You know, the webmail client that has always been better, maybe not Gmail better, but its open source better. Here’s the news from RoundCube.
After more than two years of development we finally released the first stable version of RoundCube Webmail. It’s not as feature rich as we’d like it to be but the released version is considered to run stable for a productive environment. Thanks to our users we fixed many bugs and added some nice new features. So go ahead and upgrade your installations now.
Go ahead, upgrade now.
On a side note, the TinyMCE editor (WYSIWYG) is to be considered experimental.
A New Design
I have finally put down time to design this site. I had to do something that was mine because this is also a sample of my work. It will be a blog and a portfolio as well. So the new theme really exemplifies my web design skills. I am still working a few quirks with it here and there as I get time to sharpen things in Photoshop. So far, I have to say I am very happy with it. I think this will be the theme I stick with from now on. Maybe until I get tired of it.