Firefox tip

I was theming my desktop, and it was looking pretty good except that Firefox refused to go along with the system color scheme, which caused some annoyances such as tooltips that had the same background and foreground colors. The color menu in Preferences didn't help, as it seemed to control the color of web pages and not the Firefox interface itself. Then I ran across a snippet on the Mozilla support site.

So it turns out that you can tweak the appearance of Firefox by putting a CSS file in your Firefox directory! The only drawback of course is that you have to know CSS. If that isn't a problem, though, you can potentially do a lot of interesting stuff. All I've done so far is change the color of tooltips, but I'm sure the possibilities are endless!

BTW, sorry for the short posts but while I'm still getting a feel for Dvorak typing is painfully slow. Various sources have said to allow up to a month to get back to full speed. I like it, though; I feel like I'll eventually gain a lot of speed, and even now it is a lot more comfortable to type than it ever was with QWERTY.

Dvorak

So I was convinced by a thread on Ubuntu Forums to switch to the Dvorak keyboard layout. And that's all I'm going to say because typing is pretty slow right now. :)

Last.fm

I was thinking, what can Facebook do that Last.fm can't? Exactly, play dumb farming games. :P What can Last.fm do that Facebook can't? Keep lots of esoteric statistics about the music I listen to, as well as what my friends listen to. Since that is 98% of what I used Facebook for anyway (not very well), I declare Facebook to be completely irrelevant. I don't know where this post is going. the bottom line is, get a Last.fm account and keep in touch!

Some random Windows 7 tips

This will shock everybody that knows me, but I'm using Windows 7 again! It was mostly because of school; I was spending too much time trying to get everything working under Linux. Anyway, I've discovered some cool things already. I've come to the conclusion that Windows can actually work really well, but you have to do some digging to get to this functionality.

Problem #1: I could not run a program from the command line; it said the command could not be found. The problem is that the system PATH variable (which lets the operating system find the program) does not include any of the folders in Program Files by default. Usually, the program installer will add its location to the PATH, either the system-wide PATH or the PATH for the current user. Since I install programs from the administrator account but do all my work from a different, standard account, some programs would put their location in the administrator PATH (the user that installed them) and would thus not be found when I tried to execute them from my normal account. I found out that I can create a personal environment variable called PATH, the contents of which will be automagically added to the system PATH, with no need to log in as administrator and edit any system variables. The process is very simple: Go to Control Panel ->
User Accounts and Family Safety -> User Accounts. There is an option to the left called "Change my environment variables". When you click this, you have the option to create a new variable. Call it PATH, and add to it the file path to the program you want to run, followed by a semicolon. For me, it was C:\Program Files\Mercurial; It will obviously be different for whatever program you're dealing with. Once you hit OK, you will be able to fire up the command prompt and run the program, this time with no issues!

Problem #2: I installed a program, but every time I tried to run it Windows would prompt for an administrator password because the publisher was "untrusted". The fix for this is easy. Logged in as administrator, go to the location of the executable file, and right click it. Select "properties". On the first tab of the resulting dialog, or at least on one of the tabs, there will be a button that says "unblock". Click this and hit "Apply". You can now run the executable from any account.

In the case of Problem #2, if you Googled it you would find a LOT of forum posts telling you how to disable User Account Control (the thing that prompts you for the administrator password in the first place). This is almost always a BAD IDEA, or at least an unnecessary idea. As you can see from my solution above, there are simple ways to make the UAC happy without disabling it entirely. If you disable it and an unwanted program tries to access system files, you will not be able to stop it or even know about it. The bottom line is, work WITH the system, not AGAINST it!

Also, you might want to take a minute to think about WHY the publisher is untrusted. In my case, I was installing the Eclipse IDE, which is well-known and widely used. On the other hand, if you just find a random program on the Internet and UAC pops up a warning, you need to think, "Do I really need this? Why am I installing it?". In other words, installing a lot of random crap and blithely disregarding UAC is asking for trouble.

Switching to Opera (for the moment)

Somewhat on a whim, I downloaded the Opera browser today. I've only been using it for about an hour now, but after going through the little tutorial they have I am pretty excited. There are a bunch of really cool features! Of course, if I ever bothered to read Firefox's tutorial I might learn some cool new things about it, too. :) The best thing I've found so far is the Speed Dial, which is a page containing links to a number of your favorite websites for easy access. It is displayed by default when you open a tab, and you can set the background to be any image on your computer! Here is a screenshot:

Another nice feature is the integrated email client, though I have no use for it since I use Gmail's web interface and can get there in one click from the Speed Dial. Some other utilities are a note-taking widget and a speed enhancer called Opera Turbo. Keep in mind that all of this is available by default, without having to go look for third party add-ons as in Firefox. Of course, there seems to be a plethora of after market widgets you can add as well.

The only potential downside is plugin support; I'm not sure how easy it will be to get Flash and Java working. On Windows it shouldn't be a problem, since I noticed during my last Windows period that at least the Flash plugin explicitly mentioned Opera in the installer. Linux might be another matter, though. I'll report back when I have time to document my struggles; due to homework pressures I probably shouldn't have taken the time to write this much, but oh well!  

If I piqued your interest, you can of course download Opera for free from http://www.opera.com/browser/. 

Best of the Internet, Vol. 1

I thought I would make a weekly series of the funny/interesting/crazy things I find on the internet. Since I only thought of this yesterday, this one will be short.

http://gaffa.org/reaching/ro_int.html
There are a staggering number of Kate Bush interviews here. They are very cool to read, especially I suppose if you happen to be a fan. Besides being an incredible musician, she is a wonderful person!

Bizkit the Sleepwalking Dog
lolwut?

Here are some things I made myself, because I couldn't find any other worthy entries on short notice.

New Computer

I'm going to build my next PC myself, I decided. I put together a wish list of components on Newegg, but I can't figure out how to get a link to it that doesn't require logging in as me. I made it public, but maybe it takes a while? I don't know.

I went for a high-end processor and motherboard, but skimped on the graphics and hard drive. Since the only things I really use a GUI for are web browsing and a tiny amount of word processing/spreadsheet stuff, I thought that's where I could save some $$$. But with a nice motherboard I leave open the option of improving later if I want. The whole rig ended up being $820, which was around my target. Now I just need to scrape together the money from somewhere. ;)

If I can figure out how to link to the wish list, I'll put it here for everyone's perusal.

Game of Life update

I finished refactoring the code, and have uploaded the new version to the Bitbucket repository. There isn't much difference in functionality, but the design is waaay better. Also, I made a pretty epic wiki with instructions for downloading and running the program. Hopefully it is clear, but if not just yell at me (here, there, or via email) and I'll fix it. It's hard when you're the developer to figure out what directions there need to be. It is all easy-peasy to me! ;)

I'm hoping to make it so the user can choose the background and foreground colors; that may get implemented tonight, unless I get too tired.

The Game of Life

I made a Java version of Conway's Game of Life. You can download it in all it's glory from my repository on Bitbucket: http://bitbucket.org/nfmccrina/gameoflife/overview/. The executable file is in the Downloads tab. It requires the Java runtime from Sun (of course). You can get this from java.com, but really, doesn't everybody already have it? What, you don't? For shame!

I'm currently refactoring the code base, since I had thrown it all together haphazardly and it was a bit of a mess. You can download the source code from Bitbucket too, if you want.

First Post: Rationale

Though I am still extremely suspicious of any and all forms of "computing in the cloud", it is sometimes nice to have some form of web presence. While not having a Myspace, Facebook, or Twitter account does give one warm feelings of superiority, the fact remains that it is lonely at the top. So, this is a sort of compromise. A place I can interact with people while not succumbing to the annoyances of social networking sites.