Eric Mills

Wow, missed this last month, but hey better late than never. Toggl timer is now available as a gmail gadget. Sweet, no need to load up the toggl page anymore.

Just installed Firebug – again – have known about it for years but only ever used Web Developer’s Toolbar in Firefox. Really enjoy the instantaneous preview tweaks of a website, especially with CSS. Then you just go and plug in your code fixes in your favorite coding tools. Also added, via Adobe Air, Seesmic Desktop to manage more than one Twitter account at the same time because finally it supports Facebook in the same window pane. I like me some Facebook updates. And, OmniGrowl, though “nagware” is pretty cool if you manage blogs. You can have growl notifications of blog comments. That was my morning round of installs and experiments.

Pretty happy with the way the Great Futures campaign is shaping up. Take the pledge here.

Running into issues when designing matching sites that are of different tax statuses. 501c4 can only link to 501c3’s home page, not any specific about / contacts / etc. Results in a lot of redundant data. The problem? Dunno if it’s the organization’s legislation and tax issue, or the regulatory body’s problem.

• will be returning to ontology tomorrow – kind of like “coming home” on the internet #
• listening to Ten legacy ed and orig ed side by side – don’t know how I ever heard anything in the over-reverbed orig http://bit.ly/yDvfC #

• installing latest boxee release, really want to learn its API http://developer.boxee.tv/ #
• wishlist: button to easily add a Google search result to my to do list #
• just witnessed the most depressing thing: “unemployment camp” at the local coffeehouse. #
• @sethladd: did you ever get the twitter search bar on your twitter page? #

Your first stop should be open source mac, where you can load up on the essentials. I’d choose Firefox over Camino, because even though Camino is “more native” there isn’t a noticable speed increase or any shinier chrome. The next three on the open source page, Miro, Adium, are a must, and I find that Mac’s built-in Spotlight works well enough as an application launcher that I don’t need Quicksilver (although 99% of mac users swear by it). Add Handbrake, Burn, and Audacity and you can do just about anything.

Next up, I’d skip all the open source html editors, and get yourself a copy of Adobe CS3 or 4. To help with this, you can look for torrents in all the usual places, and a little app called iserialreader will assist in your serial activation. If you go this route for adobe or any other software, you’ll want little snitch, which is essentially an outbound firewall or whatever the proper term for such a thing is. Get version 2.0 or 2.0.1 because the newer version has a nagging feature. Use serials from iserialreader.

Because I’m the kind of guy who likes to see what’s going on underneath the hood, I install iStats from iSlayer, and activate the cpu, memory, and network montior in my menu bar (kind of like in Linux distros). This is a shot of what it looks like. That’s really it, because OSx is pretty cool.

Here’s the deal, I was at version 2,7,0 and wanted to upgrade to 2,7,1 but the auto update within Wordpress kept failing to connect, and once I finally logged in to Network Solutions account manager, and sorted through their pile of unorganized crap to find their upgrade option, there was no active link to upgrade because apparently they don’t support incremental upgrades.

Here’s what worked: I reset the file permission in the FTP manager and then Wordpress was able to upgrade automatically from within the site’s account settings (not Network Solutions settings). Lame.

Yay!

After a recent fiasco, the Rose site appears to be up and running again.