Geek

It took me sometime to find Ubuntu torrents that work. I noticed that the .torrent files on the official Ubuntu server and its mirrors point to dead torrents. After some digging, I found this tracker to be most up to date. In case you're stumbling over this problem too, give it a try. It seems to be the official Ubuntu tracker.

[02/28/2005: Update - More Changes]
[03/02/2005: Update - Still Bugs in IE]

After this site has been using the old, boring, standard Drupal theme for two years, I am now proud to present my own creation: the new Diary Products theme. It uses the phptemplate engine and is a hybrid between table-based and CSS-based layouts as I am not a follower of the pure "Look Ma, No Tables" approach. There are still a few glitches here and there but overall I am quite happy with it.

I stumbled upon the Tab Mix Plus extension for Firefox yesterday and I fell in love with it on the spot. Finally there's someone who understands tabbed browsing and realizes what's missing in Firefox' default implementation. I urge the devs to incorporate this extension into head. This is not an extension, it's crucial! If you use tabs, go get it! If you understand the difference between Ctrl-Tab Ctrl-Tab and Ctrl-Tab-Tab, run and get it!

Some of the features:

• Session saver (When starting Firefox, it restores all tabs that were open when you quit Firefox)
• Undo closing a tab
• Open new tabs next to existing ones instead of at the end of the list.
• Ctrl-Tab moves to the previously active one instead of the next one in the tab list.
• Organizes tabs in multiple rows if you have many tabs open.
• Ctrl-W'ing the last tab doesn't close Firefox anymore.
• Customize mouse and keyboard events, tab font and color.

All of these are optional. If you don't like one, you can switch it off.

Have you ever seen a word processor other than Microsoft's own office suite member Word that can import an RTF (Rich Text Format) file properly? I have not. The reason for this lies in RTF's inherent complexity and its strong dependency on Microsoft's internal Word document implementation. The RTF format is basically a 7-bit-safe, serialized version of a Word document's in-memory representation plus some tweaks that ensure backward compatibility with older programs that read RTF files.

For my web comps I usually use Adobe Illustrator CS and I am quite pleased with it. Recently, I had the chance to review CorelDraw 11. The first time I ever used CorelDraw was more than 10 years ago and it must have been ancient version 2. The most recent version is 12. I reviewed version 11. For a client, I had to update a document created in CorelDraw 7, import it into version 11, apply a few modifications to it and do some streamlining. I was able to do the job, but it wasn't a very pleasant experience. Here's a list of nuisances.