Diary Products - Hannes Schmidt - Geek

Ubuntu 6.01.1 "Dapper Drake" DVD Torrents

Sat, 02 Sep 2006 00:57:27 -0700

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.

Relaunch of Diary Products

Tue, 28 Feb 2006 10:34:08 -0800

[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.

Tab Mix Plus: Tabbed Firefox Browsing the Way It Should Be

Thu, 26 Jan 2006 09:37:32 -0800

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.

Microsoft RTF Specification Nightmare

Tue, 08 Jun 2004 13:55:26 -0700

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.

CorelDraw 11 vs. Illustrator CS

Mon, 07 Jun 2004 13:29:41 -0700

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.