a cool and easy CSS trick

I was on Wired today, and found there drop down menus to look quite cool. The have a large beveled border on the top and left side, making it look like a box on an angle. Try it out, mouse over a link on the black bar...

As long as your over there, check out the office of three rings, maker of the pirate themed video game puzzle pirates.

playing with plone

I am still playing with plone, it it quite cool; however I had problems with the install, it ended up taking 5 hours on Friday to get it going. Since then, I played with it only a little bit. It feels like any other CMS out there, so I'm dieing to get under the hood of zope; but all this new stuff is to much to do at once.

Incase you are wandering, what took so long getting it installed was finding out I didn't have a python library needed to run plone. The Python Imaging Library (PIL) adds image processing, this is how plone can do things like rotate an image after you uploaded it to the web server. Cool yes? So far the best feature of plone is the ability to hide the site columns so you only have the data column across the full width of the screen. I thought about that one for a second and decided it can be done on anything with some good CSS + javascript code. Onclick width=100% or width=500px... or whatever it is.

Now I am moving on to xmlHttp, which is equally frustrating since I have to learn how to do it for each browser. Stupid non-standard code! Does anyone have any advice

cool stuff

While looking around at apple's website, I discovered the search field is now an interactive search box. It returns results of matching products broken down into catigories, and includes photos. Is that new?

Drobo is a company selling an external hard drive case that is hot-swappable and RAID. $400 is a lot, but not outrageous with all things considered. Thanks to Geek news central for that one.

Lastly, I know this is not really cool stuff, but I wanted to add it to this post. Everyone has been talking about safari for windows being very insecure, well, it's updated.

learning to learn

I went to look up what uses openid, I wanted to play with a CMS that uses it. I found plone, I saw that in order to install plone, I needed zope, and part of using plone and zope was UML. Now, to play with openID, I am learning UML to take full advantage of plone.

This sure feels like a round about way; but the amount of stuff I didn't know due to the paradox of inquiry is astounding! I only wish I had more time to learn it all.

what I liked the most from WWDC

while most of the features talked about were already known, There were new features announced reguarding .mac and I have already decided to drop that service... For me; the biggest things to come out of the keynote were quicklook, Stacks, and safari for windows. I'm hoping with quicklook I can edit id3 tags. Stacks is something I tried doing with OS X 10.1... Stacks is just a better way to do it. Safari for windows means there is now one more way for windows users to ditch IE.

10.0 had the ability to add folders to the dock; I forgot when it was I was able to right click on a folder, and get a contextual menu with all the contents; even sub-folders. It would have been nice, if it wasn't a right click....

One thing I am still waiting for is a full-featured program manager. Manually uninstalling programs sucks!

17 year cicada

so, one of the few down sides of living where I do is the noisy, all encompassing insects that happen every 17 years. We are about 2 weeks into it; it feels like it's been a month! The ground is littered with there dead body, holes from where the burrowed out, and outer shells. They live for 3-4 days after crawling from the ground. That is the only time they are hated. All the other days and years, they are fine.

Speech Accent database

Another website I heard of some time ago, that I never wrote down. This is a collection of various accents from around the word of people speaking the same English phrase. I went looking for this to identify if someone sounded like they came from greese... they did.
http://accent.gmu.edu/