For many Mac users, QuickSilver is one application they can’t do without. It’s one of those amazingly simple application that be can extended to be extremely powerful, but still elegant enough to be used for its most basic function as a program launcher. It’s also one of those software that permanently changes an user’s behavior in how they interact with an operating system forever.

As I was listening to Windows Weekly podcast this morning, I found out that Leo Laporte had gotten a new sponsor (for at least this episode) that makes a software called “Engage”. It offers a bit of the same functionality as QuickSilver for those envious Windows users. Although most likely, Windows users never knew such an approach to program launcher existed, but Mac users dual-booting or virtualizing Windows on their machine is probably incredibly frustrated every time they had to reach into that Start Menu. It is still far less powerful than QuickSilver in terms of extensibility and integration via plugins into other programs, but at least it’s better than the bare minimum Start Menu that Windows comes with.

Engage - the automatic start menu organizer

Apple announced today that Leopard is going to be delayed (via TUAW) until October because of the focused effort in getting iPhone out in time.

Personally, I think the delay doesn’t really mean much. As much as I love to see a new OS from Apple, there’s nothing obviously wrong and needs to be improved in MacOS X now. Unless Leopard has some insane, awesome unknown trick up its sleeve, there aren’t any feature that I have to have now. There certainly weren’t any new features introduced by Vista that makes me say, “I wish MacOS had this…”

Getting iPhone out on-time, and without bugs is probably the most important issue to Apple’s continued success at the moment. A bad iPhone launch could set back years of good will that Apple has built up. It’s funny how much it takes to rebuild a company (dating back to Steve Job’s return and the cute multi-color iMacs), and how easy it is to destroy it and see it crumple (the entire 1990’s for Apple).

Courtesy of WoWInsider again, there are a bunch of news in regards to the upcoming 2.1 patch (that isn’t just relegated to the new instance contents). First up, there are all the profession changes in the new content:

Full 2.1.0 profession patch notes

Then there are some comments that Tigole apparently posted on the Elitist Jerk forum here, that talks about reducing the effectiveness of flasks and retuning the raid bosses. Lastly there are also some tidbits about new Darkmoon Faire cards that’ll be much better than the level 60 trinkets & items.

Most importantly:

Changes to fishing -

• The fishing timer has been reduced from 30 to 20 seconds and it now takes less time to fish.
• The fishing timer can no longer run through its duration without a fish biting.
• Fishing has been removed from Arathi Basin and Alterac Valley.
• You can now fish in Underbog.

Now the world is a better place.

Found this post on WoWinsider:

Instead of going for the usual hunter staples of agility, intellect and attack power, Grimhorn has invested entirely in green plus stamina armor… This has given him a whopping 1074 stamina, which means he has 17134 health (at last count.)

OMG… are you kidding me?!

Following that into the forum thread where he talks about how he plays, you can expect that his pet does most of the killing; but several good points were also made, that many of Hunter’s abilities doesn’t really scale with their stats. For example, all of their stings are just as usable, and even Aimed Shot doesn’t scale much with AP.

This goes to show, with some classes, thinking outside of the box really works well. Perhaps more than anything, it also shows how overpowered Hunters are, in that they actually have the flexibility to persue such an endeavor.

Via WoWInsider

Just updated WordPress to the newest version. I have no idea what security flaw the newest version fixes, but any security flaw fix is better than none. If you have not upgraded to WordPress 2.1.3 yet, download it here.

I used a plugin to import Blogger into WordPress by processing the RSS feeds that Blogger creates. Consequently, not everything is perfect. There are a few comments which are broken (no longer links back to the author of the comments), a few posts where the formatting is screwed up, and a few more posts were the links to other sites are no longer functional.

It’s unlikely that I will read through every single one of my post and fix those errors. If anyone cares to sort through them and sees some information they really need (a link to a certain site, for example), please let me know and I’ll attempt to fix them.

Meanwhile, if you are in the same situation, and are looking for way to import Blogger into WordPress, here is the plugin that will do a very decent job:

Import New Blogger to WordPress

I’ve pretty much stuck with Blogger since the beginning, before Blogger became a Google property, when it was one of the few freely available blogging tool that existed. So what induced this loyal Blogger blogger to finally change over? One would think that I was dissatisfied with Blogger’s capabilities, but that’s quite the opposite. In fact, the newest version of Blogger, with its tags & widgets, has all of the features that I’ve always wanted.

For the most part, my switch to WordPress almost represents a step backwards. Hosting my own blog, running it on a local database rather than one that will potentially last forever somewhere in Google’s massive server farm. Customizing my own templates, throwing in Plugins to coax WordPress into what I want it to do. In fact, WordPress doesn’t have any official support for tagging, and still relies on a somewhat antiquated category system to deal with post organization.

So why switch to WordPress now? I wish I had a better reason to justify it, perhaps it was just my urge to be able to tinker more than I could with Blogger, perhaps it was the notion of having complete control; maybe it’s even the possibility of implementing WordPress on more sites, where the owner doesn’t feel particularly comfortable with giving everything up to Google.

Whatever it is… I’m happy with the move, until next time, that is.

Meanwhile, here are some tips to getting WordPress up and running:

• Install Sidebar Widgets:
  This addon will give you the ability

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