Pixel Pushing Monkey

I've been using Firefox 3 beta for a while now, and it's a definite improvement in memory usage and speed over Firefox 2. As expected, it's taking some of the addon developers quite a while to write new versions of their addon that's compatible with Firefox 3.

Granted, I don't use a whole lot of Firefox addons, but there is one addon I couldn't live without: The bookmarking addon from del.icio.us. Since I work on multiple computers at work and home, del.ici.ous has became a valuable tool to keep all of my bookmark in one place. It's also much more flexible than Google Bookmarks.

Now there is a beta version of the del.icio.us addon for Firefox 3, available here:

delicious blog - Firefox 3, del.icio.us, and you

Just follow the link and install the new version of the addon, so far it's been working great. With the availability of this addon, my switch over to Firefox 3 is complete.

It took me a few hours to upgrade to WordPress 2.3 last night. I don't have the coding prowess of some out there, so it wasn't exactly unexpected that it would've been a painful undertaking. However, upgrading to WP 2.3 was even more difficult than I had expected due to the new tagging mechanism built into WP 2.3 (which I had known about beforehand, but wasn't expecting any issues).

Upon installing WP 2.3, I immediately was being fed errors due to the use of Simple Tagging plugin that I had before to manage tags. I had to disable Simple Tagging, then import the tags into WP's new format. The import process was pretty easy and smooth. However I immediately found that there are no tag management UI built into WP 2.3 at all. Good thing that someone had already wrote a plugin to help manage tags, but it's perplexing that you would have a blog that supports tags without any UI that help manage tags.

Furthermore, the tag cloud display that shipped with WP has no options whatsoever. It just displays a cloud, it doesn't give you any customization capabilities. You can't display a list view that I had before (although arguably I may stick with the cloud view anyway). Although there are a few early plugins that can help you customize the tag cloud display just a little bit, none of them had the flexibility of the Simple Tagging Widget.

Of course, retaining Simple Tagging isn't possible, because the database structure that Simple Tagging used before is completely invalid with WP 2.3. So even though now there's an "official" tagging structure in place, overall it is much less effective and usable than previous third party implementations. Over time, there will be third party enhancments to the built-in tagging mechanism for WP 2.3, but I'm really disappointed in how bad the out-of-the-box experience is.

Everything seems to be up and running as usual. I was pleasantly suprised to see that my themes & plugins are all fully functional. The only difference seems to be the inclusion of widget functionality in WP 2.2, which makes the previous "widget-enabling" addon obsolete.

Another miscellaneous test for a WordPress plugin, with a cute picture!

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

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

The XBox 360 controller is really one of the best gamepad ever made for any console out there. The best part is it works on computers as well, where past efforts by various companies to produce a good gamepad has always fell short. You can't fully realize the XBox 360 controller's potential just yet on the PC though, as full support won't arrive until Windows Vista. The current PC drivers can't take advantage of all the buttons, and has trouble dealing with several of the input axis (getting analog stick & the paddle trigger to work, for example, is an exercise of frustration).

Of course, Microsoft isn't offering a driver for the Mac. However, just as SteerMouse provides an excellent third party solution for enhancing your mouse on the Mac, there are third party driver for getting the XBox 360 controller to work on your Mac as well. Spotty game support is more of an issue, but I'd imagine most of us will just be playing emulator games with that controller anyway.

Take a look at the Mac driver for the XBox 360 controller here.

There was one very, very annoying issue that I've found with MacOS X. When you tab through fields, it will by default, always skip over drop-down selection menus. Since so many websites uses this as say, the credit card expiration date field, it is extremely annoying as we get close to the Christmas season.

Just doing a bit of digging though, I came across the solution. Turns out this is a behavior that wasn't just browser specific, but applied across the entire OS. All you have to do is change the option of how your keyboard behaves. Tony Spencer has a blog post on how it's done:

"Un-skip" those dropdown boxes now!

As a follow up to my post about Word 2007 file format incompatibilities, there are some very clever people that found out how you can extract the text out of these new file formats. Go to MacOSXHints to read more:

Extract text out of Word 2007