Tech Blog

It has been just over a year now since my last post.  If you have visited my blog before, you’ll noticed that I have switched it from MachBlog to Wordpress.

What seems to be a sudden change has been, actually, a long period of testing and contemplation of different blogging solutions.  Being mainly a CFer, I seriously considered several ColdFusion based blogging apps, as well as a JAVA based solution, Blojsom.  While they are very good I was convinced that the right solution for what I needed was Wordpress.  Why?

Even though my CF-Angel tells me not to go with a PHP based blogging engine, the truth of the matter is that I just need a solution that works well, adapts to changes in technology and blogging trends (ie Social media/micro-blogging) and is easy to manage. Wordpress is very well known and used, stable with tons (literally) of plugins and templates right off the bat.  I really don’t want to modify the code under the hood to get what I want and this seems to have everything I need want so far:

• Easy plugin install (over 4,000 of them and I can search & install them right from the admin)
• Easy theme switcher (thousands of them free)
• Easy import from RSS feeds (I had to write code to import the comments though)
• Permalink support (pretty URLs)
• Multiple RSS formats
• Twitter plugin (better than many of the plugins I’ve seen from other blog engines)
• Facebook plugin (various plugins & features)
• SEO plugin (powerful) (continue reading…)
  

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I know this program has been out there for sometime, but I just learned about it today and I’m in love!

Launchy is an open source application launcher for windows. If you are a Linux user it works similar to the “Run Application Dialogue” but on steroids.  It won’t only looks for programs but you can customize it so that it indexes any file type on any directories that you tell it to.  By default it only indexes .lnk (shortcut) files inside the “Start Menu”.  In my case I use eclipse to code and it sits on my “dev” folder, so I just added the extension “.exe” and the directory where “eclipse.exe” resides and voilà, eclipse was indexed instantaneously.

To get to the directory options and other stuff you need to right click outside of the search box area.

Another neat feature of Launchy is that you can browse through your Drives, just type the drive letter (”c:\”) or something like “my documents” and you’ll start seeing your content and folders. On top of that, if you are in the need of some quick calculations, just type any numerical expression inside Launchy and see the results.  Now you know why I love this tool.

 

Below is a list of tips they list at their site and the download link:

• Search Google
  • Type in google, then tab, then your search query and press enter
• Check the Weather
  • Type in Weather, then tab, then your zip code or city,state and press enter
• Search other sites
  • Other sites you can search include wikipedia, msn, yahoo, amazon, netflix, imdb, and more.
• Browse your computer
  • Type in c:, then tab, then a folder or file, hit tab, and continue
• The Launchy Calculator
  • Did you know that Launchy has a built in calculator? Type in some algebra and see what happens!
• Index your Bookmarks & Folders
  • Directory: C:\Documents and Settings\user\Favorites
  • File Type: .url
• Index your Music
  • Directory: My Documents
  • File Types: .mp3 .aac .ogg
• Index your Pictures
  • Directory: My Documents
  • File Types: .jpg .gif .bmp
• Index your Documents
  • Directory: My Documents
  • File Types: .doc .pdf .xls .ppt
• Index custom Commands
  • Directory: Your Custom Folder
  • File Types: .exe .bat .lnk
• And more..
  • Please see the readme file for more tips and tricks with Launchy!

 To download Launchy go here http://www.launchy.net/

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Even though IE7 has been out there for a while now, many users still haven’t upgraded and I don’t blame them.   That means that we, the web developers, have to ensure our applications work on both versions.  The only problem is that Microsoft only allows you to have one or the other, yes it sucks!Â
Fortunately, some folks have made multiple installations of IE possible with a simple installer.  This tool let you install multiple IE’s all the way back to version 3 and you can run them all at the same time!  I know, you don’t need to go that crazy but you can pick which versions you want to install so most likely you will only pick IE6 (you have to install IE7 separately).

You can download the installer here:
http://tredosoft.com/files/multi-ie/multiple-ie-setup.exe

To get more info:
http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE

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Google's new feature for Google Maps allows you to get a street-level picture for a particular address, and not just any picture, is a 360 degrees view.  You will notice the new button "Street View" next the  "Traffic" button in the maps, where available.

How are they doing it?  They have a team ofdrivers with multiples cameras attached to the top of their cars to get every angle.

Street View is only available for major roads in Miami, San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, and Denver.  They will be adding more cities soon.

Google Maps

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VirtuaWin is a Linux like Virtual Desktop manager for Windows.  This is one feature that I got used to and use all the time on Linux but was lacking of on Windows.  I have tried other solutions but they were always buggy so I gave up until I tried this one.  I have only been using it for a couple of days but so far is working great.  I was able to customized some shortcuts (i.e. switching from desktops, moving windows from one desktop to another, etc.)

The best part of all is that VirtuaWin is Free (GPL), so give it a try http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/

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On Ubuntu if you press the key combination: Alt+F2 the Run Application dialogue window will appear (You can think of this as the “Run” dialogue from Windows but better!) Now you can run any application by just typing the name of it. For example if you type
nautilus
you’ll get the file browser program.

Even better lets say you want to modify a file/folder were you don’t have permissions as the logged in user, so you want to use root to edit    files/folders you can run the application as root by typing
gksudo nautilus
instead.

If you’re like me you’ll love this since it’ll save you clicks here and there.

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I just installed Swiftfox which is a version of Firefox optimized for various CPU Architectures.

Whether it's better or not I don't know yet, some people says it is though.  I have decided to give it a try since I know FireFox will start drinking your memory once it's open for a while specially if you have several windows opened. I haven't seen any benchmarks between the two browsers yet.  Let's see how it goes.

If you have any info on pros/cons about Swiftfox, please drop a comment.

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