May 2007 – Page 2 – Mostly Harmless

May 6, 2007

Not the rated G console

Gears of War cog Alek came over and last night I moved the XBox 360 from the bedroom back to the living room. I have not had much time to play Gears of War since coming back from vacation.

I got stuck on the first berserker. I know what I have to do. Dive left or right and stay out of it’s way, and get the berserker to crash into the doors that need opening. I just have some hand-eye coordination issues is all.

Naturally Alek was able to get past that point without too much trouble. It’s not as bad as my friend had it; his 9 year old son gets through it pretty easily too. Alek is only 15 years younger than me… I’ll just have to keep practicing.

We played in coop mode but I don’t like the way the screen is laid out. They cut the top and bottom into half for coop mode. On a 4:3 display (480p) that must work but on 16:9 display the area for each player looks too narrow horizontally. I left Alek playing around 11 PM last night.

This morning he was playing Super Paper Mario on the Wii in front of the kids. Wii is the rated G console; some how I don’t think Gears of War will be heading to the Wii.

May 4, 2007

Pidgin 2.0.0 is released

It’s released, get Pidgin 2.0.0 here.

May 3, 2007

XHTML 1.0 Strict and WordPress themes

WordPress themes are usually either XHTML 1.0 Transitional or XHTML 1.0 Strict. The first line of the generated web page has the Document Type Definition (DTD) sent to the browser to define which.

My main theme that I use FastTrack, was defined as transitional. Just for kicks I changed it to strict and figured I would use the W3C validation service to identify what needed to be changed to make it validate.

I did not have to change much. The built in TinyMCE editor produces img tags that are not XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant. For example an image will have the tag defined as

<img src=”http://blog.dembowski.net/wp-content/costco-harmony-720.jpg” title=”Logitech Harmony 720″ alt=”Logitech Harmony 720″ align=”right” hspace=”5″ vspace=”5″ />

The attributes align, hspace, and vspace are valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional but not strict.

In order to make it valid for strict I had to lose those attributes. In strict this is valid:

<img src=”http://blog.dembowski.net/wp-content/costco-harmony-720.jpg” style=”margin: 5px; float: right” title=”Logitech Harmony 720″ alt=”Logitech Harmony 720″ />

The align attribute is not valid for tag either, this requires another replacement with a style= statement.

In the theme I replaced one that was using  with .

The last thing was to change strike through and underline. I used to put in the post via the code tab <strike>text</strike> which is not valid in strict. Neither is underline. I replaced that with <del>text</del> to have a line through the text and <ins>text</ins> to get underline.

I’m not particularly concerned about XHTML compliance. This and playing with CSS entries is just part of my learning and understanding how this all works.

May 2, 2007

Pidgin IM client

Pidgin 2.0.0 beta 7 I’ve been using Trillian 3 Pro since it came out. It’s okay but I have problems with it’s stability and I suspect that AOL updated their protocol and Trillian has not kept up. Upgrading to Vista did not help, Trillian routinely crashes and I can’t get any spell check plug-in to work.

The appeal of Trillian is that instead of running multiple clients which are loaded with advertisements (I am a huge user of AdBlock Plus) I get to run an IM client that supports all those protocols and it has no ads.

The free IM client ~~GAIM~~ Pidgin is that way too except it really has kept up with the protocols. The current version 2.0.0 beta 7 runs well in Vista and looks good. I’m using it now for AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, and Google Talk. AFAIK it does not support the whiz bang features of video and voice. Since I don’t use those features anyway I’m not missing out.

The first thing the beta does is update my GTK+ installation. Good thing since the existing installation worked badly in Vista. I ran the defaults and installed Aspell also. The spell checker does the red squiggly line underneath words I misspell; important to me since I hate when people use “r u there” or “c u l8r”.

I know it’s instant messaging but do people have to kill the language that way…?

Pidgin comes with sounds for events such as when contacts log on or off, when a message is recieved or sent, etc. It supports plug-ins for things like setting window transparency, conversation color, iconify on away, and so on.

It’s all well thought out from a development that has been going on for months (not counting the issue with AOL and re-branding the product) and is a really good replacement for Yahoo, AOL, and Micosoft’s IM clients. When 2.0.0 is released in a week or two I’ll dump Trillian 3 Pro and just use Pidgin.

May 1, 2007

Quote of the day from Google

Google’s personalized home page gave me this: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”

– Abraham Lincoln.

Personally I prefer this one “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, and those are pretty good odds.”

– Bret Maverick

Month: May 2007 (page 2 of 2)

Not the rated G console

Like this:

Pidgin 2.0.0 is released

Like this:

XHTML 1.0 Strict and WordPress themes

Like this:

Pidgin IM client

Like this:

Quote of the day from Google

Like this:

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Search

Jan Dembowski