It’s released, get Pidgin 2.0.0 here.
Year: 2007 (page 14 of 18)
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 <p> tag either, this requires another replacement with a style= statement.
In the theme I replaced one that was using <p align=”center”> with <p style=”text-align: center”>.
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 <u>underline</u>. 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.
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.
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
Right after I put a post up about how dd-wrt rocks, I bricked my WRT54G v5 by playing around with the nvram settings. “It’s dead, it’s a late WRT54g, it’s passed on.”
Sigh.
Right now I have my buggy WET54GS5 back and running on the second floor. I’ll either shell out $60 for a WRT54GL or I’ll wait for draft-n to settle down and put dd-wrt on that. I’ll need a pair of them, one for the basement and one for the second floor… that could get expensive…
I’m disabling the Snap Shot plug-in. Some of the recommended links that are listed underneath the screen capture are freaky. One of the theme author links came up with “divorce” and something else 100% unrelated to that web site.
Every year Lily’s company nominates about 100 employees or so and sends them to a company paid vacation/off site meeting. These nominations are to reward them for outstanding achievements. The employees get to bring their significant others and this year Lily was selected to go.
This is the second time Lily and I went and we had a great time. The company sent us to Cabo San Lucas and Lily signed us up for the spa.
I’m not a sophisticated person. The barber is about as pampered as it gets for me (and it shows). So with some prodding from one of my friends we signed up for a pedicure, a manicure, and a massage.
It was a weird experience for me. Overall it was fine but I’m ticklish and kept laughing during the pedicure. During the massage I was asked if the pressure was too much. I said “No, it’s a little light” and she really worked on me. It did not quite hurt exactly but I now know what it’s like to go through a meat grinder.
Going to Mexico was a breeze. We had no hassle from the TSA, the transfer at Dallas was uneventful, and customs in Cabo was a snap. The most telling part of going was that we could not take water through the screening gate but we could buy bottles of water after the TSA and carry those potentially lethal water devices onto the plane.
(The TSA at the metal detector said we were allowed to buy water from the stands near the boarding gate, yes we took water on that way, and yes TSA war on liquids is too stupid for words).
Coming back was crowded and a little chaotic. We went through US customs and immigration screening at Dallas and once we were screened we got our luggage and went to the TSA guard like everyone else to go to our connecting flight. They do what you expect; they ask some questions and “randomly” select passengers for additional screening with x-ray of the luggage and some more questioning. We thought they picked us because we had a company provided lunch box with chicken inside.
Random, oh yeah, right. When we got into the waiting area and were lined up behind some people I told Lily “It wasn’t the lunch box”. They picked out every Asian passenger in the crowd. The only non-Asians were people like me who were traveling with an Asian (Lily is Chinese). Not a small amount of people either. That delayed our getting to our connecting flight in another terminal and we ended up racing to the plane.
At the gate I mentioned that we were delayed because of the TSA. The attendant said they screen randomly to which I replied “Yeah they randomly got every Asian”.
I did not complain to the TSA. They are not really law enforcement professionals like police officers, they don’t necessarily have an education past high school, and operate underneath secret and unpublished laws. Per other accounts they don’t have to explain to you why they abuse their authority or even really justify that abuse.
At Dallas they were not rude or unprofessional to us at all and aside from the obvious discrimination and delay I have no complaint. But had I made an issue of their “random” selections they could have gone nuts and I would have no recourse. See Homeland Stupidity for some better examples of problems with DHS. See Dr. Pournelle’s and others experience for more references.
Oh well. The vacation was great fun and like thousands of other travelers I just put up with this and hope that things get better.
If you have a supported wireless AP or gateway and want to have fun extending it without getting too deep into building software, give dd-wrt a try.
I have a collection of Linksys wireless junk, enough that I should consider becoming a stock holder. When we moved into this house I was thinking of running cables from the basement up to the 2nd floor. But this house does not have a simple means to run cable from the basement to the attic and I really don’t want to punch holes in the walls.
So I setup a Linksys WAP54G in the basement, another WAP54G in the guest room, and a WET54GS5 on my second floor where Lily and my computers are. Eventually I purchased a WRT54G v5 and replaced the WAP54G in the basement. I think I wanted to play with the idea of using the WRT54G as a replacement for my Linux gateway. The old WAP55G got put away on the shelf.
The second floor WET54GS5 was a 5 port switch bridge; it seemed like a good idea at the time. The thing is simple to setup but it spontaneously reboots often and support for it is really non-existent. It’s a dead end product.
The shelved WAP54G only has 8MB of RAM and 2MB FLASH which in the past excluded it from hacking. Now the website www.dd-wrt.com has a replacement firmware v2.3 SP2 micro image which fits and is a stripped down. Using these instructions, I installed the image on the WRT54G v5. It works really well and I’ve replaced the 5 port switch bridge with the WRT54G.
On the WRT54G the WAN connection is now configured as just another LAN port. I configured the device as a “Client Bridge” and connect it to the AP in the basement. At the WRT Wiki is a pretty good description of how to set it up. It’s been running without a hiccup for over two weeks now. My game consoles, the laptops, etc. all work fine.
I’m running the beta of Feisty Fawn (Ubuntu 7.04) with no problem at all. Everything is working fine and I’m keeping it on the T40.
Costco has the Logitech Harmony 720 on sale and I picked one up Saturday. Don’t bother looking for it on Logitech’s web site, it apparently does not exist there.
It’s a programmable IR universal remote with a color LCD display and is programmed via a USB cable to your PC. You create an account on Logitech’s web site, download the 7.2.1 version of the software and program the remote.
The downloaded software is not 100% Vista compatible. When you run it, it causes the window system to go from Aero Glass to the Vista Home Basic look and feel. Everything still works but the eye candy is one of the few appeals of Vista.
Easy to fix. The software is written in Java and includes a copy of the 1.5 JRE which is not Vista friendly. Azureus had the same problem.
- Download the Java 6 JRE and install. Just the JRE not the whole kit.
- Using Explorer go to the Directory “C:Program FilesJavajre1.6.0_01” (Java 6 updates might have a different directory) and copy all the contents.
- Now go to the “C:Program FilesLogitechLogitech Harmony Remote Software 7” directory and rename the jre folder to jre-old (just in case).
- Create a new folder “jre” and paste the contents from jre1.6.0_01 (step 2) there. The folder should look like this.
That’s it. The software runs fine now and I’ve used it to re-program my Harmony 720 already. Eventually Logitech will update the software (the web site says April 2007) but until then this works.
Now if I could figure out how to do this trick in Ubuntu, then I’d be satisfied.
