Spellbound is a great spell check addon for Mozilla Firefox.  It works for any web text entry area.  My friend justice had showed it to me quite a while ago, but it didn't work when I was using htmlarea so I hadn't used it much.

I just reinstalled spellbound, and am happy to say it works on shadyvale.org when using the new rich text editor.  So install the spellbound addon, and blog without questioning spelling till your done writing.  Then right click, and select "check spelling", or hit ctrl-shift-F7.

Note: Installation is a little funky if your on Linux, because you'll most likely need to log in as root to install the libraries and dictionary for the extension.  Simply log in as root, load up firefox, and go back to the install page.  For some reason they need to be in your firefox install tree, and therefore when you upgrade firefox, you'll probably have to reinstall as well.

Oh, and while I am at it, if you haven't already, upgrade to Firefox 1.0.5. 

Well after upgrading my photo gallery software this evening, I decided to emerge the latest gallery-remote.  Its a java front end for sizing, cropping, captioning and uploading photos to gallery.

Well, the now famous samr7 recently developed a drupal module called image_pub which implements the gallery remote api.  This means that you can now use gallery remote to upload pictures to drupal.  Very slick.  It can also be used with digiKam and the Windows Web Publishing Wizard.  And there was much cheering in drupal land.

So, easy upload of mass pictures into drupal's standard image module and then you can easily peruse and use those images in your posts, with the image_assist module, and the TinyMCE rich-text editor.  Its getting too easy.

Will I completely abandon the gallery software.  We'll see.  I need to spend some more time with drupal 4.6.2 and install the node privacy by role module.  That way I can post pictures and specify whether they are public or not.

For now, enjoy some pictures from my recent camping trip to Yosemite last month. 

Okay all you up and coming ruby developers. Time to add XMPP presence to your applications. :)

http://rubyforge.org/projects/jabber4r/

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. I am going to be blogging some tech stuff again on my personal blog, rather than just my workblog.

I thought it was not "just better" than episode I and II, I thought it blew them away. I thought it was very well done. And the acting didn't get in the way for me this time. While its true you can't top Han Solo as a character, nor Harrison Ford as an actor from Episode IV-VI, I do believe that Ewan McGregor and Ian McDiarmid did a fine job. Ewan was really starting to sound, look, and act like Obi Wan. And Ian was practically as convincing as _the_ great deciever, with his extended web-weaving scenes. Hayden Christensen was not annoying this time, except perhaps in a couple scenes. Frank Oz is still Yoda, and I think this is the first one of the new movies, where they really got him right.

I think I agree with knobblyknees, that episode III includes all the necessary back story for watching IV, V, and VI. You might as well call it a quadrilogy. Episode III did more for the character development and explaining the history of the Sith and the formation of the empire than the first 2 combined. I thought it was hugely entertaining and the duals epic in scale.

It will be interesting if the imdb ratings hold, I assume that ratings would start off higher by die hard fans. But right now IMDB has Episode III at 8.2/10. Compare that with Episode II at 7.0/10, and Episode I at 6.4/10. Episodes IV, V, and VI, have ratings of 8.8, 8.8, and 8.1 respectively.

Its a bit strange to me to hear the word Theocracy popping up all over the place. While certainly not a new concept :), its not a word I have heard outside of theological contexts. Yet now it seems that the left is attempting to paint a "doom and gloom" perspective about the mixing of religion and government. That somehow the Christians who have been raising moral issues regarding law and justice are attempting to switch the United States from a Republic to a Theocracy.

Primarily this is a "fear, uncertainty, and doubt" (FUD) tactical campaign. But I can't help but think that some of it might be fueled by some of the incorrect interpretations of scripture which many Christian churches have adopted. Namely, the nationalization of the promises toward Israel in the old testament.