I Decided to take shadyvale.org from blue to green, being a lush valley and all that. The old logo didn't work, so I thought I would spend a little time and see if I could come up with something other than a plain text site name.

So I fired up the old inkscape, and played around a bit. I know so little about graphics or artistry, but was able to make use of the fine tool and took advantage of the Open Clip Art SVG Library.

I then set out to create a favicon (the little picture that appears in the address bar for those using cool browsers) which I have done previously in theGimp, and ran across a little web tool, FavIcon from Pics which did the trick. Just exported a png from inkscape and uploaded it to the site and was given a decent favicon.ico. It appears that the background is white instead of transparent, but good enough for now.

Note: IE 6 users, you will see an ugly site logo since PNG transparency was broken for years in Internet Explorer. Sorry, I am tired of providing work-arounds for the bug, I would highly suggest downloading a newer browser.

I have to say that the Drupal 5 rocks, the drupal core Garland Minnelli theme has met my needs, and with the included "color" module I was able to alter the colors of the theme without editing any css.

Anyway, let me know what you think.

So...Firefox 2.0 launches today. I downloaded the full release last night and have been playing with it a bit. I looks clean, works the way it's supposed to so far, but the jury is still out.

For one, my theme has not been updated, which bums me out cause it was Japanese and awesome. That's not F's fault, but still.

Second, the tabs are movable, which is cool. But each tab has its own close button which will take some getting used to.

To be more positive, the tabs are movable, and it's correcting my spelling right now (at least I think it is, although Google might be, who knows anymore).

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. 

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 have been interested in Wiki's for the last couple years, putting up an instance of UseModWiki on Aug 30th, 2002. I have mentioned several times that I like the free form accidental linking and quick content production of wiki. What I don't like about wiki is often the messy pages that it produces which overwhelm the average person with too much text. That was when I explored blogging for its easy of use and popularity. I have spent much time exploring [drupal] and its use of taxonomy to build and share knowledge by the use of categories. But have always felt that something in between would make a lot of sense.

Recently a conversation with [enigma] and his need to find and set up a wiki for use by CS folks at his University, has brought wiki to the front of my mind again. I still have a horribly complex twiki up for my homepage at work, and would like to do something about it.

The most successful wiki of course, beyond the original Ward Cunningham c2 wiki, is wikipedia.org. The introduction of "free linking", not using CamelCase for wiki linking and other site structure and design have cause it to be quite user friendly and successful at promoting content production.

Other useful wiki sites using the same engine and ran by the same folks include Wiktionary, the free dictionary, wikibooks, the free textbook project, and wikiquote, the quote repository.

I haven't explored any of these others much, but did come across a very humorous quote from Linus Torvalds. Well at least its funny if you have every followed Linux Kernel development.

"Note that nobody reads every post in linux-kernel. In fact, nobody who expects to have time left over to actually do any real kernel work will read even half. Except Alan Cox, but he's actually not human, but about a thousand gnomes working in under-ground caves in Swansea. None of the individual gnomes read all the postings either, they just work together really well." (2000) LKML