magpiebrain

Slow day today

As I’m putting the finishing touches to my article on Java & RSS. The submission deadline for the alterations is Monday but I’m hoping to finish it tonight so I can have the weekend clear.

Gluemeat gets stranger and stranger

Moko No Swallow

Colour sites and tool roundup

A whole array of useful sites and tools for you today.

• First off, this on line PHP script over at nickherman will generate a colour palette based on a given colour.
• Colours on the web is a great site which also hosts a colour wizard which from the description sounds great, however failed to work for me with a handy Microsoft VB Script runtime error ‘800a0006’ message. The text was also a little hard to read on the wizard page, but elsewhere the site had some great information
• EasyRGB is a very handy site packed with utilities such as a color harmony generator and tint search engine
• The online QuickColor tool generates a harmonised colour palette in real time….
• As does this very good looking flash utility over at Defence Mechanism. This tool can generate random palettes for you, but doesn’t necessarily generate web-safe colours.
• Finally, The Colour Schemer is a shareware app that also generates palettes, albeit as a desktop tool.

Note, applicable the spelling of colour from other sites has been retained :-)

Zempt Movable Type client

This is my first post using Zempt as a Movable Type client. Its working pretty well so far :-) My main reason for getting it is that it does spell checking, and as you may of noticed, I need all the help I can get in that regard!

CSS Resource roundup

Quite a few CSS resources have been sitting in my ‘to checkout’ bookmark folder for a while.

• Position Is Everything is a CSS resouce site focusing on the use of CSS for positional layout. The hosted Perched Upon a Lily Pad design which I first found out about from Simon Willson is especially good
• CSSShark has some CSS FAQ’s and tutorials.
• There is some good information over at the CSS Panic Guide, although despite the clean looking site I found it a little hard to navigate.
• The Nemesis Project aims to gather all sorts of CSS resources together. I haven’t looked in too much depth but the Meta Tag Generator hosted there is very handy.
• Eric Meyer’s CSS Edge aims to show the more exterme uses for CSS.
• Finally, Glish.com has some more CSS layout techniques.

Panda Anti-virus

My hunt for a new anti-virus program have lead me to Panda Software’s Titanium. I’ve installed the trial version and so far all seems well. I’ll let it bed in for a week or so and if I like it will probably POP over to amazon to pick it up. I would buy and download it direct from them, but the cost to download the product is the same as purchasing a normal copy, which seems bloody stupid to me – I’d much rather have a CD and manual in my hands, unless its a lot cheaper just to download it.

Java Roundup

A few product releases & other things of interest:

• XPlanner is a web-based product management tool for exterme programming. (source: Javalobby).
• The OpenSymphony group have released OSWorkflow 2.5.0 and OSCache 2.0 beta 1. OSWorkFlow is an interface-generic workflow engine, whereas OSCache handles the caching of dynamic content for websites. OpenSymphony are also in the process of moving their files over to Java.net. (source: Javalobby).
• The latest early access version of the Java Generics is avaiable at java.sun.com – developer connetion login required. From The ServerSide:
  

  
  Sun has released a new version of the Generics EA package. They have dropped variant type parameters, and added support for wildcard and bounded wildcard type
  parameters. The varargs syntax has also been made more readable. Also supported are: Enumerations, Autoboxing, enhanced for loops and Static Imports.
  

The hunt for an anti-virus program

Well, my yearly upgrade license for Norton Anti-Virus has finally come to an end, so I’m starting the search for a new anti-virus program. I’d like to use Sophos, as not only is it very good but its a British company, but they are a little pricey. If I don’t find anything better I’ll just renew my Norton subscription or upgrade to Norton Anti-virus Pro.

About posts

I’ve been planning to write some ‘about’ style pages for a while, and realised the best way to do it is with MovableType. I’ll create each one as an entry and stick their permalinks on the right side-bar, so expect them shortly. I guess if I was doing it properly I’d have them in their own blog. Anyhoo, expect a brief biog and technical about section soonish.

New Textile Plugin Beta

There’s a new version of Brad Choate’s MT-Textile plugin. Not too much that id use myself – I don’t tend to do that much formatting, although the footnote support looks handy, and would probably eliminate all those bracketed asides I keep using! I’m still waiting for a way to add a title to the href’s generated using the Page Name syntax, although I probably should of submitted it as a feature request!

Updated: Seems I missed this in the documentation:

Optional: text in (parentheses) following the link text, but before the closing quotation mark, will become a Title attribute for the link, visible as a tool tip when a cursor is above it.