Categories
Geek

Geeky articles galore

I have a number of geeky postings on The Farm: The Tucows Developers’ Hangout. If you’re into that sort of thing, you might want to see today’s entries.

Categories
Uncategorized

Blogware’s New Rich Text Editor, Part 1

If you’ve used Blogware over the past week or so, you might have

noticed a couple of changes to the page in which you enter text for

articles, photo descriptions and reviews.

The original editor worked the way most web-based blog editors do;

you’d enter your article, complete with HTML formatting. If you wanted

a an entry that looked like this…

Here’s some bold text, and here’s some italicized text.

And while we’re at it, here’s a picture of one handsome fella:

…you’d have to type in something that looked like this:

Here's some <strong>bold</strong> text,
and here's some <em>italicized</em> text.
<img 
src="http://joeydevilla.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2003/12/joey.jpg">

If you wanted to get a better idea of what your entry looked like, you’d click the Preview

button to see your formatting in action. If you didn’t like what you

saw, you’d go back to the edit page, type in some more HTML, go back to

the preview, and so on. This back-and-forth is time-consuming, annoying

and feels rather like being in stone age, especially if you’re used to

using a modern word processor. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could make

blog entries is a more WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) way?

Blogware lets you do that now. Here’s a screen shot of the new rich

text editor as seen under Internet Explorer 6 and Windows XP:

Just so Mac users don’t feel left out (hey, I’m one too), here’s the same thing as seen using Mozilla and Mac OS X (“Panther”):

Just in case you’re feeling homesick for HTML source or need to use

some HTML formatting that isn’t covered by the controls offered, a

simple click of a button will take you from Display mode to Source mode:

For those of you using Windows, the rich text edior is available under Internet Explorer 6 and Mozilla 1.5.

Mac users who want to use the rich text editor should use Mozilla

1.5. It won’t work under Safari or Internet Explorer right now, but

we’re working on that.

Over the next couple of days, I’ll walk through the features of the

rich text editor and also show some tips and tricks. I’ll also be

updating the Blogware User Manual to cover the new rich text editor.

In the meantime, if you’re a Blogware user, give the new rich text editor a try!

(This entry also appears in the Blogware blog.)

Categories
It Happened to Me

Past self, meet the accordionist formerly known as Future Self

Back in July, I wrote:

Memo to my future self, six months from now

When you read this in the archives, be sure to say this to the cute

girl sitting in your lap: “See sweetie, before I met you I’d completely

given up all hope of meeting someone.”

Then cover her with ice cream and nibble on her bum.

The Redhead just pointed this out to me.

Um, what flavour, sweetie?

Categories
In the News Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Where "choice" means "my God-given right to direct access to the most impressionable and gullible marketing demographic"

“We’re restricting choice,” said Calla Farn, a spokeswoman for the industry group, Refreshments Canada, after Coca-Cola Co. and PepsiCo Inc. announced that they will stock Toronto school cafeterias and vending

machines with water and fruit juice, rather than with high-calorie

carbonated drinks.

Interesting way to say “we’re capitulating to demands by parents,

teachers and nutritionists” while getting a backhand “Dammit, I have a

right to make my money” shot in.

There are those who say that the vending machines are a form of

advertising and that advertising has no place in schools. I agree with

the principle — especially when the advertiser starts affecting school policy

— but I also have to be pragmatic. In an economic atmosphere where

people think they’re already overtaxed, how does a public school get

the money it needs?

(Full disclosure: I work in software, and they will take my Diet Coke from me when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.)

Categories
Uncategorized

Bloggie Campaign 2004

Yup, it’s the beginning of a new year, which means that once again, I’m campaigning for a Bloggie.

The Bloggies are are publicly-chosen awards given to weblog writers and

those related to weblogs. The awards that I think I’m eligible for are:

  • Best Canadian Weblog

  • Most Humorous Weblog

I

think that 2003 was a helluva year for the weblog, as it featured a

number of entries you’re certainly not going to find anywhere else. To

paraphrase the great actor Troy McClure, you may remember me from such 2003

entries as:

As well as earlier entries including:

Pretty

wild stuff. Can any other blogger boast these acheievemets?

Then again, I think Joi has, knowing him.

But that’s not the point. The point is that you get lots of entertainment bang for the no-bucks here at The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

All I ask for in return in a Bloggie nomination. Give the above links a

read,  and if you think I deserve a nomination, please head on

over to the Bloggie nomination page and nominate this blog!

Categories
In the News Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

More of "Burbs vs. Downtown"

In this earlier posting, I mentioned a series of National Post articles on what they called “the

eternal struggle within all of us: the choice between the monster

suburban home with plentiful parking or the modest plot in the city

with the coffee shop around the corner.”

Today’s offering is titled Never the commuter twain shall meet,

and contains a lot of reader reponses to earlier articles. Interesting

stuff, and I’ll need to carve out some time to throw in my two cents.

There’s also an article called It’s what’s inside that counts,

which asserts that yes, in the ‘burbs, the houses are often of the

cookie-cutter variety; it’s the spaces that people create within that

makes all the difference.

Categories
It Happened to Me

Dad Update

Dad’s had diabetes for a long time. For those of you not familiar with the disease, it’s most simply described as a failure to produce insulin (a discovery made right here in Accordion City),

which functions like a key to “unlock” the energy stored in

carbohydrates and sugar. Without insulin, you could eat your fill and

still be starving your body.

One of the side-effects of diabetes is that your organs will fail. In

Dad’s case, it was his kidneys. Luckily, his sister, my Auntie Beth,

kindly donated a kidney to him (kidneys are redundant systems — you

can live with just one).

Unfortunately, receiving a donated organ requires you to go on a

regimen of drugs that suppress your immune system. Without these drugs,

your immune system may start attacking the donated organ, mistaking it

for some kind of invasion. A suppressed immune system is essentially a

low-rent version of AIDS. Bacterial infections that would bounce off

most of us can make someone with such an affected immune system ill,

possibly fatally so.

Dad recently got an infection in his toe, and it just got progressively

worse. The whole foot’s no longer a pretty thing to look at, and the

infection’s making the rest of him feel ill. It was decided that either

some of the foor went, or he did. He was last-minute scheduled for

surgery last Sunday.

On Saturday, he noticed some numbness in his leg. Mom, who’s a pretty

observant doctor, gave him a quick checkup and noticed the signs of a

blood clot. She rushed him tot he hospital and the clot was removed.

However, over that period of time, his kidney was starved of blood and

wasn’t functioning at all. We’re currently waiting to see if they

kidney was just shocked by the lack of blood and on its way to

recovering, or whether it’s out of commission for good.

He had a couple of toes removed on Sunday — the thought of losing body

parts makes me cringe — and the doctors are waiting to see if they

have to remove more toes, or the foot, orf a bit of leg.

Dad was taking it as well as possible under the circumstances; he even

joked that he’d better not find his foot for sale at an antique shop.

He’s currently still in the ICU at St. Joe’s, and he’s sort

of fuzzy, drifiting in and out of consciousness. When he’s conscious,

he’s about as lucid as someone who’s just woken up. We’ve been able to

have conversations — he asks “How’s the job going? How was the wedding? How is your new girlfriend?”

For now, it’s a matter of waiting and seeing how his condition evolves.

His ICU nurse tells me that it’s good for him if there’s family in the

room, even if he’s not always conscious (apparently, it keeps him

better oriented), so I’ve been spending my evenings by his bedside with

my laptop getting work done and just being a smiling face whenever

needed. It’s the least I can do for a guy to whom I owe everything.

If you’ve got a spare prayer, wish, good thought or even a fung shui furniture move, could you please offer one for him?