Testing the preview Performacing for Firefox extension

Just got the link in an email. The coolest features so far:

• Integrated del.icio.us bookmarks
• Integrated page info from Tecnorati

I’m a bit disappointed that they haven’t implemented a way to escape from blockquote yet. But I haven’t posted. The real test will be:

1. Whether extra line breaks work in WordPress.com
2. Whether editing posts works — ie, dates don’t get messed up, new blank posts don’t get stacked on top of edited posts, etc.

The above had me completely stop using PFF before.

Update: As of right now, it looks like everything’s working!

Update 2: The integrated del.icio.us feature is really cool. Now I don’t even really need the del.icio.us Firefox extension, even though it is just a bit more elegant.

PowerPoint is the worst application ever

I’m stuck production making PowerPoint slides for some presentation that my boss is giving tomorrow. I’ve long believed this, but it’s never been more evident to me than it is now: PowerPoint sucks. For a lot of reasons.

1) PowerPoint itself is not a well-designed application. If all you want to do is have a few bullet points, a cheesy theme and a picture of your cat, then PowerPoint is the app for you. However, if you need well-styled charts, graphics and text (not necessarily in an outline format) then PowerPoint will let you down. It’s automatic formatting makes things automatically ugly and difficult to read.

2) Bullet points are a terrible way to give a presentation. Graphically, a bullet point is useful — it makes text easier to follow visually by offsetting key points. But slide after slide of bulleted lists just bores. And not all information is perfectly hierarchical.

I’d recommend getting yourself a LaTeX distribution and using either the slides class or the FoilTeX package. But that’s just me — a guy who knows both how to organize information and how to use a computer.

WordPress

So I set up a WordPress install on GeneralDisarray.info. It was easier than expected and pretty fun. I still think I’m going to keep my WordPress.com blog as my primary blog — it’s free and hosted, and ever evolving — but I’ll keep the url that I set up to tinker with, at least until it expires.

I also made a custom theme, which was a little challenging to do quickly with no experience usign WP template tags. But I figured it out; WordPress is very well documented at codex.wordpress.com.

Pando: Potentially cool tool

Become a Pando Beta Tester | Welcome to Pando

Looks like Pando entered public beta today. I think Pando is a sort of personal bit-torrent client. You have Pando and so does your friend. You send him a link to your file and he can download it fairly quickly. It sounds like a good idea, but its success will depend on how quickly people catch on. For some reason people are unwilling to download free useful software, but will jump through hoops to clog their machines with virus-laden animated crap.

Fink

Fink is an application for OS X that allows you to run many Unix applications on your Mac. At first, I shied away from it because I was chasing the “it just works” aspect of using a Mac. But then I remembered the “it’s just free” aspect of using *nix applications, so I went ahead and installed it. It was suprisingly easy — just matter of double clicking on the .pkg that comes with Fink.

To install packages, you can either use Fink Commander (the gui package manager — similar to Synaptic on Ubuntu) or apt-get and dpkg. If you have any Linux experience at all, you know how easy this is.

And it worked very well. Now I can run Octave — the matrix programming language — and Maxima — the computer algebra system — on my Mac.