About month ago I bought a new laptop, Acer 5520. It came with Vista Home Premium and I’ve been using it until last weekend I finally had enough. All and all the Vista experience was negative. I had lot’s of issues with the wireless connection and usually after resuming from hibernation, Vista was not able to find web site addresses anymore (tweaked a lot with DNS settings but there was no fix). The most serious issues had to do with power management. Sometimes the laptop wouldn’t shutdown when powering off or hibernating, only choice was to cut the power by force. Putting the laptop to sleep ended in blue screen of death.

There really wasn’t any reason I could think of why I should use Vista instead of XP. Only difference (in my needs) is that Vista looks “better”. Other than that there isn’t anything new, just more heavier OS. So now I’m using XP and everything works like a charm. I am however tempted to try Linux and after I read an interesting article from lifehacker, I might just do that.

Windows XP drivers for Acer 5520
http://www.acerpanam.com/synapse/forms/AcerDrivers/Aspire%205520.pdf

Run Windows apps seamlessly inside linux
http://lifehacker.com/367714/run-windows-apps-seamlessly-inside-linux

So here it is, new blog. I though I’d open new blog outside cubicreality.com. Every once in a while, I come across with some "interesting" information that might be worth sharing or just archived for my own use. That’s the motivation for this blog.

Anyway, I’ll still have to tweak these graphics a bit but you’ll get an idea on how it will look.

Update 9.5.2009
This was posted in Blogger blog. Those posts were imported to this site.

Until now, I’ve used FireFox addon called NewsFox. It’s been working fine but I would like to have a separate reader program. Today I noticed that FeedDemon is no longer shareware but freeware. I installed it and it seems to be quite powerful RSS reader, so I’m going to use it from now on. If you are looking for a desktop RSS reader, I highly suggest trying this one. It handles enclosures pretty well so it’s good for podcasts also.

FeedDemon
http://www.newsgator.com/Individuals/FeedDemon/Default.aspx

NewsFox – FireFox addon
http://newsfox.mozdev.org/

After I installed the Windows Live Writer beta 3, I noticed that the spell checker didn’t work anymore. The reason was the fact that WLW was localized to Finland. However I only write English text so I’ll need the English dictionary. Hopefully the WLW team will let users to choose the spell check language directly from the WLW in the future.

Currently you can fix this issue by changing the loc file. That file seems to only have a ISO 639-1 language code (codes here). By changing the code to en, WLW enables the spell checker.

Default loc file path is:
C:Program FilesWindows LiveWriterloc

I’ve used the Lightning addon for Thunderbird as my calendar for a year or so. Today I was browsing Lifehacker and found out that you can use the Google Calendar from Thunderbird. Lightning supports iCal which is also offered from Google Calendar, so it’s possible to import calendars to Thunderbird. However, it’s read only. If you create/edit events in Thunderbird, they won’t show in Google Calendar.
Fortunately there is a way to get around this limitation. There’s a Thunderbird addon that will let you to handle the calendar in both ways.

I’m thinking that I’ll replace the current forum calendar with a Google Calendar. It’s a lot more user friendly and more feature rich.

Thunderbird
http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/

Lightning
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightning/

Provider for Google Calendar
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/4631

  I’m here listening to Daily GizWiz episodes and thought to test the new version of Windows Live Writer. The newest build is Beta 3, released 5.9.07. It’s much more stable than Beta 2 and also the installation process went a lot smoother this time. There’s few new features and it work’s now in 28 different languages.
WLW is the one and only Microsoft application that I really like. The usability factor is really good. If you are a blogger I highly suggest to try this app.

Windows Live Writer
http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/

  Another new version I’m using is FileZilla 3.0 I’ve used the 2.x version for a long time and just last week noticed that 3.0 version is out. FileZilla is a FTP client and as far as I know, it’s the best freeware client. The 3.0 version now support drag’n'drop to other programs like CubicExplorer. That’s the one feature I was missing in the older version. Now there’s only one minor feature I’m missing. It’s an option to copy the http address of a file to clipboard.

FileZilla
http://filezilla-project.org/

I’m currently designing a database (MySQL) for the new version/bug/task tracking system. For that task I’m using DBDesigner 4. It’s a free open source application designed to visually build databases. And it’s written in Delphi . To bad I don’t have Delphi 7 installed, otherwise I could have fixed few "design flaws" in it. I’ve used it for few days and have had no problems with it, except for a small annoyance in the table editor.

DBDesigner is now part of the official MySQL tools and it goes by the name of MySQL Workbench. I haven’t yet tested it so can’t say how it works. It still seems to be in Alpha stage (???).

Anyway, here’s how my database look at the moment:

Well, it’s that time of the year again. For those who don’t know, ASSEMBLY is a computer festival, a demo party and a LAN party all rolled into one. It is four day party running 24h/day for computer hobbyists. Almost 5000 like minded people around the world come together here in Helsinki Finland. I never have been in ASSEMBLY myself but I’ve watched AssemblyTV from web many years. For me it’s a time to lay back, have few beers and do some fun coding.

If you are interested, you can watch AssemblyTV 24/7 (2.8 – 5.8.07). Read more here:
http://assemblytv.net/2007/stream-en

Here’s more info about ASSEBLY:
http://www.assembly.org/

Secure Login is a FireFox extension that adds similar functionality as Opera’s Wand has. Basically by clicking on the "key button" (or using keyboard shortcut), Secure Login fills the login fields with the saved password data and logs you in. There were some news last week about a "hole" in FireFox that let’s malicious sites to steal saved passwords (read more here). Secure Login "fixes" that issue by not filling the login field until the user tells it to do so.

Secure Login
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4429

found via Lifehacker

I finally took version control system in use for CubicExplorer. I chose SVN. Currently I’m using local repository but will move it to a server once I have the time and energy to build a new case for the hardware. I’ve been using this thing for a week now and it’s really nice. Currently CE has over 100 files in it’s source so it started to be a bit hard to handle. The biggest thing I like it is the log. Now I can write note on every bug fix or other change, which means there will be change logs for releases

I used to use a simple folder tree to handle different versions. Every once in a while I took copy of CE’s source folder and started to work in that new folder. I also had all the files in one folder so it was quite a mess. I decided to change the folder structure a bit so that source files and .dcu files are in their own sub-folders. It’s much cleaner now.

I’m using TortoiseSVN to do everything. It supports local repositories so there’s no need to use svnserve or Apache. Also I’m using a simple add-in for Delphi that adds menu with common TortoiseSVN commands.

TortoiseSVN
http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/

Delphi add-in for TortoiseSVN
http://delphiaddinfortortoisesvn.tigris.org/