I was asked if I knew PHP and could help someone debug an error in their site.  I was ecstatic, no one usually asks for PHP help anymore.  So I went to help them, and low an behold, the source file they opened was like a foreign language.

Okay…  I understood most of it, but I was shocked at how rusty I was.

Lately, I’ve been working in Perl, Python, Common Lisp and MatLab.  The P* languages are my favorite so far, Common Lisp has some cool aspects, and MatLab is awesome at Math.

But I knew I had been doing some web development lately, but I couldn’t figure out why I kept getting even more errors when I was trying to help someone with PHP.  Shockingly, I had been using Python for far too much web development recently, and I kept telling them things you’d do in Python, and not in PHP (import being a big one)…

Anyways, I’ve been working on some new projects.  I’ll share them here once I get things setup and working.  I hope you’ll like what you see.  But in the meantime, you guys should download the latest version of Chrome, Safari, or a Beta of Firefox.  I’ve been dabbling in some HTML5 and whatnot (don’t get too hyped up, it’s amazing to me, but kindof basic).

I do love finding a program that I say, “Oh, I can do all of my needs in this one application.”  It’s awesome because I feel less bloated in a way.  Take for instance, VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop 5.  They both do the same thing, but VMWare Fusion has (in my opinion) a better Unity mode than Parallels’ Coherence.  But Parallels has better support for OpenGL and 3D Graphics on their virtual machines, but VMWare feels more stable with the features it provides.  So, what do I do?  I have both (and use the both evenly just to let you know).

Anyways, back on topic.

Word processing has always been an issue for me on a Mac.  Windows keeps it simpler, somewhat.

Word Processing on Windows

In terms of user interface and design, I think that there are 3 main holders of power in Word Processing on Windows.  There’s Microsoft Word, Corel WordPerfect, and IBM Lotus Symphony.  Sure that are some more out there, like OpenOffice.org and AbiWord, but they follow the trend, and don’t try to set trends.  You may argue that IBM Lotus Symphony itself is based upon OpenOffice.org, but the user interface of Symphony sets it apart.  Symphony has it’s own look and feel, not something like “Hey, use us, we look just like the expensive stuff.”  I think OpenOffice.org and AbiWord are great projects and very useful, but they don’t really try to stand out among the crowd.

All of them pretty much have the features I need, it’s just the interface or pricing.

I love the interface of IBM Lotus Symphony.  The only problem right now is how bulky it is.  I can’t use it because of how slow and clunky it feels.  If it were snappier, it’d be my word processor of choice, but right now, I just keep my eye on it hoping for speed improvements.

Corel WordPerfect is a great tool.  I know people who refuse to use anything else.  I could never really get into it.  I’m looking at it now, and I like what I see, but now I’m on Mac, so I don’t see a point in buying it.

Microsoft Word is pretty much the standard.  I personally don’t like the “ribbon.”

On Windows, I currently use AbiWord or OpenOffice.org (the build from Go-Oo).  Sure I bash them for following, but they’re reliable and useful.  I also don’t use Windows very much, so I just need something cheap to open up documents when I am on Windows.

Word Processing on a Mac

On a Mac, you get the same basic choices that Windows has, MS Word, OpenOffice.org (or NeoOffice), and IBM Lotus Symphony.  You also get a load of other choices like Nisus Writer, Mellel, Bean, Mariner Write, iWork’s Pages, Pagehand, and much more (not to mention things like Scrivener or WriteRoom).

MS Word is still the standard for most people.

OpenOffice, NeoOffice, and all the other derivatives still aim to provide the same feature set of MS Word.  I really hate the user interface on the Mac because it doesn’t flow.  Even though it no longer requires X11, it still looks like a Windows MS Word 97 clone.

IBM Lotus Symphony looks the same as it does on Windows.  I still love the user interface, but it’s still bulky and slow to run.

PageHand is a relatively new player in the Mac OS X Word Processing game.  I really like what it has so far, but it still has a long way to go.  I really need footnotes, headers, footers, and some other things that PageHand currently doesn’t provide.  I want to buy it, but I’m reluctant (although buying it would probably aid in development and get me the features I need).  Another one of my concerns, yet also my likes is it saves to the PDF format.  The actual markup is a comment in the PDF (I believe), which makes me concerned about necessary file size when sharing the document (but I can always Print->PDF I guess).

Mariner Write feels really old.  It’s still updated, but there’s times when I believe, that a meeting should be called, and an update to the modern age should happen.  Sure it’s friendly, but it feels like it’s designed for old people.  Not sure how to describe it, but I feel like I lose control in the wrong direction with it.

iWork’s Pages, on the other hand, makes me feel like I lose control in the right direction.  I really like Pages, but I don’t see me using it in my day to day writing.  I enjoy the interface, I enjoy the features, but when it comes down to some of the parts of the document I need to edit for classes, Pages needs a few more steps than what I want to take.  Mainly for custom footers and headers on every page, easy foot notes, and some other things (although I’m probably doing things wrong because I’ve been told it’s actually easy to do in Pages).

Mellel is a word processor that I keep looking at, trying, and finding myself hating for tampering with.  It’s a great tool, but the learning curve is too steep for me to make the jump.  I’d like to learn to use it, but I can’t find the time nor patience to do so.

Bean is a free minimal word processor.  It has the basic features most people need.  I think it’s okay for basic word processing, and it’s fast as can be, but it lacks the power I need.

Nisus Writer Pro is what I currently use.  I love the interface and the features, but it’s still a bit rough around the edges in comparison to some of the other things out there.  I rarely use images in my documents, but when I do, I always question why I’m trying to do it in Nisus.  Other than that, foot notes, headers, footers, and a lot of other things are easily.

I really like Nisus Writer, PageHand, and Symphony because the most common things I need to do are easily and readily accessible.  MS Word, OpenOffice, and some others have floating windows and a bunch of other things to customize regularly accessed or regularly changed  parts of a document creating too much clutter (in my opinion).  The person working on PageHand probably read my mind or something because they way it handles typography is simply beautiful to me.  I love the way it works.  I wouldn’t have bought Nisus Writer Pro if Symphony worked well enough for daily use on my computer (sorry Nisus).  Symphony is great project, but I think they need to work on making it more usable (or tolerable?).

My main issue with word processing on the Mac is that there are so many choices, and each choice handles things in its own way, which is both a blessing and a curse.  On Windows, it’s more of choose the one that opens the right file formats, or which one works nicely with your wallet.  On Mac, the concern is how do you, as the user, want your word processor to work with you (or how do you want to work with the word processor).

I think there are many great things coming out in the future.  OpenOffice is working on a new user interface (at least for Impress?), MS Office 2010 is supposed to come out soon, and PageHand is still relatively young and growing.  I haven’t heard that many rumors about an iWork ’10 (other than there probably won’t be one).

Anyways, what do you use for word processing and why?

I mostly bought it for CoverScout, Flow, and Tales of Monkey Island.

CoverScout

CoverScout is really cool, but I’m annoyed at the SongGenie integration thing…  I don’t want to buy SongGenie.  It should check if it’s installed and then decide whether or not to use it.  It also installs SongGenie by default (then tells you you have to pay for it after a trail).

Other than that, it’s pretty awesome.  It usually finds the cover I’m looking for instantly.  If it’s not directly on Amazon or Google images, you can launch a web browser, search for the image, and set it by clicking “Apply” from the web browser.  Pretty nifty.  It’s better than my previous way of searching through iTunes for albums with no covers, then passing the song name to a dashboard widget which would search amazon and yeah…  This ways a lot faster, nicer, and easier.

Flow

Flow is another FTP/SFTP/AmazonS3 client.  It looks and feels awesome.  I’ll admit that there are many similar clients out there, and many of them also boast the same features.  One main feature Flow has that other don’t is an internal editor.  Other’s (ForkLift, Fetch, etc.) allow you to open files in an external editor, but for some of the smaller edits, it’s sometimes useful not to have to launch a separate application.

How does Flow go beyond the competition?  Pretty much just in the user interface.  It’s beautiful.  Transmit feels a bit outdated.  Fetch is awesome, but there’s small things that irk me (mainly presentations of transfers, and I swear it’s not at fast, but it’s probably just me).  Forklift is also good, but there are tiny visual elements to Forklift that offset me.

In all honesty, I already own Fetch and Forklift and probably would have never bought Flow if it weren’t for the nanoBundle.  It’s beautiful, but it won’t cause me to go “Oh, I already own an FTP app, but Flow is just to beautiful not to buy.”  But now I’m using Flow, mainly because I feel that a nice interface will increase my spirits helping to produce better results…

Tales of Monkey Island

For those of you who don’t know me, “The Secret of Monkey Island” is about the only computer game I play.  Tales of Monkey Island being on the nanoBundle sold me.  That’s pretty much why I bought it.  I don’t like spending more than $20 on a game, so a $20 bundle with a game I was itching to get had me sold.

No screenshot yet because I haven’t played it (downloading it now).  I love the original game, and I’m hoping that Tales of Monkey Island is just as fun.

The other apps…

So there are a bunch of other apps you get as well.  I can see myself using RipIt, but I don’t normally watch movies, so it may just sit there…  MacJournal feels a little bulky.  I’ve never been a fan of journal desktop clients, especially big and bulky ones…  I might use Clips.  Never really tried a clipboard manager or anything like that because it was never part of my workflow.  RapidWeaver hasn’t been unlocked yet.  I might use it, doubtable, but still possible.  I’ve never been a fan of WYSIWYG or template editors, but recently I’ve been caught in a “quick make a page for _____” and would have preferred a faster method, but I’m currently looking at Flux for something like that (as it has more freedom than RapidWeaver).  For everything else, I use Espresso or Textmate.

I’m hoping to take a break from everything, but there’s a lot to do to prepare for next semester.

So yeah…

Final grades came out today.  I’m proud of myself.  I’m hoping to raise my GPA up a little more to be in my happy zone, but it’s sitting at a safe level right now.

Still working on a poem for the Transformations Project.  I was told it good right now, but I still feel like it’s missing something.

As for videos comparing VMWare Fusion to Parallels, VMWare Fusion just published an update that was supposed to fix a lot of stuff.
I couldn’t get Team Fortress 2 to run well under Fusion (it kept glitching), but it ran fine under Parallels.  The new update (3.0.1) is supposed to offer a big boost in speed and whatnot.

The more I compare Parallels to VMWare, Parallels seems much better.  The only issue I run into is that Parallels will crash more often, although I’m guessing it’s the same reason why it seems better.

Both are awesome, but I guess it depends on what you’re doing that determines which one you want to buy.  Here are some viewpoints and yeah.  Don’t take me on my word, both offer trials, but this is just from my experience.

Developing

If you’re developing, I say go with VMWare Fusion 3.  VMWare Fusion 3 feels more stable and crashes less on me.  Parallels is pretty stable, but I run into a few quirks every once in a while (mainly with how the windows move or programs closing without notice).

VMWare Fusion also offers some cooler integration features (in my opinion).  Both show the windows notification area, but VMWare introduces an application menu as well (which works on Linux as well, at least Ubuntu).  Parallels shows the start menu if you click on the icon in Mac’s Dock (while in Unity), but it shows the Windows start menu, not feeling very Mac-like.  Okay, okay… that’s not really development related, but when I’m testing stuff, I like feeling some connection between everything.

As for speed, Parallels does feel faster, and it does perform some tasks faster, but it’s not as stable.  I’ve had Visual Studio crash a couple of times so far while it’s pretty stable in VMWare Fusion.

Gaming

Not that I do much gaming.  Parallels wins.  That sums it up.  Sure VMWare has made tons of improvements, but it’s not as good as Parallel’s.  I’ll post a video running some stuff in Parallels, then running in VMWare.  I play some simple games, like The Secret of Monkey Island, and there’s a difference.

So if you’re gaming, then I suggest using Parallels.  Some of the bigger games will die or slow down (in both Parallel’s Desktop 5 and VMWare Fusion 3), but the games that do run tend to run better in Parallels.

Office & Productivity

I say go with either.  Parallels is less stable with some applications, but for general office and productivity applications, it ran well.  VMWare runs fine too.

If you’re buying it to run general Windows apps under Mac OS X, then pick either.  If you want to watch some wmv’s under it, pick either.

Linux Support

Go with VirtualBox.  It provides a really awesome Linux experience…  The only issue is it doesn’t integrate with Exposè or the Dock.  It does do OpenGL and DirectX (for Windows) though (I think).

If you don’t want to use VirtualBox (because you’re running multiple VM’s at once, or just want to spend some money), I say go with VMWare Fusion 3.  In my opinion, the features offered by VMWare beat Parallels making the Linux experience better.  It’s mainly just how they handle the “Unity” or “Coherence” modes.

Other Points

• When switching to Unity or Coherence, VMWare Fusion 3 is faster (at least for me).
  • VMWare has better integration with the Dock.  Applications minimize to their place in the Dock (so I.E. minimizes into the I.E. icon).  Parallels doesn’t do this.
  • Parallels has better integration with Exposè.  Overlapping windows aren’t drawn overlapping in Exposè.
  • For dragging windows, Parallels looks a lot nicer.  I tend to get a trailing effect with VMWare Fusion.
• For running and starting applications, Parallels Desktop 5 is faster (for things like Firefox, Internet Explorer and whatnot).
• In terms of stability, VMWare is better.
  • Applications tend to crash less.
• Feature wise
  • Windows Support: I think Parallels is slightly better at running Windows.
  • Integration with Mac OS X: VMWare Fusion wins in number of features and usefulness, Parallels wins in quality of features (definitely looks nicer).

Buying Advice

Like I said, it depends on what you’re using it for.  I feel safer with VMWare Fusion 3.  It feels more stable, but it is also somewhat sluggish.  If you’re developing, or just looking to run simple Windows apps, VMWare Fusion is good.

For gaming, I like Parallels better.  It’s faster, and the graphics seem smoother.  It also support OpenGL 2 on all versions of Windows, unlike VMWare which only support OpenGL 2 on Windows XP (or is it the other way around?).

Hope this helps you.  Don’t blame me if you spend but don’t like, there’s a free trial for both.

I like to carry around my computer, and my computers like to talk to each other (seriously)...  The only problem is that the IP addresses of the computers change throughout the day.

The easiest solution was to use DynamicDNS.  There's probably several other ways to do this, and you can probably use some free service with an easy to install script, but if I have a host that supports it, why not use it?

So this is just a modification of the script originally post on the forums.  I tweaked it so the settings are at the top (to make it somewhat easy to modify), and so it can update multiple domains (because one of the computers is setup to send stuff to the older domain, but I bought a new shorter and cooler one)...  The last ip file is also hidden in Unix/Linux.

So here's the script:

Chmod the file "chmod +x updateIP.py"

Add it to your crontab, I have:

0,30 * * * * /Users/scripts/updateIP.py >> /dev/null 2>&1

This runs the script every 30 minutes and redirects any output to null. Every 30 minutes is probably a bit of overkill (since I think the TTL is about an hour, and I'm not too experienced in the matters of DNS), you can probably run it once an hour or so.

So this let's my computers talk to each other. They steal and store files on each other. There's some other minor things as well that are cool.

It also allows me (and others) to SSH in without having to remember numbers and do some cool stuff, like compiling homework on a machine more powerful than our laptops.

My first looks at it aren't too impressive.  It's been quite sluggish for me, but that might just be the Windows XP VM I have.  Switching to "Unity" was about the same speed, exiting "Unity" was definitely faster.

The new start menu is cool.  Integration with the Mac OS X Dock is a lot better.  There's still the redraw issue when using expose and the windows are minimized or overlapping.

Applications don't seem to be starting up as fast since I switched.  Like I said, it's probably just me Windows XP VM.  I'll post updates if Vista has the same issue, or if a clean install fixes it.

I don't really see the "improved drawing in unity."  It's actually worse for me.  When I drag a window, I get even more lag than usual (like the trailing window outline).  The mouse does seem more responsive though.

There's a whole list of new features here, but I think a clean install will work much better than upgrading.

Updates:

Vista is definitely running faster.

Some of my likes:

• No longer have to tell people to call me at this number in the morning and another number at night (because I don't get cell phone service in my room).
• I can use it with Gizmo5 so I can talk to people from my computer if I want.  Kind of cool, but it doesn't work to well with my laptop since the mic isn't as good.
  • If you use this with the call feature from Google Voice, you basically can call people for free without using your minutes.  I'm not sure how I feel morally about this...
• My room phone only allows me to call locally for free, so I got a local number from Google Voice which allows me to call anyone from my room phone.
  • Or I can just use the call feature on the Google Voice page.
• I really like the voice mail feature.  It's a lot nicer than my current providers.

My dislikes:

• The SMS feature is okay, but without an awesome phone, it's like me e-mailing peoples phones (have to launch my web browser to use it)
  • It's okay if I'm in an area with Internet and no service.  This is more of a phone problem then a GV problem though...
• Call Screening.  I'm iffy on this one.  The feature is great for me, but people who have called me so far don't really like it.  I don't want to disable it, but yeah...
• When you call your Google Number to configure stuff or listen to voice mail, it's not as intuitive as it could be.
  • Google is known for keeping things basic, which is good, but I think there could be some cooler things added, I mean it's Google, right?
• I really wish there was an advanced setup for the "ring schedule."  I have classes on Mon, Tue, Wed, Thurs, but not really on Fridays.  But I can only pick times for "weekdays" or "weekends."

Overall, it's useful.  It's not something epically awesome or insane, but I'll use it.  The international call rates are cheap compared to what I've found so far (not that I do a lot of international calling).

It'd be awesome if they integrated it with Google Chat (and released an awesome Google Chat client for Mac and Linux).  I'm guessing they don't want to step too much into Skype's territory though.

Anyways, after I use it some more, I'll post some more updates.

Snow Leopard seems awesome so far (except that not all of the software I use has been updated for it yet).

The issue I faced today was the installation times.  When I installed Tiger, it only took 1 hour.  Leopard installed in 45 minutes.  Snow Leopard took 32 minutes on my iMac (pretty quick I guess).  On my macBook, it took 1 hour and 37 minutes.  The times for Tiger and Leopard are for my macBook.  My iMac is new and Snow Leopard is the first major upgrade on it.  I was really shocked about the whole 1 hour and 37 minute thing.  People were posting that upgrades were as fast as 13 minutes and the longest I heard was about 50 minutes.  So I allocated a good hour to do this on my macBook.  Just shocked.

I'll admit, the Finder and Preview run a lot faster on my macBook now.  There are some other applications that also run a bit snappier.  The boot time, shut down time, and connecting to a wireless network are also faster.  So it's definitely worth the upgrade.  Disk eject is now a lot more intuitive.  The preview in Finder is a great improvement (Expecially when uploading videos and stuff).

My only complain is that the installer didn't run as fast as it claimed it would.  I'll admit, I'm probably an anomaly because I do have some custom compiled things and modifications...  But that's on my iMac, not on the macBook.  So yeah...

Love using Snow Leopard, but let's hope that if I ever need to reinstall, it's a lot faster.  The installation itself was easy and simple, but the wait was killing me (out of eagerness to test).

Oh, and one quick questions.  Is anyone else (on a 13" macBook) experiencing issues with the Grid view of a Stack going out of screen?

[podcast format="video"]http://media.dorkify.com/personal/theOpening-iMac-s.mov[/podcast]

I was playing around with iMovie 09.

Some pictures: