Chris's Blog

Well it seems that live writer is working how it should. It's a very easy to use application. Yes, something new for MS. Although, after hitting publish on the previous post it did return an error message telling me that it hadn't posted the blog entry. Something I did find amusing after checking it had.

So a couple of screen shots,

A nice easy to use insert

The add plugin takes you to this website that lets you download additional plugin's for your LiveWriter software. I've yet to find a plugin I find useful. I do however like the link called "Insert Map..."
It's excellent. So here's a birds eye view of near where I live... :)

The menu bar is the usual sort of MS thing.

This software has made life slightly easier for posting blogs, it has inbuilt spell checker. Something I missed sorely in the web typing. It also lets you save as you go along, so no more typing out a huge blog, hitting submit, and losing the whole dam thing.

It's also made it easier for letting staff add content to our internal blog at work. They no longer get lost with all of the menus. With this they type, spell check, add pictures and then hit publish.

I picked up some beta software from Microsoft the other week. After installing it and realizing that it doesn't actually work with Serendipity blog software. After spending 5 minutes today and finding a link on the website www.s9y.org. Live writer is now working with Serendipity. If you follow this link, http://s9y.org/210.html. And Live Writer can be downloaded from here, http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/

Still playing with LiveWriter so expect some crap blogs whilst I play with the software.

Well I've finally given in and signed up for Face Book. I don't think I've spent so much time on a website messaing around, looking for people, saying hi to old friends, ignoring some other people that you have no want to get in contact with. I think I'll get bored with it soon... or at least when things get busier at work. As it's half term at the moment, no kids + no staff = relaxing time. Next week will be busier, a day out in London, followed by a few drinks in the evening up in town.

I guess it's back to work now... :(

Finally, somebody has created a fix for suspend to RAM for the HP nx7400 laptop.

Stephane Graber here wrote the fix. So wahoo. :)

Did you know that apt-get in Ubuntu had an easter egg?!

Try running apt-get moo and see what you get.

Ubuntu have today released Feisty Fawn. Lots of new features. One of the features I like the look of is this,

"Windows migration tool: The new migration tool
recognizes Internet Explorer bookmarks, Firefox favorites, desktop
wallpaper, AOL IM and Yahoo IM contacts, and imports them all into
Ubuntu during installation. This offers easier and faster migration for
new users of Ubuntu and individuals wanting to run a dual-boot system."

This tool will hopefully get more people saving the cost of upgrading to Vista and moving over to use free Open Source software.

For a full list of new additions to Feisty Fawn have a look here

So as you know I got a new laptop supplied for work. One of the down falls to this was having to have it turn up with Vista on it. No dramas, we can re-size the partition and then it will have Ubuntu installed on it. Great. I've now been using Ubuntu more on the laptop than Vista. It's easier to do things. I've resized all of the images that we took in NY (blog to come about New York when I get time. Have a look at the pictures here, My Gallery), all through command line and it doesn't take long at all. In Windows you'd need to have Adobe Fireworks, and go through everything.

So running Ubuntu you get all the software you could ever want for free. One of these being some software called MythTV It's awesome. I've been playing around with it on my laptop and it runs so quickly. It has a MySQL backend to it as well. It's now tempted me to buy a TV tuner for my Media Center that is hidden behind the TV and is now having Ubuntu installed as well speak. Although we are now going through the 2nd install attempted as it seems to have a problem with the ACPI on this motherboard. Before I was able to start installing Ubuntu though it seemed that my media center decided to have a bit of a fit, all usb ports stopped being picked up by windows and the PS/2 port decided that it would be a bad idea for it to work. So we are now using a new(ish) Mother board. Lets hope I can get it working!

I finally got around to ordering my new laptop from work. Not a bad delivery. Ordered on the Thursday afternoon at about 4:30 and turned up at around 9:30 on Friday morning. Really impressed with the company Printware

I've ordered a few things from them. All of them I've ordered late and have turned up early the next morning.

So back to the new laptop. It's an HP Laptop, Model nx7400 So unfortunatly it came with Vista installed on it. But I thought I'd keep it for a while as I'm not sure what it's like. It took an hour from the first switch on to get to the desktop. Ten minutes after the first boot up it was having Ubuntu installed. I went for the alternative CD isntall. 30 minutes we are sat at the Ubuntu desktop. The only problem is that the wireless doesn't work out of the box. :( This is where Neil over at Netvis came in really usefull. He managed to get the wireless up and running in a few minutes.

The laptop as a whole is very good. Sturdy keys, quick, huge screen that is crystal clear.

More will be posted about it once I've used it some more.