Condray.net

I’ve been struggling for a while to get one of my favorite web frameworks, Perl’s Catalyst on to one of my favorite LAMP servers,  XAMPP with little success. With the help of Ishigaki Kenichi over at http://ppm.tcool.org/ I’ve figured out a way get everything running. Here’s how you do it.

1. Install XAMPP and the Perl Add-On.
2. Install Perl 5.8.8.820
3. Run PPM and add the tcool repository (http://ppm.tcool.org/archives/) and disable all other repositories.
4. Remove File-Spec
5. Run ppm-shell and install Catalyst-Runtime and Catalyst-Devel using the –force option
6. Disable the tcool repository and reenable the ActiveState repository.
7. remove Errno using the –force
8. Reinstall the latest version of Errno (1.10)

I hope this saves someone some time and frustration in the future!

I’m thinking about changing the RSS feed of the site to include not only the posts from this but some of my other social networking sites using Yahoo! Pipes. To do this I have to change my default feed and I’d like to get an idea of who’s currently subscribed to my feed. If you read this blog, please vote in the latest poll so I can see who’s signed up now. Thanks!

I’ve been working on moving my site to a new server and upgrading the guts of it to a full fledged Content Management System (CMS) named Joomla. I’m really impressed by Joomla and the functionality it provides. It has a lot of plugins to it that knit together various web applications into one convenient system. Modules that I’ve currently added are:

• Wordpress blogging software which now contains the contents of my personal blog and Japan trip blog
• Gallery2 image gallery which allows users to comment on photos
• Joomlaboard forum
• Polls
• Banner ads for Google and Amazon

I’m also eyeing the install of a few other modules as well

• Google Maps
• Wiki
• Battlefield 2 Leaderboard

There’s still a few more design tweaks that I want to make to the site and I have to recover all the user comments, but for the most part, I’m pretty happy with it.

Please answer the poll, leave a comment, or make a forum post and let me know what you think of the new site.

Lifehacker had a link to a program that I have been looking for for a long time, Taskbar++ . It lets you move your applications around on the task bar much like you can move tabs around in Firefox or Avant Browser. I really like this because there are times that you want all of one application together in the task bar or you want them in a specific order but you forgot to open them up that way. Now you can just drag them into whatever order you want.

Make sure that you read the instructions on how to use it on the Lifehacker site and not on the Japanese homepage. The Bablefish translation makes reading the instructions really weird.

I do a lot of work with Excel files and oftentimes have to paste its contents into Lotus Notes. When you do this it pastes the data in as an image file instead of just plain text. PureText is a great tool to take whatever you have copied to the clipboard and converts it into plain text. This is very nice if you’re copying from webpages or word documents and just want the words and not the formatting. With one extra keystroke you can paste plain text instead of having to take the time to go all the way to Paste Special. PureText is a highly recommened program and, best of all, its free!

In the notes of the PHP documentaion there is a link to a neat application called Uniform Server. It is a program that has a combination Apache server, Perl and PHP interpreter, mySQL server, and the phpMyAdmin program in one package. The nice thing is that all of it lives in one directory so that you can do development within that directory, then put on a USB drive and take it with you and run it on another computer. A very cool app!

I’ve recently had to rebuild my computer which required me to reinstall all of my software. Its given me the chance to update and try out a bunch of software that I think would be useful for everyone:

General

xplorer²

Do you like the tabbed browser feature of modern web browsers like Mozilla and Opera? This is sort of the same concept, allowing you to view your file system with one extra window pane. I love the flexibility and the ability to see more of my file system.

Notepad++

Hate Window’s built in text editor notepad? Don’t use vi? Then Notepad++ is for you. A much nicer experience than with plain ol’ notepad.

Gimp and GimpShop

Gimp is a neat graphics editor with a lot of the features that Photoshop has (well, at least the ones I can figure out). For its price (free), it is a worthy replacement for Photoshop. But if you want the full Photoshop experience for free, try GimpShop. It is a customized version of Gimp but with all the menus rearranged to look like Photoshop.

Internet

Firefox

Natch

Azureus

A darn good open source BitTorrent client.

FreeDownload Manager

Every so often I have to download a big file from a site with a flaky internet connection. This program will keep after that download until its finished. It also integrates with most browsers.

Avant Browser

Sometimes you just have to use Internet Explorer but the IE interface is awful. You can recover a lot of the nice tabbed browsing features of Firefox but you can still browse sites that require IE.

Security

Sygate Personal Firewall

Always run a firewall when you’re online, every little bit helps. The Sygate is a pretty good personal firewall with a high degree of customization in what you let through. It just got bought by someone so get the latest version while you can.

Games

PCGen

A really great d20 character generator. Its got just about everything from 3.5 (classes, feats, equipment, etc.), its customizeable, and its free!

Battlefield 2 Demo (BitTorrent link)

Man this is a really cool demo! Everything is gorgeous and lifelike, there’s lots of options for characters, and its a blast to play. One of the multiplayer games lets you start the fight from an aircraft carrier. How cool is that!