Collin Condray’s Blog

Several of us went to the Old Spanish Treasure Cave and I took a few pictures. In a nutshell, not intentionally scary.

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!

A couple of weekends ago, we went to the Tulsa Zoo. The zoo was kind of lame but I think we had a good time and the day ended well with dinner at PF Chang’s. Here are some pictures. If you don’t have time to look at them all, the keeper is this one.

I’ve gotten a new Gmail account and I’m considering switching to it as my main email account. I’ve been using my current permanent email account for almost 9 years. I’m afraid to switch away from it because I’ve subscribed to so much stuff over the years, I might not be able to login to something that I need like a job hunting site or a forgotten password reminder.

I’d also like to switch because after 9 years I get a ton of junk email since my address has been floating around for years. My service has been getting better about blocking spam but I wish I could make it so where it blocks anything in Russian.

I’d probably get less spam with Gmal since it’s a new address. I haven’t really looked at Gmail’s spam blocking features. I assume they are at least as good as my current provider’s.

I also like the 2 GB of space Gmail offers. I don’t think I’ve sent 2GB of email in my entire emailing history. There’s also an ability to share files with your friends that sounds intriguing. I’ve also found a lot of interesting hacks in Make magazine that I’d like to try out as well.

I wish that it had IMAP capability and better usability with my Treo but I’ll probably switch soon.

What do you think?

Last week I was doing some training in St. Paul. One of the things we did was go on a few store walks to see how the stores have set up their displays. On one of these trips, the trainer pointed out a disturbing characteristic in almost every store we went to.

In most grocery stores, there are freezers in the ailes called “coffin cases” typically located in front of the meat, cheeses, and milk sections. When you look down into them they are usually stocked with frozen meats, vegetables, fruits, and other items that need to be kept very cold. When you’re in the store next time, look at back side of one of these cases, inside the refrigerated part, right below the metal lip. You’ll see the words “Load Limit” which has two arrows pointing out from it horizontally. The stores are not supposed to load anything above this line or else the item will start to defrost. In most of the stores there was quite a bit above this line, frozen turkeys were the worst culprit, that was in various states of defrosting.