Cycle Quark

Paul Thurrott recommended Windows Live Write recently for blog editing, so of course I had to test. I have used ScribeFire for Firefox, Flock’s built in blog editor, MarsEdit on the Mac, as well as wordpress.com web-based editor. I am obviously not completely happy with any of my choices since I keep trying new ones.

I am writing this post using Windows Live Writer and it seems fine.  It seems to have all of the features that I would expect. Sometimes I discover problems after the post goes up, and it does not look like I expected.

Live Writer is supposed to work with a variety of blogging platforms. Setting it up to work on my wordpress.com blog was straight forward. I supplied the URL of my blog, my username and password. After a few moments, I was ready to go.

I work mostly on my Macbook Pro so I have to run Live Writer in Parallels, so I see a little bit of a performance issue, but it is not major.

Mahalo Daily is a short video podcast hosted by Veronica Belmont that covers a different topic everyday. One day it is hangover cures and another it is the perfect grilled cheese sandwich. Well I checked on the recent ones today and I saw that there was a podcast about SLAC. It is not as good as a real visit, but you should check it out anyway.

Flock is a web browser based on Firefox with built in integration with a large number of interactive websites. I have tested it with gmail, yahoo mail, wordpress.com, del.icio.us, and picasa web albums. So far it works ok. There is an integrated blog editor that I am using to publish this.

I used Time Machine today to restore a file I mistakenly overwrote. I have a laptop so my backups are not every hour, but more typically just one or twice a day when I connect my external disk after I get home. Nevertheless, I found a copy that was more up to date than the one I accidently copied over my good version.

I saw this quiz on Andrew Sullivan’s blog. He got 83% correct. I got 100%, and I don’t even like Jackson Pollack. The quiz asks you identify whether pictures were painted by a famous artist or an ape.

There is a nice article in the New York Times on the requested science funding in the President’s recently submitted budget. It discusses both the relatively high levels of funding requested and the difficultly that recent similar requests have had getting through Congress.

I saw this review of MarsEdit, so I decided to try it out. It is not a WYSIWYG editor, but it does a a very quick preview function. It can almost keep up with my typing.

I have been using ScribeFire which is a Firefox extension, but I have been moving towards using Safari. MarsEdit is a Mac standalone blogging client.

I attended a meeting of physicists yesterday, and I was surprised to see the distribution of laptop brands. It was 14 Macs, mostly MacBook Pros, 4 Dells, and 2 Thinkpads. It reminded me of this photo.

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I lived in Madison, Wisconsin for seven years so I know something about cold weather, but the only city with serious cold weather that I visit regularly now is Chicago. When I arrived at O’Hare this afternoon the temperature was 50 degrees. I went to my meeting and when I returned to my car around 6:00 PM, the wind was blowing hard and the temperature was 20 degrees. I went off to dinner and when I left it was snowing and the temperature was 8 degrees. The quick drop  in temperature was what makes it memorable.

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I thought I had upgraded Xcode to 3.0 which is the Leopard compatible version. After poking around I discovered the Tiger version was still installed. I removed the Tiger version and installed the new ones. I had already upgraded Macports to v1.60 which is the Leopard compatible version. My first test was building wget. Wget is a command line file fetcher, so it does not have a huge number of dependencies: expat, libiconv, ncursesw, ncurses, gettext, zlib, openssl, but enough to test the package system. I then followed with ncftp a command line ftp program, which shares a dependencies on ncurses with wget. It compiled fine.

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