August 10, 2007
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August 2, 2007
A baby with a blog
Our 5 month old baby now has his own a blog.
Actually our garden also has his/her own blog 
Engage screws up my keyboard
While on the subject of Start Menu replacement, I’d like to mention another tool called Engage.
It’s also a Start Menu replacement, but it managed to disable my logitech mouse and keyboard… After a while, I don’t know how long, I always experienced this after unlocking the computer, the keyboard didn’t produce any letters. After failing to use the keyboard I tried to use the mouse instead, but I couldn’t double click on anything anymore.
Really strange, happened several time, and the problem disappeared when I installed it.
Start menu replacement
I don’t know why, but I regularly try different tools that promises a more efficient Start Menu in Windows XP:
I’ve installed SmartStartMenu a number of time on several computer and liked it, It’s not really a Start Menu replacement but it basically does the same thing as the replacements do: lets you search the entries in the start menu instead of browse, thereby saving time.
Then read about Vista Start Menu somewhere and thought it looked good. Maybe I was influenced by all the hype about the Start Menu in Vista. Everybody is talking about how great it is to be able to search the start menu (and how bad it is with all the shut down options). So I installed it had in my machine for a while.
Then I uninstalled it. And I have gotten rid of SmartStartMenu as well.
Turns out that I don’t use them, I took a long time to figure out. It seems that I don’t need any of them. I’ve always had a pretty long list of ‘most used programs’ in my regular start menu, and that seems to be enough. I also have one or two icons on my desktop for some things.
I now think this is a more common situation than I first anticipated, I like tool, to try them out, as well as make my own, but are they really needed? Well, as long as I have fun trying them out, it might not be necessary for them to same time? right?
Follow-up on ReSarper and VisualSVN
I previously had some problems with the combination ReSarper and VisualSVN, so I’m happy to report that ReSharper 2.5.2 and VisualSVN 1.2.2 works like a charm together.
I have no idea what the problem was…
And then Snap went
In a previous post I was pretty impressed by snap. But after running it for a while, and encountering it on a number of other sites it starts to be annoying, previews pop up all around the place when you move the mouse. I really just want it on some select link, and the links should look good in the preview as well. So until I find out how to do that I have disabled it.
“Less is more”, “Small is the new big”, etc
New theme
I usually don’t think much about the appearance of my blog (or the rest of the website) but sometimes, like once a year, I suddenly find the time. This time it started with the Tag Cloud, I also wanted a cool ‘cloud’ where the size of the tag name corresponds to the number of post with that tag. I installed the keywords-tagcloud widget and Jerome’s Keywords (which is required by the widget).
Then it turns out that that my theme (ocadia by Rebecca Wei), which I’ve been pleased with for a long time, didn’t display it correctly, it became a complete mess.
So I started trying out a large number of themes many looked nice but almost everyone has some flaw, the don’t show pictures, don’t show pictures correctly, forces you to have the menu on a specific place or with specific content, don’t support widgets, makes your blog very narrow, etc, etc.
I now use Coyote Moon, basically the first one that worked, and as a bonus supports variable width.
As soon as i got it working, I decided to drop the Tag Cloud. Ironic…
