According to this news.com article Microsoft will finally be releasing a plugin that allows for saving Word documents in ODF format. This is great news that many people have been waiting for a long time to hear. It will sure be nice to know that a file saved from Word in ODF format can be read by users who may not have Word.
The ongoing series of apple commercials are fantastic. The actors they have for both PC and Mac are great. Unlike most commercials these commercials are so entertaining I actually want to watch them multiple times.
See the latest ones about better results and counseling and big boy clothes
In my usage Google maps has been pretty stable. With all the people that use it there are bound to be bugs that are found. I found a blog link to a very intersting “bug” in google maps. Check it out. I am amazed that this was able to get through the QA team at google. Or maybe it is a hidden “feature”.
I’ve been a fan of serveral Weird Al songs but I saw his new one today “White and Nerdy”. I think this has to be one of the funniest parody videos I’ve ever seen. The video is so descriptive of so many people I know and in many ways myself.
Check it out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mBGODdzzVw
I’m definately not the best math student in the world but these “solutions” really made me laugh and feel better about the math skills I do have.
See for yourself: http://immense-world.blogspot.com/2006/09/mathematics-genius.html
I saw that google has opened their google transit service by publishing an API. I think this is a fantastic idea so I wrote UTA the following letter. Hopefully they will soon be using this service.
click more to see my letter.
I was asked how to detect if the flash plugin is installed. I found some pretty good info adobe puts out on this.
There are several useful articles here
http://www.adobe.com/support/flash/detection.html
This one is particularly applicable to detecting if the flash player is installed.
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=tn_14526
I’m glad they have this information because although most browsers do have flash installed developers should still play nice with those who don’t and they should espicially make sure that the user has the correct version for any newer features of flash that they are using.
Get your own pirate name from piratequiz.com.
part of the fidius.org network
Verizon called me to try to sell me the modem capability on my blackberry. They made it sound like it was free at first but then after I asked it turns out it is another $15/mo. Why the extra charge? The fee they are charging is already exorbant. Verizon should try to include more for the fee but instead they want to try to get every penny out of their customers that they can.
I was having trouble with maven today and trying to figure out what was going on because none of the error messages I was getting made any sense. After troubleshooting I finally figured out I somehow didn’t have a build.properties file. This was causing everything to behave differently than what I expected. I’m still not sure how this file ever got deleted in the first place. Luckily I was able to recreate it quickly.
So the moral of the story is to make sure you have a build.properties file in your home directory if you start having trouble with maven.