ryan's blog

I suppose I'm a glutton for punishment because for the last few weeks I've been running the Firefox 3 beta (v5). Under heavy load it was quite unstable (6+ tabs including Gmail, Gcal, etc). So I started using the *nightly snapshots* (aka Minefield), which for potentially explosive software is much more stable than b5.

BTW, the improved look and performance of v3, even in beta form, make it obvious this is going to be a significant upgrade for Firefox.

For those of us without cable TV but who still want to watch great media on the Internet, there's a great tool I've found. It's called Modern Feed. Instead of using Google or whatever to seek out the various shows, or worse yet trying to maintain bookmarks of all the sites that publish their shows online, this one corrals them all in to one place.

Ever since the web came along UI designers have had to change their tact from the desktop to the browser. Now the browsers are going onto every imaginable device. Websites are having to either produce many versions of themselves depending on the client, or produce one dumb-downed version that works on them all.

Here's a good article that discusses UI design issues for the devices of today and tomorrow: http://www.digital-web.com/articles/web_beyond_the_desktop/

I love Gmail and this morning came across this skin for it that makes it look really slick: http://userstyles.org/styles/5867

Google sites aren't coming up for me. Here's what I get after doing a whois:

Here's a good list of software for your geek toolbelt:http://www.runpcrun.com/free_IT_support_engineers_toolkit

Anything you use that is missing?

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/the-best-places-to-watch-documentary-movies...

Someone commissioned the building a "very unique space theme" desk and this is what they got:

Here's a handy cheatsheet to help you get the most out of Gmail!: http://r.evhead.com/hodgepodge/gmail-shortcuts.html

A server at Harvard was hacked, and to add insult to injury, the entire backup of the server was posted on bittorrent, with comments dressing down the sysadmin by name. Ouch! http://www.devicepedia.com/security/harvard-site-hacked-and-then-leaked-...

Here's how I got OSX working with an Intel D975BX2X2 and Nvidia video card.

The long-awaited Vista SP1 is out and lo and behold after installing it some users can't boot their machine: http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/showpost.aspx?postid=2848906&siteid=...

I'm always in the market for good desktop wallpapers. Here are a couple sites I use to get 'em:

http://caedes.net

http://socwall.com

Anyone else have any other sites they like for wallpapers?

The following outlines my setup of Drupal in a multisite fashion on the webhost Bluehost. This lets you serve sites from one Drupal codebase with each site having its own database, domain name / URL, and themes/modules/file store. You can even go a step further with Bluehost and allow different people FTP access to just their Drupal site.