Rue Plumet

I’ve used BibleWorks software on my computer since college. I’ve found it very helpful and fairly easy to use once I got the hang of it (there is a little bit of a learning curve to find the BibleWorks way of doing things, but it’s not too bad). It was extremely useful when I was taking Greek last year. BibleWorks is designed primarily around the biblical text itself. It has quite a few English translations, along with multiple Greek and Hebrew texts and language references. But what it doesn’t have is commentaries or much other reference material that is not closely related to the biblical text itself. That’s what makes Logos a great companion product.

I recently picked up a copy of Logos when CBD was having a sale. It’s another Bible-related software package, but instead of being so optimized for the study of biblical texts, it’s more of an electronic library. You can purchase several different levels of the product to start out with, each containing various numbers of electronic texts, and then you can add individual titles or packages at any time from there. They have all kinds of things available, including dictionaries, outlines, topical guides, atlases, word studies, historical and archaeological information, and devotionals. I purchased one of the larger initial sets, and then I’ve added quite a few commentary sets on top of that. I also eventually ended up buying several of the language references that I already had for BibleWorks in the Logos format so that I could have them available in both programs. It’s kind of a drag to buy the same thing twice just in two different formats, but having references like the BDAG (Greek lexicon) and HALOT (Hebrew lexicon) available with a single click in each product is extremely convenient.

So while I still love BibleWorks and everything that it offers, I’ve really found Logos to be a great second program to have alongside it. If I had to choose just one I would probably select BibleWorks (largely because of my interest in the original languages), but I’m very glad that I don’t have to choose one or the other.

So my retail copy of Office 2007 arrived today. With the release of Office and Windows Vista, Microsoft has apparently switched to these weird new plastic boxes. When you buy software from Microsoft, the only things you really need are the disc, the certificate of authenticity, and the product key. Microsoft used to put the product key on the CD sleeve and the COA on either the CD sleeve or the box flap. Now both of those are stuck to the silly plastic case. So before I could just cut the COA off the box and save the CD sleeve, but now I have to keep the entire plastic case? That’s just ridiculous. I guess I need to find some way to hack the box apart and keep just the little pieces I need.

As I mentioned previously, I just upgraded to Office 2007, and because I switched to a different Office edition to save money, I no longer have a current copy of Microsoft Access. I have a handful of Access databases that I use in a couple of programming projects, so I needed to convert those to either SQL Server Express or MySQL.

I’ve been using MySQL for quite a while for PHP projects, but I’ve never used it for a .Net project. So I decided to try SQL Express first because the programs that use the Access databases are written in .Net. I also already had the VB and C# Express versions installed on my machine, so I figured they would work well together.

SQL Express installed just fine and everything seemed to be okay, but with the Express version you don’t get a copy of query analyzer and you get a super-stripped down version of enterprise manager. So stripped down, in fact, that it does not have import and export. What the heck? How are you supposed to get data in and out? Well, I thought I would get sneaky and use the SQL upsize feature built into Access. That seemed to work okay and for a while I thought everything was fine until I discovered that it had truncated a bunch of my long text fields at 257 characters. Not good at all. I tried various ways of doing the upsize from Access, but no matter what I did the values were still truncated. So I wrote a quick utility to read out the values from the Access database and make a bunch of SQL insert statements in a text file, and then I ran that and finally got all of my data loaded correctly. Then I tried some of my views in SQL Express to make sure everything was working, and I discovered that SQL 2005 no longer nicely handles views with an order by clause. When you open the view it just ignores the order by and returns the rows in a random order. There are apparently some workarounds for that, but I was starting to get really frustrated.

So I installed MySQL 5 (well, technically I just upgraded my previous install of MySQL 4). The installation went smoothly and everything seemed fine. I tried to run the MySQL migration toolkit that lets you pull in data from other sources, but it told me that I needed to update the Java runtime on my machine first, so I went ahead and did that. It took less than five minutes, including the download, and it didn’t even need a reboot, so no big deal. With the new Java runtime installed, it let me run the migration toolkit and then it was able to pull in my Access database, including the data, in about 15 seconds. And the data wasn’t truncated. And it played nicely with my views. That went so well, I decided to try switching my .Net programs over to the MySQL connector. I downloaded the connector, added it as a reference to the projects, and then did a fairly simple search and replace to swap the SQL Server objects out for the MySQL objects. And then it just flat out worked.

So what did I do next? I completely uninstalled SQL Express. How is it that two products from Microsoft can’t work together, but MySQL had no problems whatsoever pulling in data from Access? I don’t know the answer to that, but I do know that I’m using MySQL for all of my projects at home from now on.

After using Office 2000 for many, many years, I finally decided to move up to Office 2007. I used Office 2000 for so long largely because of the cost of upgrading, but with Office 2007 Microsoft is now offering the new Home and Student edition that can be used for non-commerercial purposes. It includes Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote for $149, which is quite a good price compared to the regular versions (it would cost $329 to upgrade my copy of Office 2000 Professional to the 2007 version). Plus the Home and Student edition can be installed on up to 3 machines. The only thing I will really be missing from Office 2000 Professional is Access. I have a few Access databases that I’ve used as part of programming projects, but considering the cost savings, I plan to convert those to SQL Server Express or MySQL so that I don’t need Access at all.

The amount of comment spam I get on this blog has been increasing steadily for quite some time now, but lately it’s been getting even worse. In the past 24 hours alone I received 181 new spam comments, which is simply ridiculous. I had to do something because manually getting rid of the spam is a hassle, so I installed the Akismet spam filter plugin. Hopefully things will go smoothly with the new plugin, but if you leave a comment and it doesn’t appear within 24 hours or so, please let me know via email because it’s possible that the new plugin incorrectly marked it as spam (but it’s supposed to be pretty good, so hopefully that won’t happen).

I’m not crazy about the “river of news” direction that the latest beta of FeedDemon has taken. FD has offered newspaper style views for quite a while now, but until the latest beta, they were always offered alongside the option of using a more traditional email style view. With the release of FD 2.0 beta 2, the program has taken a dramatic swing towards newspaper style viewing, while at the same time removing options typically used to make email style viewing more efficient. I understand that there can be certain advantages to newspaper style viewing, but I think those advantages very much depend on the specific feed or type of feed you are reading. There are still some feeds, at least they way I read them, that are much better suited to an email reading paradigm.

Anyway, because of the turn the latest beta has taken, I started looking around at other options besides FD. After looking at many possibilities, I downloaded 6 that looked promising. I installed them, then loaded them up with my feed list and tried them all out. Some were not so great, and some were very good, but in the end, I still liked FD the best. Once you have a feed selected, it is by far the fastest reader of everything I tried (and I trust Nick will work out the current slowness when selected folders and feeds). My next favorite readers after FD were probably RSSBandit and RSSOwl. If those two readers ran a bit faster, they would be serious considerations for me versus FD. My biggest problem with RSSBandit was the delay between clicking an article in the list and having the content for the article appear in the browser window. FD is practically instantaneous and I noticed the (annoying) lag on RSSBandit every time I clicked on an article.

So for now, I will continue to use FD. I can appreciate the addition of river of news style features, but I hope that they are not added at the expense of email style viewing. I think both paradigms can successfully coexist in FD, and I hope Nick decides to add back a few of the old options and behaviors for email style reading.

When I originally bought my current computer, the first thing I did was wipe the hard drive and rebuild the machine from scratch. When I did that, I divided the main hard drive into two NTFS partitions. At the time I thought that would be handy, and four years ago, who needed 30 gigabytes of space on a single drive anyway? Well, over time I came to regret that decision, as software products got bigger and bigger. I started running out of room on the system partition, and I really wanted to combine the two partitions back into a single larger system partition. But Windows provides no way to resize an NTFS system partition once Windows is installed. So I started looking around at other options.

There are, of course, commercial products that can do what I needed to do, but for one simple partition enlargement, there was no way I was going to pay 50 or 60 dollars for something like Partition Magic. Eventually I found an open source project called GParted, and a version of the project packaged up as an really easy to use Linux Live CD. I did several web searches and all I could fine were positive comments and success stories.

So with good backups of everything safely burned onto DVDs, I blew away the second partition on my drive and then used GParted to extend the system partition to fill the entire disk. After running GParted, the first thing I did was reboot into a full check disk, and the check came back perfectly with no errors whatsoever. So now I’m right where I want to be. I have a single partition that fills the entire disk, and as a result I have a nice cushion of free space on my system drive. Based on my experience, I would recommend GParted as a great tool if you need to make changes to NTFS partitions.

• GParted

I know I’ve had a string of more “technical” posts lately, but after this one I hope to get some normal stuff posted soon. Anyway, I discovered an amazing Firefox plugin recently, and it really helped me out today, so I wanted to share my experience. I had heard quite a bit about the “Web Developer” plugin for Firefox, and I downloaded and installed it a few days ago, but I hadn’t used it yet.

Then I got a comment on my latest CoppemineSC post from someone who was having a fairly odd formatting problem with the plugin. He and I traded emails for a little bit and, based on a screenshot of the problem that he sent me, I started to think that the root problem was probably related to the CSS for his blog theme. So I visited his site and used the Web Developer extension to view the CSS for his blog, which worked very nicely. I eventually discovered that he was floating left all of the images in his blog, and that was really the issue. I have every different element type that is inserted by CoppermineSC coded with unique class names to try to provide flexibility, and it turned out that, as far as I could tell, adding some specific CSS for one of those class names (to clear left so the text would move back to the far left) would solve the issue. But how to test it? It was the Web Developer extension to the rescue again. It has an awesome feature that lets you edit the CSS for site on the fly, and then apply the newly edited CSS to the page rendering. That meant that I could try out my fix and verify that it actually worked. I have to say, that feature is amazing. It was a breeze to use and it was exactly what I needed.

The Web Developer extension has all kinds of other options that I haven’t had the opportunity to experiment with yet, but judging by my experience with the CSS portion of the extension, this one is a must-have for developers.

• Web Developer extension

I needed to access a private newsgroup the other day to get help with a software product. Newgroups are getting rarer every day as more companies move to bulletin board systems instead, but in this case I needed a newsreader, and I didn’t have one installed on my machine. Sure, Outlook Express and Thunderbird have newgroup functionality, but I was looking for something a little more full featured.

Several years ago when newsgroups were more common, I used the FreeAgent reader, but I decided not to use it now for two main reasons. First, it hasn’t been updated in several years, and second, it doesn’t support multiple servers. Since some of the newsgroups I need to access are on a private news server, using FreeAgent would make it difficult to access news on another server.

So I started looking around for a new newsreader. There are several commercial applications out there and they look very good, but considering how infrequently I need to access newsgroups, I was looking for something free. I downloaded a wide variety of possibilities and eventually found Gravity.

Apparently Gravity used to be a commercial product, but it has since moved to open source. I have to say, the product is great. It has everything I was looking for, including options for multiple servers, and more configuration and customization options that I know what to do with. So now I’m a convert to Gravity and I’m very happy with it.

I find it kind of interesting that in selecting my web browser (Firefox), email client (Thunderbird), ftp client (FileZilla), and now newsreader (Gravity), in every choice I ended up picking something from the open source community. And that’s not because I limited myself only to open source alternatives, it’s because those programs turned out to be the very best products that met my needs.

• Gravity Newsreader (download at SourceForge)
• More info on Gravity

I finally have all four of my image galleries updated to the latest version of Coppermine (1.4.3). It took longer than I initially anticipated because only two of the four themes that I use had already been moved to the new format. That meant that I had to manually convert the other two themes myself. Thanks to the great instructions provided at the Coppermine website, it really wasn’t too hard. However, it was quite time consuming to correct all of the errors and get the themes to validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

With the Coppermine transition complete, I now have all blogs and image galleries running the latest versions of their respective platforms. Futhermore, every page on my entire site now validates as either XHTML 1.0 Transitional, XHTML 1.0 Strict, or HTML 4.0 Transitional, which is great. I was thrilled to discover that Coppermine 1.4.3 now generates standards compliant code, because Coppermine had been the missing link in getting everything squared away.