BananaBlue

I almost signed up for BananaBlue today. It's an online supermarket, for Australia, which services my area.

I'd just been shopping. It's really nice to be able to browse about to see how much things will cost. They offer BPay, all sorts of EFT, and credit card payments - the BPay was what hooked me. It also looks like there's a way to just buy your re-occuring items.

The site design looks like arse, but I really don't care.

I couldn't sell Chloe on it though - $8 AUD was a bit too hefty for her. As she put it "That's a nice bit of steak..."

Trac wish: a $%%# link and a milestone template

I don't know why we don't have links to milestones, and I really want prebuilt templates for milestones.

Guest Rant: Alex vs. Zend

Alex writes:

Dear Zend,

I work in a company where we all (Editor: except the super awesome Dan) develop using the Zend IDE and for the most part it is a fantastic piece of software.

The most frustrating thing fucking painful; like chewing glass thing that we all find (and this came out of a over lunch conversation) is how the tabs behave.

It is almost super impossible to use the tabs, once you have opened more than about 6 files. We're all hyperactive goldfish. What are we meant to do with 6 files!

So I'll be needing to switch between two related classes that I'm working on. I'm working on file1, and I go to click on file2 and what happens... the whole row shifts to the top, and the top row shifts to the middle.

This makes it impossible to navigate easily between files, and keep track of what we've just been working on. Boy, does this shit me.

Here's how you stop me going all Reservoir Dogs ear-scene on you:

• Don't. Make. Them. Move. At. All.
• Don't consider a career in law enforcement

Thank you, that is all.

--Alex

Me vs. Ubuntu (Dapper Drake)

Gripes:

• Why is it so hard to set up dual monitor support? I need a GUI to prevent me from screwing up; and the option to 'preview these settings'.
• I want tortoisemerge. tkdiff, and others... suck.
• It would be really, really handy to have an option to 'copy windows shortcut keys'; straight off the bat. It took me a while to work out how to set up ctrlD (show desktop), ctrlR (run something).
• I wish gedit had the tab increment/decrement plugin enabled straight off the bat
• Gaim 2.0.0 and firefox 2.0.0 are nowhere to be seen
• Setting up an application to run with wine should be easier
• Give me a get started guide that points me to very similar to windows truetype fonts.

No other major hiccups in swapping.

MySpace

This article on Myspace makes me angry.

1. They drop apache, mysql, perl for... ColdFusion, SQL Server 2003, and Windows
2. They get a shitload of users, all doing a lot of read/write operations. Replication will fix it!
   
3. Shitloads of users. Let's uh, throw hardware at it. Yeah, yeah, hardware. Hurray.
4. Shitloads more users. The login system must go on it's own database.
5. Shitloads. Uh... SAN, anyone?
6. Ubershitloads. Uh. Ahm. MEMCACHE TYPE THING!
   
7. Shitloads more. .NET? YES, .NET! and SQL Server 2005! and 64 bit architechture!
8. Oh look, billions of dollars. Yes please.

Instead of doing exactly what blogger does - when you change something, it's written out to disk and never rendered again; unless it changes; they simply kept adding hardware.
WHY!! Are you seriously telling me that this takes uberbeast hardware to support? Rubbish!

1. User makes a comment
2. Stuck in database for a moment; with whereever it needs to be added to.
3. Rendering farm reads database, authors files; pushes out static html to webservers.
4. Removes from database

... no more dynamic bullshit.

Easy.

Open Office Calc Enhancement - stop pestering me and do what I say

Every time I open a CSV, I get prompted to format the stupid thing the way I want.
I just hit ok. I have never in my life reformatted the CSV - maybe I've done
that *after*, while 'editing'.

For users like me:

• If I use the open dialog, I should be given an option to 'launch format helper' (checkbox) / advanced. This would prompt me as it does now.
• There should be a 'reformat' type menu option, which launches the same UI as #1
• The current UI prompt should include a 'use these settings by default' checkbox
• Once I've set my defaults, I should never be pestered again unless I explictly 'erase defaults'.

Issue 62729

Open office calc enhancement - find it!

Say I've searched for "beans", "frogs" and "fish".

I hit ctrl + f, and I start to retype 'bea'.

Open office should autocomplete for me, and show all previous search keywords
starting with "bea".

To see how this would work, go to your location bar and type "goo".
You'll see google.com come up, as well as others.

Issue 73543

Gaim whinge pays off

Me:

Autoprofile looks to be a very useful plugin. Unfortunately, the maintainer
appears to have been busy and has more or less let it slide.

- how much effort would be involved in making it work on the latest
gaim?
- is anyone able to do so?
- does anyone know a better way to get in contact with the author and
give them a friendly hassling? (on the site; contact info doesn't appear to
reach them)

I know I'd certainly love to make use of it...

Gary Kramlich:

I talked to Casey tonight, and will be attempting to update it for a
release for beta6. This will be done via the sf project since I am now
a developer there as well. In any case, there is going to be a bit of
leg work, so don't hold your breath expecting it to come out right when
beta6 does ;)

See thread unmaintained plugin: autoprofile

What do you hate about Open Office?

Comment away!

FIXED Open Office Calc Bug - stop stealing my selection

1. Highlight several cells
2. Ctrl + f(find and replace)
3. Check entire cells
4. Advanced options
5. Check 'current selection only'
6. Find something that isn't there, ie: data = "aa","bb","cc"; search = "dd"

Expected:

• You are notified that you have no matches
• Your selection remains intact

Actual:

• You are notified that you have no matches
• Selection is lost

Issue #73542

Open Office Calc Enhancement - shut up about CSV already

When I save a spreadsheet to CSV, only the active sheet is saved. The first time
I ever did it, I might have cared about the warning, but now I do not.

Please allow me, in a similar fashion to firefox, to elect to never see this
message again via a checkbox. It should, ideally, default to checked.

See also: 54761

Issue 62729

Open Office Calc Enhancement - read my mind with text selection

This applies to 2.0.4

When you have a selection of information, Calc should be clever enough to automatically determine you want to find & replace within that selection.
It should also be very easy to correct that assumption if you have highlighted cells, but want to find & replace in the entire document.

1. Highlight information
2. CTRL F (find and replace)

Expected:

• The 'advanced options' UI is expanded
• Only in current selection is automatically checked
• Since advanced options is expanded, you can really easily uncheck 'current selection only'

URL:
Issue 73541

Help Wanted: PHP / Rails developers in Adelaide

If you have skills in PHP 5, or have built something decent in ruby on rails, then we're looking for you.

In short...

• We have a Really Big Web Application which supports about 25% of the residential home loan valuations done in Australia
• We've got a lot of smaller projects on the drawing board where rails experience is a definate plus
• We're in Adelaide.

... and we need you. Interested? Email a resume and a few links to things you're proud of, and we'll see what we can do.