Megabytes

I just downloaded and installed Codeweavers‘ Crossover for Mac. As a Mac-using website developer, I need access to the Windows environment to view my websites through the filter of the dark side.
I have been using Parallels since I purchased my Intel Mac this summer. And it’s great. Fast. Secure (with a few extra steps). And easy to use.
Just one drawback, without installing another Windows partition on my Mac, I can only run IE6 or IE7 in my Windows XP environment.
It was at a MacForce class on running Windows on a Mac that I heard about Crossover and decided to give it a try.
My plan was to run IE6 in Parallels and IE7 in Crossover. However, I’ve needed to readjust since learning that IE7 does not work in Crossover. Instead, I will switch that around and run IE7 in Parallels and IE6 in Crossover.
IE6 installed flawlessly in Crossover. I chose the minimal installation. I must say, it is a little unnerving to see the Windows dialog boxes on my Mac screen. Did some minimal surfing to known and trusted websites. No problems.
Now to install IE7 in my Parallels Window environment. Easy. Again I surfed some known and trusted websites in IE7 and had no problems.
I have not tested keeping both programs open and going back and forth between IE6 and IE7 in the two environments. In the Codeweaver forums, I read about a possible runtime interaction issue, machine “getting confused about whether to relay packets to the virtual machine in Parallels vs. IE running natively on your Mac.” Although this individual, a staff person at Codeweavers, says he does run Crossover and Parallels at the same time without ill-effects.
Another day, I will try that. For now, it works well for me and achieves the results I was looking for. Looks like I’ll be purchasing Crossover after my trial runs out.

Fluidly-designed web pages automatically adjust the page layout and redesitribute the content when a user resizes the browser window. Unfortunately, any inline images are not included in this resizing effort. Wouldn’t it be neat-o if the images reshaped themselves when a user resized the browser window? Of course it would.

That technology is closer than ever. Two visual research scientists, Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir have presented their research at the recent SigGraph 2007 Conference held in San Diego this past August.

Check out this YouTube video of their presentation. Will we see this as a new feature in Photoshop CS4? Or better yet, as a Photoshop plug-in!

I did a little digging around in the WordPress DOCS area today. The online help and support for this blogging software is quite extensive. Not only are there DOCS which describe every facet of the app, but there is a discussion forum, too. Sign in and you can post questions to other WP users. Even without signing in, you can search the forum.

So I was digging around, looking for the way to add a graphical calendar to my sidebar. I like the look of a month view, where days that have posts are highlighted and you can view posts of a particular day simply by clicking on a date.

There are many options provided by WordPress for navigating the posts of your blog. The default settings include a search box right at the top of the sidebar, as well as to list Archives by month, and posts by Categories. That’s a lot of navigating.

Still, I added the calendar. And a few days ago, I added the listing of the 7 most recent posts. The sidebar’s getting pretty busy. I think I’ll keep all of these options for now and get some feedback from you.

Which of these options do you use when navigating this blog? What do you use when navigating other blogs? Do you like to read all the posts about astronomy? Perhaps you prefer to read all the posts that occurred during your 3-week vacation. Do you just want to see what I’ve recently written about?

Let me know. Because no matter what method I like, it is what you, my readers like, that is paramount.

There are so many chocolate-y good plug-ins for the Firefox browser. I have about a dozen that I use regularly. Let me tell you about a few.

1) Forecastfox
If you work in a windowless office, Forecastfox by Richard Klein and Jon Stritar, could be your window to the world. This plug-in lets you place weather icons in the status bar or the toolbar of Firefox. It’s inconspicuous, doesn’t take up much real estate, easily customizable and performs its service simply displaying understandable weather icons.

Hovering over an icon brings up a detailed and customizable weather report from AccuWeather.com.

2) Colorzilla
Here’s a quick and easy way to get RGB or HEX color codes. Alex Sirota’s Colorzilla plug-in places a small eyedropper icon in your status bar. Shift-escape enables the tool, hover over a color on a web page and color info as well as DIV ID displays below. A contextual menu provides easy copying of color codes as well as access to a color picker and a zoom tool. Nifty!

3) MeasureIt by Kevin A. Freitas
This was one of the first plug-ins I installed. When activated, you can measure in pixels the height and width of any element on a web page. This is useful for the web designer attempting to line up elements on a page or measure a logo or other image.

Cooliris Previews is a great browser add-on that pops up a link preview without clicking on the link and leaving the page. It is available for Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Flock browsers.