It now appears that the cat and mouse have put aside their instinctive differences to work together towards powering up the name Google in the logo. Where is this doodle going? We’ll find out more tomorrow.

Today I started to discover Ruby. It is a programming language that is meant to be “language” oriented to normal people. You can actually take a 15 minute on-line Ruby tutorial via your browser over here. What a great way to fiddle a bit and see what the syntax looks like.

I do have to honestly say that I found several things about the tutorial very frustrating!

• You must go linear and do just what they say to get to the next step … hit a typo and you a hurting … I wrote the guy and suggested a next button is in order
• In lesson 7 or 8 he has a link that blows away the demo blog programming that you just typed in … and you have to back way up into 7 to get past it
• You actually have to type everything out … how about an autofill … I understand the value of doing, but this got monotonous
• it doesn’t exlain when we use single and when we use double quotes … it doesn’t help you to understand why we are using upper case sometimes and not others, etc.

Still worth a run.

Rick Dooling just pointed me towards the Ruby on Rails project. It is an open source web framework that will allow a programmer to rapidly work though a project with less effort in minor semantics of coding. As it says, it favors convention over configuration. I look forward to digging in a little further, but this reminds me of when I first heard of PHP. This thing looks like it may have traction to go big. Who wouldn’t want to use this thing? It appears to be overtaking .net and Java deployments.

That led me to this random site called Quimble.com where you can get a survey up and running in minutes. Interesting site, supposedly built using Ruby on Rails.

Open Office business suite of productivity software has been updated from version 2.0 to 2.0.1 just eight weeks into the run. The minor update is primarily to fix a few things and add some nice improvements. It now allows an IT manager to control whether users have access to all componants by permitting custom modifications to the configuration menu, and allows you to either resume in a document at the cursor position where you left off (great for authors and the default) or at the start of the document (great for readers). Most significant of all, it now has a new mail merge feature!

They have added better support for bullets when opening Microsoft product’s files, added improved drag and drop OLE behavior in the Impress/Draw componants, and now allow you to configure your default font size.

As you know I am likely going to review Prentice Halls book, Point and Click for Open Office right here in a few days. I like it a lot thus far. When I review a book, I actually read it. I am about 2/3rds of the way through it … and I don’t know how carefully I will read the two chapters on Thunderbird and Firefox to be honest, so probably in a couple of days. My first take at this point is that it is a good book, especially if you are switching from Word, or giving the program to your mother, friend, spouse, etc. hoping that they will actually use it. For heavier users of Office products, it is too light to be honest. Still, a book like this is a good starting point for most people.

If you want to buy a copy please use my link so I get a few pennies for my trouble 🙂

I recently did a makeover to two sites, TraverseLaw.com and WardropLaw.com. I was given the design to use for the first and used a friend to help me with the creative spark on the second one. I of course did all of the coding for both of them. I would appreciate any coding and usability comments about the sites. Are they usable? Do you experience any difficulties navigating around them or experience broken code? I don’t really need feedback on the looks of the sites as that is now set for the most part.

On that same thought process, a friend of mine over at em two design just showed me this site called YourSexyLife.com that they have completed. I really like that design. I think it is probably on my top ten list of all time favorite looks. The site is interesting because it is about living a full life, with sex or celibate, in a way that is sexy. As her tag line says, “sassy, yet classy”. It isn’t the typical type of site I would visit, and yet it somehow drew me in for a read. I was disappointed that she didn’t permit comments, but I guess with a name like that she is worried what she might get back. My friend was showing me the site to show me the quality she was able to obtain on the main gif image on the site. Impressive work!

Well we are on day two of Google Doodle #10. Overnight a cat appeared in the image and is about to get plugged in by the mouse who has the business end of an extension cord in his hands. Do we know these Tom and Jerry(ish) characters? Don’t you think they missed an opportunity to put the cats tail into the “g”?

You can see an archive of Google Doodles, and other Holiday Logos used on Google over the years. My all time favorite is still Google Doodle #7.

That reminds me, I should dig out our holiday logo. We are late this year … but then I just put up lights outside my house yesterday as well. I will leave them up for all 12 days of Christmas, so they will get some play time anyway.

Phishers are alive and well, and expecting to double their haul this holiday season! Just last week a domain we host was cracked and a phishing site was dropped onto the site. It appearred that as many as a dozen people dropped thier details before we could get the thing shut down. We of course worked backwards, found the hole and plugged it. It was impressive how quickly we were given notice of the issue by Godaddy. If you receive a phishing email, forward a copy to spoof at domain dot com, for example spoof at ebay dot com (obvioiusly reassemble that address). Both Ebay and PayPal for example will agressively pursue the site to shut it down, so the quicker you let them know, the quicker action can be taken to prevent loss to others.