Computer stuff today

HTML editing

I completely give up on WYSIWYG HTML editors. The only one that doesn't suck is Dreamweaver. I cannot afford it so back to using a text editor. I do not even like the text HTML editors on Linux. Blowfish does not offer suggestions. At best, it tries to make the closing tag when you type an opening tag. This is more annoying than useful. At this point I just want a programming text editor.

At work, I jot down some notes and finish them up at home in the evening. I have to remember to mail the HTML to myself at home. Tables have given me trouble with hand written HTML in the past, but it is better than OpenOffice.org's web editor which refuses to make any text without it being wrapped in paragraph tags. This can through tables in to disarray. Paragraphs go haywire. You change one thing and everything else may be affected.

Yesterday I used OpenOffice web editor and things went OK. The HTML editor drops bits like the end embed tag from a YouTube video. The funny thing is if you copy and past the WYSIWYG part and avoid HTML completely, the YouTube videos work. Not sure if Blogger is fixing this for me or if the Editor leaves the end embed tag in place if you avoid the HTML view part.

Now, I'm just typing in the text and adding in the tags in a text editor. It doesn't even matter which one I use. There a wars fought and lost over which text editor to use on Linux. There is something empowering about just typing in the code as you go. It takes longer. It may not be as fancy as the auto formatted stuff. It works for the most part. Anything you use over and over, you can make a template. When I talk to people who do web editing daily, they all and I mean all edit the HTML at least some of the time. All the WYSIWYG seem to modify the code. They capitalize tags or un-capitalize tags. They drop things on the floor. They loose all the tabulation. They swap one kind of tag for another. These changes are usually in the name of some some standard or another.

HTML all the way! Of course, next week I'll change my mind again. Stay tuned.

Laptop utilities

It took a laptop three hours to run a drive check at work today. I had to leave it running over night. Because I have to lock it up, I had to walk it to the lock closet on battery. It was only at 53% when I left.

At my old employer, we only had laptops. There were precious few desktop kinds of computers around. You had to have an exemption kind of reason to get one. I had two laptops assigned to me. This is because I had to constantly restage one of them for software install setup. The other was my normal workstation. When it rained, it poured. It seemed like I had weeks go by where I had no install work to do and then I would get five all at once. It never failed.

Semantic Ghost

Used the real Ghost CD today. First time in years. Iv'e been using G4L Ghost for Linux for several years now. I had a situation where I needed a feature that G4L does not support as far as I can tell. I needed to burn some computer images to DVD instead of a drive or network. This is a pretty slick thing to do when it comes to people leaving the company.

You have to install the software on a Windows box. Then you have to create a boot disk using that software. They give you all kinds of choices. You can even add an image right on the boot disk if you are in to that sort of thing. It has been such a nightmare getting the boot disks part of things to work in the past. It is really nice having a company just make a utility that gives you the GUI. It is about time.

I need to start using this software more often. It is pretty cool. The open source rip off of this software is pretty darn cool too.

USB drive cables

The company ordered a couple of those USB to SATA/IDE/Laptop_IDE cables that I raved about a while back. The one I had purchased is going back home with me. People were fighting over it. These things are $14 well spent for an IT person.

They let you burned DVDs, mount drives, copy large stuff all over the place even faster than the network will let you. They are slow, and a bit awkward to use. Many machines will not use the devices plugged in to one of these cables for a boot device. Tons of issues. They are still worth the $15 or so online.

Someone asked me what kind of USB drives to get. I recommended these cables. This way, you can use all kinds of drives to move stuff around and you are not locked in to one drive type or size. They work with legacy equipment too. Flexible is good in IT.