Ted’s Rants and Raves by Ted M. Young

Looks like I’ve been doing a lot more Twittering (see http://twitter.com/jitterted) than blogging the last couple of months. One thing I like about Twitter is it allows me to write down short (<=140 chars!) thoughts or ideas that don’t warrant a full blog posting. Now that I’ve "saved up" a bunch of thoughts, I can go and write more about them.

Note that my twitterings (tweets) are 95+% about software, development, agile, etc., and very little "ooh, I just saw a cute puppy" or "I’m hungry" — that’s just not the way I want to use Twitter.

Thanks for the kudos from the IntelliJ IDEA Blog! I enjoy pointing out the little known, but very useful, features that makes IntelliJ IDEA so pleasurable to use (and makes me so much more productive). It’s certainly nice to know that someone besides my dog is reading this blog (no, not even my wife reads this blog). I’m prepping another tip for tomorrow, but if anyone has any plug-ins that they like (especially if you wrote it!), let me know in the comments.

All is well, at least on my machine, for build 7744. When I get time, I’m going to take a look at the Flex support, but that probably won’t happen for a few weeks.

Another 7.0.3 release candidate (#2) is now available:

Selena, build 7744 (IntelliJ IDEA 7.0.3 Release Candidate 2) is available
at http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/IDEADEV/Selena+EAP

Detailed release notes: http://jetbrains.net/jira/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?version=11550&styleName=Html&projectId=10132&Create=Create

Looks like mostly new features and fixes for Adobe Flex development, with some other miscellaneous but not earth-shattering fixes. As usual, I’ll download, install and start using it. I enjoy the bleeding edge.

The Silicon Valley Linux Users Group (SVLUG) is having another InstallFest in San Mateo, CA (2800 Campus Drive), this Saturday (March 1st) as part of the larger Bay Area InstallFest for Schools. Other areas include San Francisco, Berkeley, and Novato. The goal is to donate 500 computers, with Ubuntu pre-installed, to Bay Area schools. Here’s more information: http://www.untangle.com/installfest.

Sounds like fun, especially with free pizza and schwag from the Mozzilla Foundation!

I switched WordPress themes because the old theme wasn’t working well on Internet Explorer (probably something to do with the large images I used in the last post).

Also, I decided add a topic to this blog: stop-motion and animation (which includes claymation, cut-out animation, etc.). I’ve done a little bit of claymation in the past, and I’d like to get back to it. I also want to try out Toon Boom’s new product for kids: Flip Boom. While I’m certainly not a kid, I do have a 3-year old and I’m curious whether he’ll enjoy working with me on creating some animation using the program. It might turn out that he doesn’t yet have the attention-span for this, but he’s sooo into playing with his cars that I might be able to keep him interested if we animate cars. I’ll report on how that goes.