Vanilla is the sweetest forum on the web. It’s clean and slick and cool and simple. It works. It doesn’t confuse you. It stands out. It’s damn delicious.

If I could have my own little way I’d use Vanilla everyday.

Enough said.

Meet Vanilla: a new kind of web forum

With Vanilla we wanted to break the mold created and followed by just about every other forum on the web. We sat down and thought about what we liked, and more importantly, what we didn’t like about web forums. We wanted emphasis on the discussions rather than the statistics. We wanted to stop using MSN or AIM to send secret messages to other forum members; We wanted to be able to save the common searches. Basically, we wanted the thing to work for us instead of against us. Most importantly we wanted it to be free and we wanted it to run on just about every web server out there. So, Vanilla is a PHP / MySQL solution that is 100% open-source. You can take it and alter it and use it free of charge. The GPL is your friend.

I’m working on converting my crappy phpBB installation to Vanilla. When I get through it, we can all have some Vanilla.

Longhorn is now Vista, available for IT professionals and developers in the first beta starting August 3rd. This next-generation Windows operating system sounds like a mountain spa resort, and they claim that it enables a new level of confidence in your PC and gives focus to what’s important to you. Microsoft expects to release a commercial version next year. I’m not so much enthused but what the hell, we’ll see how good it is when it comes out.

Update (August 1, 2005): I posted some screenshots here.

Another boss wants to make a presentation. This time though, he did it all himself… until he bumps into a problem! Apparently for some strange unexplainable reason PowerPoint won’t embed sound, it would automatically link it instead. I quickly doodled with it and found there was a file size limitation. I increased the limit and *boom* it should work, right? Nope, Microsoft just has to be an asshole everytime. I thought it was something wrong with my puter but then I got frustrated so I googled how to embed sound in powerpoint and I found this: Certain sound files cannot be embedded in presentations in PowerPoint.

SYMPTOMS
When you add sound files to a presentation in Microsoft PowerPoint, the file size may not increase as much as expected. When you view the slide show on another computer, you may receive an error message similar to the following: Cannot find the specified file. Make sure the path and filename are correct.

CAUSE
This behavior occurs because only WAV sound files can be embedded in PowerPoint presentations. All other types of sound files are linked, as are WAV files that exceed a file-size limitation. If the presentation is moved to another computer without all the linked files, you receive the error message described in the “Symptoms” section when you attempt to play the sound in PowerPoint.

Sweet huh? I feel great once again for “beating” Microsoft. If they want to make my life miserable they’ll have to try harder than that! *lmfao* So much for usability and user friendliness!!

Another article on how to embed sound in PowerPoint [PDF].

At last, the wait is over! The best browser on the planet gets off its beta and is now Gold. I’m downloading it now with my crappy 56k but it’s gotta be worth it. If you find the Mozilla site busy Dougal has a torrent. Switch baby!!

Yesterday I linked Konfabulator in my Linkies. Last night I downloaded it, installed it, fell in love with it, and today I’m proudly advertising it!

So what the hell is it? Here’s what the site says:

Konfabulator is a JavaScript runtime engine for Mac OS X [and Winfuck] that lets you run little files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to. Widgets can be alarm clocks, calculators, can tell you your AirPort signal strength, will fetch the latest stock quotes for your preferred symbols, and even give your current local weather.

If that’s not clear enough, these are little things for your desktop, they’re cute, they’re light, and most importantly they work!! So if you’re like me and you like to have nice usable graphical elements on your desktop, download away! It’s free… courtesy of Arlo Rose.