www.jaredstevens.net

Well, I just got Windows 7 RC1 installed. I've never used Windows 7 previously, so I was curious to see what changes were in store. I didn't have a lot of time to mess with it, as its pretty late.

My initial thoughts were:
* The UI is really really different. Internet Explorer has a weird way of grouping tabs/windows. I'm still trying to figure it out.
* Slashdot.org apparently caused IE 8 to freak out and a window came up asking me if I wanted to 'Recover' the page, or some such action.

Okay - I've had this thing for a little while now, and I wanted to update my opinion on the machine.

First, the challenges. When I installed Linux, I blew away the Vista partitions. It turns out this thing doesn't come with a Vista install disk, (or any CDs for that matter). There was a backup partition though... :( After solving this problem, I wound up getting Vista and Linux installed at the same time. (On a side note, I thought Vista Home Basic would be way worse than it its... I actually don't mind it too much. There are, naturally, things I would like to change...)

This has been driving me up the freaking wall. I have a Lenovo T500 with a hybrid Intel 4500HD card and an ATI Radeon Mobility 3650 card. Windows Vista is cool enough to be able to switch between the two for the most part, but this problem has been interesting in Linux.

Well - during the March Madness sale at Lenovo, I bought a T500. I checked out some computers from Dell, Apple, and even ASUS. What I wanted was something that was powerful enough to run the games that I have now, as well as the software that I use. It needed to be about 5lbs, and run fairly cool. It also had to be durable.

I've been trying to figure out how to make an auto-suggest widget in JavaScript. Generally, the hard part isn't setting up the AJAX transaction. (In my case its basically just a JSON transaction). The hard part is getting the silly suggestions to line up with your input field.

Well, today, you're in luck. I've figured out, (with the help of a few search engines, forums, and blog posts), how the heck to do this.

The tricky part is figuring out exactly where your input field is. (At least it was for me.) There are four words I'm going to list here - take note - they're very important:

This is my first submission to Failblog. I hope it makes it. :)

Those looking closely may see that this sign is up in front of Ken Garff Nissan. I didn't take this picture with the intention to degrade Ken Garff or Nissan - my intention is simply to illustrate what measures are being taken to survive in our current economy.

I've been using Suse Linux for a few years now. It replaced Caldera OpenLinux as my distro of choice around 2001. (For all you Ubuntu zealots out there, I've also given Kubuntu a try off and on for a few months at a time... :) ) I've found that despite it's off releases, that its a pretty solid OS and provides a good balance of configurability and user-friendliness.

Go watch this video.

I wrote some long drawn out thing on how this video makes me feel like I can do anything. Then Drupal freaked out and killed it. I'm annoyed now, but here it is anyway.

I was really impressed - I even tied it into motorcycles. I hope you enjoy the video.

Please lol for me. :)

Alright - I'm going to give this api of mine a shot. I finally set up my photo manager with an API so that I can include photos in my blog and stuff. I wanted to put up some pictures of Bad Moon Rising at Timpanogos Harley Davidson a few weeks ago.

This is what greeted me when I arrived at Timp Harley:

The mod_rewrite rule for Drupal Clean URL support has been updated to deal with tar.gz files, (and .tar and .gz, etc).

Here is the code I used:
(drupal_clean_urls.conf)

<Directory /srv/www/vhosts/drupal>
        RewriteEngine on
        RewriteCond  %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^/$
        RewriteCond  %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^/(files|misc|uploads)(/.*)?
        RewriteCond  %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !\.(php|ico|png|jpg|gif|css|js|html|tar|gz?)(\W.*)?
        RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]
</Directory>