If any of you have Office 2007, you’ll notice the pretty nice WordArt options in Power Point.  If you attempt to do the same in Word 2007 though, you’ll be in for a big disappointment.

I’m hoping that  in the future, MS will release an update to fix this.  The old WordArt is ugly at best.  Microsoft dropped the ball on this.  ON a positive note, it’s the only gripe I have about Office 2007 so far!

Recently I had to reinstall 2003 on my server at home, which was home to my BG Alert SVN server. I vaguely remembered setting SVN up about a year ago, so I had to put my trust into Google. Unfortunately, there wasn’t one site that helped with the whole setup. Since I don’t want you to have to deal with that, I’ve put all the information here, in one post.

To get started, you will need to download subversion, the current version is 1.4.5. Make sure you select the setup.exe to download for the newest version as well.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed subversion on the server, create a directory for your repositories. This can be done in Windows Explorer or from the command prompts with the mkdir command (mkdir C:\repositories). You will also need to give the NT AUTHORITY\NetworkService account appropriate rights to the directory you create. If you forget to grant access, you might get denied when Read the rest of this entry »

With the release of Opera 9.21 a couple weeks ago, people started to tell me that it was hands down better than Firefox. I’ve been using Firefox on and off since version 0.7 and exclusively since version 1.0. I used Opera 7 in there somewhere and had tried it since I switched 100% to FF with v1.0. It never was as good as Firefox IMO.

Fast forward to 5/2007. This new Opera release is gaining users from Firefox so I decide to tell people it sucks and then try it. Makes sense, eh? Download was small and the install was just like any other program out there. I open it after the install and notice nothing has changed since I last used Opera. That isn’t a bad thing, Firefox hasn’t change it’s appearance in a long time either. I hit CTRL-T to open a Tab and I get a Speed Dial page. Pretty slick. I load it up with URLs to my favorite/most used sites and get this:

It’s pretty much one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen in a browser. Put your 9 favorite or most used websites there, hit CTRL-T and click the one you want to open. You can also hit CTRL - #, where # is the Speed Dial number of the site you want to open. I did a search on Mozilla’s extension site and there was one Speed Dial extension and it was crap compared to Opera’s. You drag and drop in Opera’s version and it has clear buttons as well as context menus for every Speed Dial you have setup. From the context menu, you can clear the URL out of it, update the thumbnail and set the update interval.

Unfortunately, that’s the only positive thing I’ve taken from Opera 9.21 so far. It’s enough for me to keep testing it out, but I don’t think it will be enough for me to use it past this week. The find option in Opera is still an annoying popup like in Internet Explorer:

With Firefox, when you hit CTRL-F, you get a search bar at the bottom that isn’t in the way at all. Another thing that bothered me about Opera is when you middle click on a bookmark in the bookmarks menu, it won’t open in a new tab. In fact, the only button that will do anything is the left mouse button. No context menu when right clicking on bookmarks in the bookmarks menu. Middle clicking will open in a new tab if the bookmark is in your “Personal Bar,” which is Opera’s name for a bookmarks bar. The other thing that really bothered me is when you only have one site open, the tab bar doesn’t go away. I couldn’t find a place in the preferences to change this behavior, as that happens by default in Firefox, but at least there is an option to change that.

That’s about all I’ve gathered in the two hours of use I’ve put in. Like I said, I don’t see myself using this in place of Firefox, but I DO hope that someone comes out with a comperable Speed Dial for Firefox. It’s one of the coolest features I’ve seen in a browser.

Also, I am aware that there is a built in torrent feature, but I decided to not bother testing it out since nothing is going to beat uTorrent and I’m not going to leave a browser open to seed.

Edit… Opera apparently doesn’t like Wordpress:

Fixed by copy/pasting into the edit page for this post in Firefox.

So I caved and I’m writing a blog now . I figured I could post all the cool stuff I find for my various software and web projects here to make it a bit easier for others to find answers to their questions. It’s sucked having to search Google for 30 minutes to find answers for what seemed to be little things.

So a little about me…my name is Mike Gromer and I go to school at Neumont University. It’s a fast-paced computer science school that puts a lot of emphasis on working on projects with teams. It’s been here in Salt Lake for a few years now and the graduates have had enormous success in the field. Luckily, Neumont is partnered up with companies like Microsoft and IBM which helps keep the school technologically superior to many other school. I was in CS at the University of Texas and in my first quarter at Neumont, I had learned more than in 3 semesters at UT.

Hopefully I will stay up to date and keep my blog up to date. Like I said, my goal is to keep an easy to access list of coding tricks so people don’t have to search hard like I did. Have a good one!