Quinn

I just made a new photo set, Hojoya 2006 at Flickr. Hojoya is one of the three major festivals in Hakata, Fukuoka, Japan. Our family visited there as the second time together. The last one was two years ago and it was rainy. This year, a big typhoon was coming but didn't rain much at that time. It has become as the annual family event since this gives us a nice excuse to see my wife's sister who lives in Fukuoka, at least once a year. There are some not pretty photos of gabage and stuff. I thought they might be interesting to some who never been in Japan. I didn't put a photo with many people in it, but there were lots of people later in the evening. Well, I hope you enjoy the photos.

I need IEs only for testing. Today, I just installed standalone IE7RC1. It was so easy. I should give Jon Galloway a big hug. Anyway, it doesn't look any differnt in rendering websites that I made. It looks min-width is working some but not complete. I should give more testing though.

Another thing, IEs4Linux is pretty good too. It runs with Wine on Linux/UNIX systems. It is perfectly working on my Gentoo system.

I've been wondering why there are no web services developed by the Japanese that get world-wide attention. I mean, there are lots of web services widely used but only available in Japanese. Those web services, somehow, never seems to bother to go beyond. How hard could it be anyway? Zooomr is developed by only a few people ( actually only one main developer ) and still its service is available in 15 languages.

I found there are two newly introduced web services developed by the Japanese while they are available to users who speak English.

• Lingr
• PhotoZou

I really can't predict how well they are going to do. But, I would love to see more excitements in the near future.

And, of course, the same thing applies to those web services which are only available in English too.

This is the screenshot from my Gnome Desktop on Gentoo Linux system, which I recently set up on Dell C640 laptop. Doesn't this look very much like Mac OS X?

I am even able to watch Flash movies at YouTube and also mov videos. But those are just for fun. What I need the most is to be able to choose Japanese inputs while running apps/system in English. That's what I do with Mac OS X, and I was successful with this one too!

I am using Glossy P theme with Gorilla icons. I am sure there are more Mac OS X like themes and icons. I like the top bar of window which just looks like Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4). However, these blue scroll bars are too bright for me. I prefer gray or something else but I don't know how to change it at this moment.

I used Gnome's Configuration Editor to change the buttons on top bar of window. I chose Applications >> System Tools >> Configuration Editor, then it will launch the app. In the Configuration Editor window, I chose app >> metacity >> general, which finaly led me to edit button_layout to the value "close,minimize,maximize:menu", which will layout the buttons to just like Mac OS X.

I haven't really used Bluefish Editor or gPHPedit yet, so I don't know what's like to be using this environment as my web developing work, but it doesn't look bad at all.

So, am I going to switch my primary environment to this? Only probem at this moment for me is the hardware. I never liked any PC machines. So, it seems the chances are depend on this question - when will I able to buy a MacBook? Then, again I probably never can leave Mac OS X.. Anyway, I think it's good to have more choices and choose one over the others on whatever needed, right?

Quinn's Photo [Zooomr]