Today I found another really cool use for IconDeveloper. I am in the process of writing up documentation for Object Desktop. As any technical writer will tell you, the useage of icons in a technical document to highlight key points is critical to creating clearly understood directions. But how to do that? Microsoft Word wouldn't let me. IE won't load them correctly for some reason. The built in Windows XP viewer didn't work.  But...But... IconDeveloper would open them. So I just do...

MadIce writes: I agree with your "True progress, in my opinion, is a melding of ethics and a realistic understanding of human nature." But isn't that a liberal point of view? It would allow you to make a progressive decision. Not necessarily. Each side's ideologues believe they have a lock on both. Communism failed because it didn't take into account human nature (which led to cascading inefficiency that ultimately spelled its ruin -- people generally want to succeed fo...

When I ask, "Why do liberals keep losing?" what I specifically mean is those who believe in American liberal ideals (which to a European means something different) are finding their political fortunes ebbing and their influence on the United States weakening. And it boils down to this: the left wing mainstream media and liberal politicians mistakenly think that their beliefs are held by the majority of Americans.  They're not. They should know this because the polls on these is...

Been having a lot of fun at work lately. Very busy but still incredibly fun.  For one thing, been working on a bunch of different programs at once. Namely: DesktopX and DesktopX Pro IconDeveloper WindowBlinds 4.2 Today I discovered the joy of combining Flash and DesktopX together. Holy cow can you do some neat stuff. I took a Flash Tetris game and turned it into a DesktopX object. I also made a movie of my desktop for this month. Here's a screenshot of it: ...

My wife and I have started dating again. By that I mean each other. Despite my attempts to stress to her that I'm a stallion and as a stallion I must roam and roam free, she still insists that I date only her. We've been having a lot of fun and it's amazing how much things have changed since when we dated before we got married. 12 years ago, which is about when we started dating, I drove a vette. A che vette but a vette none the less. Surprisingly, chicks weren't impressed by it. They weren'...

I'm having a lot of fun with IconDeveloper . It's almost done. Probably will go 1.0 in the next couple of days. It's one of the dozen or so programs that makes up Object Desktop, a suite of programs that let you completely change the way Windows looks and functions (as little or as much as you want). I've used various icon editing packages over the years. My big beef with them has always been that they are 1) expensive and 2) come with image editing features.  I don't want to use some ...

The music industry, particularly the on-line music industry, has some real challenges ahead of it. People are still prone to pirate music rather than purchase it even when it's only 99 cents. My belief has been that much of music piracy has to do with convenience. But in a poll last week on WinCustomize.com that asked whether people would be buying music on-line the results were not reassuring. Over 1,200 people responded on WinCustomize and 42% of people responded that they would continue...

Liberal bias in the media is pretty established at this point. Established in the sense that any reasonable person who has put any significant effort into looking into the issue will have come to that conclusion. The main deniers of such bias come, naturally, from liberals. Debating whether there is liberal media bias, for me, is like debating evolution vs. creationism. I'm not going to waste my time debating whether evolution is a fact or not and I'm not going to debate whether liberal media bi...

What is it with the continental Europeans and their hatred of Israel? In a recent European poll, 59% of Europeans responded that they think Israel is the greatest threat to world peace. Israel. Not Iran. Not Iraq. Not North Korea. Heck, not even the United States. I've talked via email with people from Europe (western Europe mainly) who just can't understand why Americans have such a "blind spot" to the "obvious" threat Israel poses.  What threat? Threat to whom? The threat Israeli children p...

Manufacturing jobs going over to China? Republicans fault. IT jobs going to India? Republicans. Acid rain? Republicans. Warm weather in November? Republicans. In fact, all bad things, if you listen to some people, are the fault of Republicans. You see, they have a deep dark secret: They favor businesses. And as hard as this is believe, given how enlightened we're supposed to be these days, they actually think capitalism is good. Isn't that amazing? Capitalism good! Let's take the charge t...

With DesktopX 2.0 out, I've been having a lot of fun playing around making all kinds of silly things. There's really nothing quite like DesktopX out there in the sense that it makes creating things very very easy. Let me show you something I sent to my mom today to illustrate my point. We got a cute picture of the 3 year old sleeping on the floor. My mom really likes the picture. But rather than just emailing her a picture of him (which I also did), I decided to put something together that sh...

What is it with Mac users and their tendency to think that everything was invented on the Mac? I've been seeing this a lot over the past few weeks as features of Longhorn have gotten leaked out. Compositing? MacOS X. XAML? There's an equivalent on Mac too. Name something on Windows and you're told it showed up on the Mac. Which is a pretty tall attitude for people who only recently seemed to have discovered preemptive multitasking or threads. Did Apple "rip off" the idea of preempti...

http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/film/resolutions.html Some interesting alternative endings for The Matrix: Revolutions.   On Bi-polar stuff The trick to dealing with bi-polar, at least mild bi-polar tendencies is for those 3 days of manic behavior where the ideas are flowing: Write them down. Then use the other 20 days of normal level to execute on them.

If you've been coming to JoeUser for long, you've hopefully seen a gradual progression in the quality and features of the site. We've been heavily evaluating the various blog features and technologies out there. Some are really good. But some are just dumb. Here are some of my newbie view points on these issues. Feel free to comment and tell me where you agree or disagree. Good Blog Technologies RSS The Good: RSS is a standard that takes headlines from news sites (particularly blog sites...

What do you get when you combine Samurai Jack with Star Wars? The Clone Wars Micro-Series.  These short (very short) episodes run only a few minutes each and are done on the cheap but are incredibly enjoyable. I wish they'd done this between Ep 1 and Ep 2. It's the overall story of the Star Wars universe that excites many fans. And as bad as Ep 1 and Ep 2 were, the problem wasn't so much the story but..ahem..the director.  Ep 1 may not have been the greatest story but you take our ...