I decided it was time to add texture to this site, after the recent article in Smashing Magazine about textures. See the footer for the new texture? I might try to slip more texture in at the top to go along with the new look.

On a side note: after I saw The Spirit I throught about make a comic-book style theme to this site. I could implement a csszengarden-type system to switch between the various styles.

I just added the second project to this site: outlook2gmail. This is a program, written in Python, that exports Outlook appointments to a Gmail calendar. See the below link for more details.

I figured that it was about time to redesign the website. Took me awhile to come up with this design, but I think it works out well and seems a little more full than the previous design.

I checked that the design works in all the popular browsers that I have installed (e.g. Opera, Firefox, IE6/7, Safari). Feel free to contact me if you notice something out of place and I will try to clean it up.

Here are links to some of the technologies I have incorporated into this redesign:

• SyntaxHighlighter - used to highlight (e.g. color code) language examples I might provide
  
• TinyMCE - none will see this much, but it is the editor I use to make entries
• P+C DTR - all of the headings for this website are converted into an image with a particular font (04b_08.ttf)

I realized that OLPC is releasing their software platform for download. They offer a LiveCD and Qemu images. Since I am using VMWare -- only because that is what I am familiar with -- I thought I would download the LiveCD and step through an installation. (I have been installing and re-installing OpenSolaris this same way for the past couple days) However, I found that the LiveCD is not an installation CD -- or if it is, does not work like the LiveCDs I am use to. Thus, I thought I would install Qemu and try the OLPC/Sugar Qemu image.

Impressions of Qemu
I thought Qemu was easy to install and easy to use. I think it could use a front-end -- mostly because I have a bunch of images and I want to go to one location to start any of them up. I still am not sure if Qemu has any issues with networking or not. The OLPC/Sugar image did not start the network connection on start, but if I ran dhclient, I got eth0 up. BUT, when I tried a fresh install of OpenSolaris, the install complained that there was no network link. Qemu (with Kqemu) seemed to run as fast as (or faster) than VMware. I also like that it is OSS.

Impressions of Sugar
I like the interface a lot. I thought there are still a lot of issues to get worked out. However, I enjoyed mucking around with the interface. I, also, like that everything is build on Linux. Thus, if I had an issue, I could switch over to the console and debug away. See Sugar Instructions for a brief explanation of how Sugar works. I hope to post my own screenshots soon.

This is my penguin walking animation from the below post. Since it was too large for everyone to download, I decided to use Google Video to stream the video.