Posts Tagged ‘open source’

用软件来监视网页

Saturday, December 29th, 2007

为了防止类似昨天忽悠惨案的发生,我决定用软件武装自己。我的核心思想是,pcworld以及其他知名零售商的clearance或speicals是真实的,我一时没买到是因为发现得太迟了。尽管我经常逛pcworld,但肯定有比我更勤奋的人,真正实惠的clearance或specials的机会和数量是少之又少的,凭我的勤奋度和运气度能赶上吗?不能。

因此,我得借助于外力,外力就是软件。我选择了WebMonX,不用说,肯定是open source,用了一下,虽然WebMonX可定制性不是很高,但拿来监视网上商品的销售价格已经足够。我添加了几个我最感兴趣的商品,设定每小时监视一次,这下我终于可以在第一时间抢到offer了。

web pages monitor

openoffice, staroffice, starsuite, which one is which?

Monday, December 17th, 2007

I have been using OpenOffice for a while. Though I heard about StarOffice, I was not bothered finding out what it was until google includes it in a recent release of GooglePack. I am pretty interested everything recommended by google, so I downloaded GooglePack today, mainly for StarOffice. Then I played with StarOffice for a couple of hours, comparing it with OpenOffice.

At last, I mixed up StarOffice with OpenOffice. They are of the same sponsor, they have the same interface, and they are both free and open source. Although I read an article carefully about “OpenOffice vs StarOffice” features, the difference is insignificant so that 99% of users can’t distinguish StarOffice from OpenOffice. I am among those 99%. I think even the developers of StarOffice and OpenOffice are confused with these two Offices. They put documentations of both on StarOffice site, and divert APIs of both to OpenOffice site.

I came across another product called StarSuite, which makes conception even more complicated. In English version of StarOffice 8 documentation, it calls itself “StarOffice 8″; in Chinese version of StarOffice 8 documentation, it calls itself “StarSuite 8″, and I could not find any Chinese version of documentation which exactly titled as “StarOffice 8″. I assume these different language versions of documentation are referring to the same product, but StarSuite is not free because it includes some non-free extensions.

sugarCRM竟没有partner在中国大陆

Saturday, December 15th, 2007

sugarCRM是我蛮中意的一款开源软件,但我一直没能把sugarCRM应用到实际业务中。要想把sugarCRM应用起来,想起来很简单,操作起来有太多的细节要做。所以我想找个已被sugarCRM认可的partner公司,help me customise and extend sugarCRM。

可是我在sugarCRM的网站上的亚洲区partner里看了一遍,连香港都有sugarCRM partner,这么大一个中国大陆,竟然没有一个sugarCRM partner!

Thunderbird确实好

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

我是一个很懒的人,thunderbird出名已经很久了,我仍然stick to outlook or outlook express。本来也是,不就收发一下邮件嘛,用哪个软件有很大区别吗?今天由于其他方面的原因,我不得不下载thunderbird用了一下,当然它没有惊天动地打动我的地方,但它的utf8已经走到microsoft前面了,outlook/express在英文windows下总是处理不好中文主题或发件人(outlook处理不好中文发件人,而outlook express处理不好中文主题)。别看平时我也能忍受着阅读??????布满问号的邮件,但既然看到thunderbird做得这么好,那我决定更多地支持一下开源产品啦。

流式布局

Thursday, December 6th, 2007

自从读了Jakob Nielsen的«Homepage Usability»一书以后,我特别fancy fluid layout,这成了我做任何网站一定要达到的目标之一。经过一段时间的研究,我对fluid layout也算小有所成,最有心得的部分就是不借助table,不依赖javascript,在有不定宽度的图片情况下,做图文混排的fluid layout。

我也很在于其他层面的usability,因此每遇到user friendly的东西,我总要赞叹一番。新版本的wordpress,堪称website usability的典范,但它的default theme竟然没有采用fluid layout,不禁让我唏嘘。于是我准备发挥一下我的专长,同时也为open source贡献一份绵薄之力,就改掉它的fixed layout。

我花了点时间看了一下style.css,大致知道要怎么去改进它啦。现在大家看到的页面只是我搞了测试以后的中间产品,四个角都没对齐,莫怪。剩下的事情就是要裁减背景图片,做个拉门,然后就差不多了。但我有个毛病:难题在一团乱麻的状态我的战斗力很强,有了头绪以后反而懒得去落实了。 这个差不多了的style.css何时能变成最终成品,我也不知道。

要不,你来donate我一下?