Never Ending Baustelle

I’m a big fan of the ScribeFire Blog Editor. There is one very annoying behaviour however, that each time I’m pressing the key, which generates the X11 modifier ISO_Level3_Shift (and also the key with the modifier Super_L), that a new window with the ScribeFire online help opens. Since I’m composing the articles with the Markdown Wordpress plugin and a German keyboard layout, I’m frequently required to the press the ISO_Level3_Shift key. Fortunately, once the ScribeFire online help window has opened and has been placed below the main browser windows, it stays there, although the online help page is loaded each time the ISO_Level3_Shift key is pressed. Am I the only one, who sees this behaviour under Linux?

By choosing an readily available external theme, I though these IE CSS compatibilty issues would have been taken care off, but I was apparently wrong. I had omitted to look at this site with IE6, since at home I’m mostly working in a Linux environment. But today at work I took a quick look with IE6 and the result is, that I switched to the Abstractia theme, which also looks good in IE. I guess I need to check, if my minor changes caused the degradation of the Livegreen theme, but what I saw with IE6 was not very nice. And I’m really tired to relearn the IE quirks, each time I want to do a bit CSS styling after a bit of time doing no Web work.

Nearly forgot about this, but ridderbusch.eu is now active. Well, you’ll come back here anyway.

Well, I couldn’t resist. Since the EU domains are now on offer, I decided to let Godaddy order ridderbusch.eu for me. I’ll see if I’ll really get it, but since it is available I don’t see any reason to not get it.

In the past couple of days I’ve been trying to update my personal data at ICQ, without real success. I’ve been trying this through the Web interface and through the Windows ICQ5 client. The effect is essentially the same.

When I look at my data through the Web interface, the most peculiar data is displayed. I’ve been to update my birthday to January, 1961. However, what I’m seeing is December, 31st 1969. Sometimes my age is correctly displayed as 45, then again as 36.

Then I’ve been trying to update my avatar to something else. Again, the same unpredictable result. With each browser reload, I’m seeing something different. This is all very annoying.

Somehow I think, this fits with the uglified user interface of the Windows client due to much advertisement. I’m getting a much more solid feeling from Google Talk.

In my company I’m still running TWiki as the department collaboration tool. Although to be honest, except for 2 or 3 people in my group the usefulness of a Wiki has not yet really been understood.

Anyway, I’m still running the September, 2001 version of TWiki with some local design modifications. Since I have redesigned my departments website, I thought, it was time for an Twiki refresh as well. A release candidate for version 4.0 was announced recently on freshmeat, so I gave this version a try. And I must say, that I’m very probably going to switch to Drupal. I found TWiki’s customization layer not very user friendly and somewhat hard to understand. There are so many files with so many TMPL definition. In the end I might not have tried hard enough to understand it all, but it sure looks intimidating. Drupal on the other hand was very easy to understand, one template file styled with CSS. To have a little more flexibility, I installed the PHPtemplate engine and after about a hour I had a basic working design implementation even though I never have programmed one line in PHP. With the installed Markdown module, text input for any user will be just as easy as with a Wiki.

So, I guess, Drupal will be it in the end.