Google Earth rocks!
In the german news magazine "Der SPIEGEL", I read a quite promising article about Google Earth. Today, I gave it a try and was impressed by the smoothness of the tool right away. Here is a file that shows you where I have lived so far.
Eclipse 3.1 is here!
Only by chance, I dropped by the Eclipse downloads site - only to see that Eclipse 3.1 had begun shipping just a few minutes ago! Right now (18:38 CET), the downloads counter has reached 751 - and counting!
Opera 8 is here
After 3 official beta versions, Opera has relased version 8 of the Opera browser. You can get it in Windows and Linux flavors.
The free version display ad banners at the top of the window. To make them go away, you can buy a license at 34 EUR. If you happen to have issue 8 of the german c't magazine, you are eligible to buy the browser for only 8 EUR - a great deal!
Oh, and here are the new features and changes: Opera changelog
I have been using Opera since version 7.x and never want to use any other browser. The most useful features in my eyes are:
Tabbed browsing
Support for sessions (opens a set of sites you browse regularly)
Mouse gestures
Quick Preferences (now, you can enable / disable you proxy with just 2 (!) keystrokes)
WordPress rocks!
During the last days, I had some time to play around with WordPress, a quite impressive blogging software. I had seen it on Ed Burnette's eclipsepowered blog some time ago, but never found the time to install it. I should have tried it earlier! It's so cool and usable that I will drop my typo3 installation and replace it with WordPress.
DocBook rocks!
I decided to write the documentation for my current project using DocBook. After using it for a few days, I must admit that I really love it: using DocBook XSL, you can transform it to PDF, HTML (one single large file or many small files, one for each chapter), HTML Help or even Eclipse Help! Much to my pleasure, I found a really amazing Eclipse plug-in that helps me edit my DocBook files (in fact, you could any XML editor to edit those files). The plug-in I am talking of is called Vex-A Visual Editor for XML. Although originally intended to edit XML files in general, it has been written with enough flexibility in mind. The editor uses a stylesheet to render the XML files into a visual representation (see the Screenshots). Now I can edit my DocBook files in WYSIWYG - great!
