racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

WordPress widgets are cool! I’ve been using and tweaking WP installations long enough to realize that it’s not always easy to do modifications, especially with the fast pace software and web services are updated these days. And with heavily-modified installations (such as jangelo.racoma.net), a lot of effort is involved whenever you try to upgrade your software. So as much as possible, I would now try to do the modifications in a way that further upgrades wouldn’t be too difficult–and use of WP widgets is one of these ways.

One of my latest posts at ForeverGeek: duplicating your Firefox profile.

If you use several computers, then you’re likely familiar with the frustration of having to re-input your settings, passwords, bookmarks, history, extensions, and form auto-fill information into your new Firefox installation everytime you re-install your operating system, or get a new computer altogether (lucky you!). I recently got my hands on yet another extra laptop, and I thought of transferring my profile from one of my existing systems. Yes, you can download software that automatically does the backup and restoring for you, but where’s the geekiness in that? Real geeks do it manually–which is perhaps the most straightforward way, anyway.

Do check it out if you run several computers and you’d like to sync–or at least copy–your bookmarks, history, extensions, and passwords across computers. This can be very useful, say, you want quick access to your sites on both your home and office computers.

I love middle-clicking with Firefox–lets you open links in new tabs in a snap. Also lets you close tabs in a snap.

And guess what I hate the middle-click for.

Have you ever tried drafting a longish blog post and then accidentally middle-clicking on that particular tab?

I’d better be more careful next time.

From MSNBC, it’s official: Intel-based Apple Macintosh computers can run Windows. Announced at the MacWorld Expo 2006, Apple will not prevent users from installing and running the world’s most popular operating system on the world’s sexiest computer hardware.

Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, said in an interview Tuesday that the company won’t sell or support Windows itself, but also hasn’t done anything to preclude people from loading Windows onto the machines themselves.

Looks like Microsoft doesn’t see Apple’s Mac OS X as a threat to its dominance of the enduser/desktop computer market. And Apple doesn’t regard the use of Windows to be a diluting factor in the sexiness of the Apple hardware line.

Personally, I would rather have Windows applications run natively on OS X rather than have to dual-boot up to Windows.

(via DIGG)

Am currently trying out Mozilla Sunbird, a new project Mozilla, maker of the uber-cool Firefox. is working on.

The Sunbird Project is a redesign of the Calendar component. Our goal is to produce a cross platform standalone calendar application based on Mozilla’s XUL user interface language.

Sunbird (name may still change) is still in alpha stages, so the app may still “contain serious bugs leading to application crashes, dataloss or other unforeseen consequences.” 

Unforeseen circumstances? Perhaps, something like your date standing you up or worse, your significant other breaking up with you? Or that meteor crashing into your backyard unscheduled?

At any rate, I’ve downloaded Sunbird, and will be trying it out. As I also intend to use the app across my desktop and laptop, I’ll also be checking out Portable Sunbird.

Portable Sunbird allows you to carry your calendar and task list with you on an iPod, USB thumbdrive, portable hard drive or any other portable media. You can plug it right into any Windows computer and use it just like you would on your own.

In fact, you can get portable Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, AbiWord, GAIM, NVU, and FileZilla, among others, from portableapps.com (tip from PCWord)!

This will probably be topped by the rumored Google Calendar, but it’s worth a try.