Frankbeaton.com

Bought myself a new laptop yesterday — a 2.4GHz MacBook. It’s my first Apple and I think I’m officially a convert now. OS-X is every bit as cool and useful as you’ve been led to believe. I’m in love.

Gabba, gabba, one of us…

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It’s been months in the making, and all weirdly hush-hush, but the all-new, all-awesome Comic Book Resources is finally up, and 99% of the programming work was done by yours truly.

Check it out.

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My vote for coolest new tech device: the Asus EEE-4G Sub-Notebook.

Basically a miniature laptop — folded up it’s about the size of a Nick Hornby novel in hardback. 7″ screen, 3/4-size qwerty keyboard, has WiFi, a 4-hour battery life, three USB ports, a 4GB solid-state hard drive and it weighs less than 2lbs. Runs a stripped-down version of Ubuntu Linux that comes pre-installed with Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice. Supposedly boots up in 8 seconds. Shockproof and spillproof. MSRP is $299 for the basic model (the same thing you’d pay for an AlphaSmart).

Seems like it’s practically made for writers, doesn’t it?

I am happy with the laptop I have. I am happy with the laptop I have. I am happy with the laptop I have. I am happy with the laptop I have.

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Dear LAMP developers who do their coding primarily on Windows systems,

WAMP is the best thing ever. Especially when combined with Eclipse and PDT.

Yours truly,

Francis

P.S., This will likely be the only time I ever post anything about programming. I fully realize most of you couldn’t give a shit. But god damn, WAMP is awesome. It’s one of those tools that makes you honestly wonder how the hell you ever got anything done without it.

P.P.S. Yes, I realize that last sentence was horribly worded. I’m in my programming place right now, okay? Not my word… things… place. Writing place. Whatever.

I 1Z 1337 h4X0rZ!!!!!!!!!!111eleven

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Pray for me.

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Changed web hosts yesterday (Las Vegas Web Hosting to Hurricane Electric) and the whole site went down for a few hours due to some clunky DNS issues. Sorry about that; sometimes it’s just unavoidable. Anyway, I’m thrilled with HE so far. The new server is fast, clean and spacious, with no wizards or crappy control panels to wrestle with. Just an SSH login and a database name. Exactly the way God intended.

I spent a few hours migrating the blog yesterday and I think everything is present and working as it should, but if I’ve learned anything it’s that some form of unexpected weirdness almost always follows a server migration, so if you find anything strange or broken, please let me know.

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Just realized that the site hasn’t looked right in IE since I set the blog text to “justify.”

Fixed.

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Got hold of a copy. Used it for a week. Hated it. Went back to Final Draft 6.

FD7 has a new PDF-writing engine, which is supposed to improve font support and general readability. I saw absolutely no difference, except that the size of the PDF files it produced had ballooned to near-Photoshop levels. An average script for me is about 40k in PDF form, exported with FD6. Using FD7, that same script is over 2MB(!). That’s, what, a 500% increase in size? With no discernible difference, either on screen or on paper? Fuck that. Also, FD7 got rid of the old Scene Navigator feature (something I use often), and replaced it with something called Index Card Mode — which is like Scene Navigator, except completely useless.

Jaq, man. Why didn’t you warn me?

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