Microsoft has released a ‘PowerShell’.

Using a new admin-focused scripting language, more than 130 standard command line tools, and consistent syntax and utilities, Windows PowerShell allows IT Professionals to more easily control system administration and accelerate automation.

Sounds pretty neat, I think I’ll have to install it and play around. When I get some time that is.

Also, a big new update has been released for Wordpress. Tons of new features and design changes. I’ll have get this all updated as well and check it out.

Working in a giant corporate environment, its hard for me to imagine this gaining widespread usage among my current peers.  However, this is a tremendous example of what can be done with a web based collaborative application.  Its called Google Spreadsheets.  ZDnet has an image gallery and article that showcases many of its features.  You can find it among many other interesting offerings by clicking the 'more ' link from the Google home page.  Google Spreadsheets falls under the Google Labs link.  It obviously isn't nearly as robust as Microsoft Excel, yet still, its pretty amazing all you can do considering what it is.

I'm typing my first post here using the editormonkey plug-in for wordpress.  Seems to be a pretty nice replacement rich text editor.  The big benefit that I see is the spell check feature.  It seems to be the only way to implement a rich text editor with a spell checker.  All of the other spell checker plug-ins I've found had to be used with the plain text editor.  I did find though that there is a conflict between the implementation of TinyMCE in editormonkey and the wp-contactform plug-in.  If you have both enabled you wind up some code that shows up below your editing box.  Disabling the wp-contactform plug-in fixes this.  And best of all, the TinyMCE version packed with editormonkey seems to be compatible with the flickr photo album plug-in as well.  Where as the FCKEditor packed with it does not.

Well, I haven't gotten everything done I wanted to for this second installment of myspace sucks. But, I did finish up a pretty thorough article/tutorial on how to fix the bad layouts using Stylish. Check it out here. Yet to come will be the flash elimination and I think that's about it. Unless someone has any other suggestion I think we'll be done with myspace.

At least, not completely.

I don’t really ‘use’ myspace. I mean, I have this site, why do I really want to keep another? But, I do have friends on there so I do browse it from time to time. I suppose its the voyeur in me. Now, I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but myspace, has issues. Alot of ads and music and videos on every page you go to. Well, I’ve found a few things you can do to not only help speed myspace up, but reduce the annoyance factor of many peoples pages to a minimum.

First, you gotta be using FireFox. Why? For lots of reasons, but mainly, because of the extensions. Then, get yourself the Adblock extension (and I’d also recommend the adblock updater as well). As well as the ‘Stop Auto Play’ extension. That is a fantastic one I found recently that prevents not only the auto playing of embedded video and audio files, but if configured properly, it prevents them from even being downloaded. The Stop Auto Play extension will prevent all of those embedded video files from playing but, it won’t work on the myspace music player because its flash based. In your preferences, you can set to have these not play automatically as well. But, in my experience that preference seems pretty sketchy. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. So fixing that and fixing all of these customized layouts will be next time.

Stay tuned for part 2 of the myspace sucks post.