Recently I was asked by a family member to search around for a laptop.  Now happens to be one of the better times of the year to make a purchase like this because of all the back to school sales going on.  On one hand its fun finding these deals, but on the other it's depressing when you still can't afford them yourself.  Oh well, maybe next year.  But on to what I found...
 

Well since I haven't finished my Drupal calendar project yet I figured I would update my blog with some useful computer tools I have run across the past couple days.  It started when I needed to do some research on an issue my friend Aaron was having with his browsers crashing each time they would open.  Both firefox and IE both were crashing, so I figured he must have gotten some sort of malware or virus.  Of course the first line of defense I recommend for real time antivirus and spyware scanning is AVG Free.

I started searching for Drupal Calendars and came across a really great tutorial on how to configure your own Drupal Calendar System.  It starts with a website called Drupal Therapy, they do a number of screencasts and seminars on how to do things in Drupal.  This one for setting up your calendar system was quite informative.  I recommend it if you are thinking of integrating a Calendar into your Drupal CMS.
http://www.drupaltherapy.com/node/76
 

This post is to test the Generic Syntax Highlighter (GeSHi) on Drupal.  Its a fairly simple script that is used across many open source content management systems.  Not long ago I setup a DokuWiki CMS site at work for managing our knowledgebase documents.  It is a really neat system and very versatile.  Like most CMS's it has the ability to run plugins.  One of them, which comes standard with the system, is the code highlighting engine GeSHi.&n

Today Su (my wife 老婆 [lǎopó]) sent me a link to this site called http://www.nciku.com/ .  I took a quick glance around the site and from what I see its pretty neat.  It looks like the perfect web based tool for English to Chinese translations.  My other resources are http://www.chinese-tools.com/ and Rosetta Stone.  But back to NCIKU, this site is very feature rich.

It has a Conversations section which lists numerous conversations you may have and displays in both english, chinese, and pinyin.  Pinyin is the Romanization of chinese into english.  Its the english phonetical way to pronounce chinese words.  The conversation piece is cool because it even has audio to help you with the 4 different tones you find in the chinese language.  That has been the hardest thing for me so far is the 4 tones.  Every word has 4 tones, and each tone has a different meaning.  So basically for each word there are 4 different meanings.  CRAZY!

Well I finally started my blog again. Yey. The previous one used WordPress, but has since been upgraded to Drupal. I started looking into Drupal when Matt D setup his site http://www.backlashart.com with it. It's a pretty slick CMS and highly configurable, so it's right up my alley. Unfortunately in the transition from web hosts I was unable to backup the WordPress database so any previous blog posts are now gone. Oh well, its time for a fresh start anyways. That old blog was before I was married, and married me is a new me.