16 Oct 2005
Note to self, PHP’s mktime() function breaks when you use leading zeros. Thankfully, that means I’ve got 18 hours left to cram, and not nine. Bizarre.
p.s. Now’s a good time for the RSS people to come out from the trees and look at the now fixed hh:mm countdown on my site.
p.p.s. The first post-script will be irrelevant this time tomorrow.
p.p.p.s. Trackback spammers, have a heart. I haven’t got time to deal with your crap right now, and really won’t feel like it tomorrow afternoon. Just go away for a while, okay? Thanks.
15 Oct 2005
I had written a post praising Elinks’ capabilities, featuring not only HTTPS and FTP support, but also tabbed browsing and more-than-respectable rendering of table-based pages — heck, it even works well with Gmail, albeit in plain HTML mode. But then I accidentally hit the wrong arrow key. And it ate my post. So now I feel less like saying nice things about it than before.
Nevertheless, impressive considering the limitations of the medium. I used it to download Breezy from iiNet’s FTP (because ISP.net.au still doesn’t have the ISOs), and averaged about 750KB/s — which is about a third again of what I was getting from ISP.net.au, so I think I’ll change the sources.list to that. It’s a shame Telstra’s files.bigpond.com is so useless/HTTP-only/slow to respond to new releases, because I’d love — and I’m sure they’d save some bandwidth/peering expenditure — to be able to get quota-free downloads of this stuff. I probably could have got Breezy from there, albeit via HTTP, albeit in a few days time whenever they get stuff up there (haven’t checked, might be there already, but generally they’re pretty sluggish), but it’s just so much easier this way.
Anyway, I’ve burnt it to CD now (no, Elinks doesn’t do that too) and will hopefully be up and running again soon.
Posted from Elinks
15 Oct 2005
On the subject of the film Thelma and Louise:
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Person 1:
(surprised) Do they die?
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Person 2:
Yeah, they drive off a cliff!
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Person 3:
That’s feminism for you…
Shrug, I thought it was funny :P
15 Oct 2005
Looks as though they’ve just implemented a “no unread items” case, which means it won’t persist in keeping your last item to be read in an unread state until it aggregates more data. Not a problem for people with massive feed collections, but mine is of a relatively austere disposition. This’ll make it a whole heap more pleasant for people like me, who just hate seeing “unread” items sitting there.
I wonder if this means they’ve improved their handling of “invalid” feeds? I had one that was causing problems (actually, it was Michael’s comments feed), and making the reader throw errors only resolved by logging out then back in (just like a desktop app… pffft!), but I asked if he could fix that and he did, so that problem disappeared. The only other problem I’ve found is in deleting feeds… I get the ABC TV feed to my desktop feed reader, but Google’s web app really isn’t suited to handling that kind of information, because of the chronologically-dependent default mode of displaying information. There’s an anachronistic display mechanism in which you can select feeds, but this isn’t the default view and it’s not terribly intuitive.
What would be nice to see is an RSS-feed from the RSS aggregator that simply sends the state of read/unread. This would mean Google-enabled RSS tray apps could work, which would be wonderful… like the Gmail tray notification app at present, but for Google Reader instead. Oh, and they really should come up with a less ubiquitous and more interesting name for Reader at some point… it’s almost frustrating having to type it as a proper noun just to make it clearly understood. I mean, I’d do this regardless, but it’s annoying not to be able to slip up occasionally (or, specifically, on MSN where I rarely bother with capitalisation, unless I’m trying to make a point) without my meaning tending more towards the obscure than is normal.
For example, compare these two headlines:
“Google reader improves”
“Google Reader improves”
In the first, the agent is a Google reader; or,–and herein lies the confusion– a reader of Google, presumably a human. In the second, it’s clear that I’m talking about Google’s product, Reader.
Importantly, both are correct usages (well, correct in mangled-sentence-headline-grammar), though only one acknowledges that “Reader” is the name of a product (hence, a proper noun), as opposed to a regular noun: that is, Google’s product that (verb) reads feeds.
Even “syndicator” would be a better name, in terms of usage (though, based on much of the quality of writing on the web, it would be spelt incorrectly more often than not, irrespective of capitalisation in recognition of its proper noun status!). Was “Reader” really the best they could come up with?
Aside: it has occurred to me I don’t have a category for this post. It belongs under Geek as much as general Nerdery, but no such category exists and I can’t be bothered to create one. What I potentially could be bothered to do is ditch categories altogether and move to tagging, instead. On the post-first-bout-of-exams todo-list.
15 Oct 2005
Aaaannnndddd it’s screwed. I got home from a BBQ with friends from church at about 10 last night and switched my desktop [joah/home.joahua.com] on to be greeted with an X.org error screen. Fun fun. Linux sure knows how to ruin an otherwise-good evening.
Ah well, I’d already made one whole system migration sans any difficulty, with only a reboot to consider, so I’m pretty happy with the mileage I’ve got out of it thus far. Just think, if I’d tried that with a Windows system, well… it would have had maybe a month to live!
I tried to get X.org working again this morning, but NVidia’s Linux 7667 driver is being a bitch (and 7676 is worse) with my kernel sources, so I think I’ll just grab the ISOs and reinstall from scratch. I keep my home directory on a physically separate disc, so it’ll be relatively painless… but I think I’ll hold off a few days, probably until Thursday (and then, English Advanced is over forever!! Or, maybe not forever.), so there’s one less distraction.
Now, if I start downloading the ISOs from Ubuntu’s core server today, they should be ready just in time for installation on Thursday! Heh. Mind you, that’s probably not a great idea seeing as we had a blackout yesterday (local distro snafu, nothing major, but it has me recognising blackouts as a reality now: that was the first we’ve had for… a few years, local circuit breakers/RCDs excepted. Power in the eastern suburbs is pretty good.)… I’d rather wait until the memory of that fades before leaving stuff on for extended periods of time. Really should spend a bit of money on surge protected powerboards.