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.
14 Oct 2005
At this stage, if you’ve got broadband, you’d be mad trying to apt to the latest version with the core servers. I was getting maybe 14KB/second max speed from there.
Use a mirror — I’m getting about half a MB/second from mirror.isp.net.au by FTP.
Alternatively, waiting 48 hours would probably do a lot to make the experience less painful, but my theory is I don’t need to think about it whilst it’s downloading, and I have to do it at some point anyway, and they’re going to use the upstream bandwidth at some point regardless.
Interestingly, this release features OpenOffice 2.0 beta 2. The full version release was scheduled for today, but it’s now anticipated to come out sometime next week. I can understand Ubuntu/Canonical’s wish to get it in, though, seeing as they don’t change the CD images after a release goes ahead, and from all reports even OO.org 2.0 beta is a million times better than 1.0.x. Thank goodness.
Looking forward to having a play with this once it’s done downloading. Because of the weird way Synaptic’s sources.list manager works, I’m now stuck downloading some packages from archive.ubuntu.com. Next time I’ll go the command-line route. Bleh, I’ll check back in a few hours.
Or not. I got sick of waiting so I manually changed all the slow sources and started again. Estimated time just went down from 12 hours to 30 minutes, ooohhh yeah!
14 Oct 2005
I spent fifteen minutes figuring the whole GPG thing out today, and, I have to say, it makes lots more sense once you’ve attempted it once. This article from LUG@GT in particular is perhaps the most straightforward piece I’ve ever read on this matter, but that’s dually a comment on the literary capabilities of the F/OSS community as a whole, yet simultaneously an endorsement of the article itself.
The one thing I still don’t quite get is how a message — speaking of emails, here — can be considered as “authentic” as a result of its GPG signature. The signature varies based on the content of the message, and somehow this signature can be considered authentic. Published or not, I still struggle to see how a message can be authoratively considered authentic or otherwise based on a public authentication method seemingly in a state of flux. Perhaps the message content when compared against the key yields the email address and name, against which the message is compared?
If so, in the page linked to above there is (another link to) a full public key not represented in the email message that is supposedly authenticated… not even in its abbreviated hex form (or whatever the heck (hex? :p) 0x426B3C19 is meant to represent — that’s my public key, by the way.)
Anyone who knows how this stuff works got a better/clearer explanation for me? I can understand or at least interact with the encryption side of things without difficulty… I just struggle to see how this signature can be in any way meaningful, when it changes whilst supposedly representing some constant. I’ve proposed a possibility in this post, of course, but I can’t prove it… maybe that’s what the Comment field GPG offers is for? Skeptics like me?
13 Oct 2005
One of several shots from a series of photos I took recently. Comment and post your cheesy titles if you’re that way inclined! “Soar”, obviously, is a little too cliché… can we do better? Hehehe.
For more, see the newly resurrected gallery. Click the image above for (compressed) source resolution. Uncompressed source and full resolution versions of all images in the gallery are sitting on my computer… I’d say to get in touch if you want to use them for anything, but then, I still haven’t bothered to fix my contact form yet. Well, leave a comment and I’ll get in touch ;-) And I’ll fix the contact form soon, promise.
