There’s a new service debuting this week called bandwagon that provides music storage via Amazon’s S3 service for a flat fee. By posting this link I should be able to get a free year of service.
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I decided to make use of some of the other features that FeedBurner provides me. I use them to publish my RSS feed but I realize that not everyone likes to read sites through RSS. So I’ve added an email subscription box on the right hand side of the site so that if you want to know when I write new content but don’t want to be bothered to actually visit the site you can add your email address and it’ll send you an email. I’m fairly certain that FeedBurner will not sell your email address but I’ve added my own email address as a subscription so I’ll know myself how trustworthy their service is (plus it’s good to eat your own dogfood). So give the email subscription a try if it suits your needs, otherwise you can continue to visit or read the content through your RSS reader.
Tags: feedburner, rss, subscription
Tomorrow I’m going to be setting up a corporate blog at work. My goal is to use it as a tool for inter-group communication. We don’t have a good way of distributing knowledge to a lot of people at once and my impression is that a blog would fill that need. I’m of course going to be using Wordpress to set it up; it’s idiotproof, offers the user management features that I need and I hope to be able to introduce RSS and the advantages of syndication to other people in my group and in the company. I’m not sure they’ll take to it like I have (I plan on using Thunderbird for RSS syndication of this internal blog).
One of the first things I did at this job was set up a wiki; two years later I’m setting up a blog. It’ll be an interesting experience I think and it’s something that I’ve been wanting to do for quite a while: partially to boost the “soft” skills that will be required of me but also to show initiative. When you’re pushing for something you have to provide as few reasons as possible for people to doubt you and as many reasons as possible for people to believe in you. Irreplaceable without domination. That’s my motto these days.to
Tags: blogs, Career, corporate-blogs, rss, thunderbird, wiki, Work
Stephen Colbert did a very amusing “The Word” segment on Tuesday about Wikipedia. You can see it here on YouTube while it’s still online. He discusses how with Wikipedia you can build truth and reality through consensus as opposed to facts. He edited his own page and encouraged people to edit the page on elephants saying how the population has tripled in Africa over the last six months. It was a very humourous discussion which prompted quite a few pages to be locked down and protected because the SysOps on Wikipedia didn’t want vandalism. I believe the pages are still protected because if there’s one thing that The Nation can do it’s follow their leader.
Anil had a great article on Wikipedia entitled “Antipedia” the other day and it provided some excellent reference links for further reading on what the future of Wikipedia could be and a discussion on what it has become. I’ve bookmarked them for later reading when I get some free time (should happen any day now right?).
I think Wikipedia is a great community achievement. Considering how frequently I link to it from here I use it quite frequently but I would not use it as a definitive reference. I’ve had this discussion with Marcy too because a lot of her students tend to use Wikipedia in their research, usually as the sole source for their research. That’s not a good practice; high school students need to know how to do proper research – visiting an actual library, reading the books, taking notes. Using Google alone to do your research is not really researching. There’s a lot of skill involved in researching and I hope that that is a skill that doesn’t get lost in the coming years.
Tags: colbert-nation, colbert-report, elephants, research, stephen-colbert, wikiality, wikipedia
I just checked my email (it was down for a few hours this evening) and found this from our IT administrator:
We had to shut down the servers as the server room became flooded from a toilet over flow in the hallway. The room has been cleaned and dried and the servers are now back up and running.
Remember what I wrote before about the cleaning people wanting for a cleaner restroom? Those warnings should not have gone unheeded. Now we’ll have a server room smelling of toilet water. Fortunately my desk isn’t too close to that room.
Tags: bathroom, computers, It Happened To Me, server, toilet
I subscribe to Guy Kawasaki’s feed. Or at least I thought I did. He’s an interesting writer and I like to read what he writes about. In my feed reader this morning there was post on his feed but when you read it you realize that it’s something else entirely:
This is an incredibly small blog that’s intended to: redirect you to Guy’s new feed, show Guy (and others) the reason why they don’t want to just let their Feedburner feeds get deleted, and gently inform Feedburner, Bloglines and others of a little problem that needs to be fixed.
For those of you who are are seeing this message in your feed reader and wondering why I’m not sounding like Guy Kawasaki, here’s the deal. You are subscribed to an outdated Feedburner feed that Guy allowed to lapse. You should unsubscribe to this feed and subscribe to his current feed, which is located at this URL:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/guykawasaki/Gypm
Message to Guy… See? This is what I’m talking about. By allowing your Feedburner feed to get deleted, you’ve opened your subscribers up to having somebody else (like me) to come along, create a feed by the same name in Feedburner, and capture the eyeballs of your subscribers.
Message to Feedburner… Ahem. Perhaps you want to think about the process by which feeds are deleted? Some kind of waiting period (a month, 6 months?) before somebody else can create a feed with the same name? Perhaps some kind of permission-granting thingy?
Message to Bloglines… Ahem. The reason I can do this is because of your tendency not to clear out the cache of “subscribable” feeds very often. I pounded Guy’s blog URL into your “Add” gizmo and got a huge list of feeds, including 2 obsolete Feedburner feeds. I found the “hijackable” feeds by going to the feed URLs in turn, and finding a couple that have been deleted from Feedburner.
If I was an unscrupulous type guy, I could put up a site that: looks just like Guy’s site but spoofs his unsuspecting subscribers into clicking on things by hijacking his credibility, or direct his subscribers to his competitors or do any of the things that people do with domain names that expire…
Yep, here’s the issue — this is just like dropping domain names. ‘Cause that’s what’s happening, a feed URL is being dropped in such a way that somebody could easily write a script to, um, snap up those domains.That’s it. Remember, Guy’s real feed has moved to:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/guykawasaki/Gypm
Onward,
Mike — www.haven.com
This is the risk of letting someone else manage your RSS feed. I fall victim to the same flaw as I too use FeedBurner to manage my RSS feed. This wouldn’t happen if I managed it myself. I don’t have the readership that Guy does so it’s not really a big risk to me to use FeedBurner but Mike here has shown that it’s not that difficult to hijack a feed. He’s white hat in that he’s redirecting people to Guy’s proper feed but he could have continued to pretend he was Guy. We’ll see if Guy responds to this at all (or if he even knows).
Tags: feedburner, guy-kawasaki, hijack, rss, white-hat
If we didn’t have free drinks at work I could use this manual (PDF link, why not use FoxIt?) to hack the vending machine on the main floor of our building. Then I could get all of the free Coke that I’d need. That is, until I’d inevitably get caught and then I’d have to return the hacked merchandise.
Tags: coca-cola, coke, hacks, vending-machine
I’m fortunate in that I work for a company and work in a job that allows me to work from home if I want to. A lot of people can’t do this and I’m grateful that when I’m feeling sick or when I sleep in (like today) I can still get my job done from home through a VPN. I actually get a lot accomplished when I work from home, perhaps I get too much done as I tend to forget to stop for breakfast and/or lunch. I didn’t eat very much today before dinner and I was pretty hungry once Marcy got home.
It was a good thing that today was so productive because tomorrow I have to leave a bit early as we’re going to see Etta James. Thursday I might have to leave early too because one of the teachers at Marcy’s school is having a little get-together at her place in Uxbridge. I’m not sure how I’m going to get there on time but I’ll try my hardest.
Tags: Commuting, etta-james, Technology, telecommuting, uxbridge, vpn, Work
At work I was tired of having my computer crash because I wanted to open a PDF document. Adobe Acrobat seems to have a bad habit of remaining in memory and generally locking up the CPU for no apparent reason. Sometimes it’s because it’s trying to do an update check and I think some of the other times it’s just poorly integrated into the browser.
I needed something better so a coworker and I spent some time and found a tool called Foxit Reader. It does exactly what it says it does – it’s a small, fast, clean and free PDF reader. The difference in loading times between it and Acrobat is phenomenal. It’s a fantastic replacement (so far) for me so if you’re looking for an alternative on Windows to view PDF files, give Foxit Reader a try.
Tags: acrobat, adobe, foxit-reader, pdf
I’ve decided to start keeping some basic statistics on our car beyond the actual value. These things included the mileage each week, the gas we put in (amount, cost, cost/L) and then from there I can maybe figure out what kind of fuel efficiency we’re getting and how our mileage changes from week to week, season to season. I’ve decided to try this out using Google Spreadsheets which I received an invite for a while back but had no reason to use it up until now (even now you could argue that I’m fabricating a reason to use it). I won’t be able to create any charts but all of the basic functionality you’d expect to find in a spreadsheet is there. I can even download it to Excel’s format or to CSV or HTML if I choose. Also I can allow other users to view or even edit my spreadsheet so it could be really great for collaboration. Once I have several weeks’ worth of data I’ll probably update on my experience with Google Spreadsheets and possibly some conclusions about our car. It certainly won’t be as detailed as my elevator analysis (which I should port over to this site at some point).
Tags: car, google-spreadsheets, honda-accord, statistics, tracking
Apparently there was a power outage in the area yesterday afternoon. When we got home last night after 10:30 the stove had the “PF” displayed and the time since the power outage (it was about 2:43). The power was out long enough to affect the computer so I turned it back on to check my email and such. It loaded up but after I logged in it said that there was new hardware to be configured. I haven’t added any new hardware and the hardware it was talking about was an Ethernet controller and a PCI port. I have a wireless network card for my machine here and that was the card that wasn’t functioning so I couldn’t get on the Internet to figure out what was going on. I tried having it autoconfigure the “found” hardware but that didn’t work. I turned off the computer instead because it wasn’t something that I wanted to deal with and we had to get up early this morning anyway so I figured that I would fix it today when I had some more time.
This morning when the computer was turned on it had no problems with the PCI port and it knew what type of wireless network card I had and after it installed the drivers everything worked again. I’m just a little confused as to why it happened in the first place. Did the power outage affect the motherboard in some way?
This machine is now over 4 years old. That’s fairly old in computer terms. I’ve been looking at some Dell machines, particularly the Media Center ones so that we could have recorded tv/music/pictures/whatever available to us. It would be an expensive purchase though so maybe if we save up we can look into that further on in the year. I don’t want to be spending $1000 right now when there are more pressing expenses to deal with.
Tags: dell, motherboard, network-card, pci, power-outage, troubleshooting, wireless
I read The Daily WTF every single day through RSS and boy almost every single day I crack up laughing. If you’re in software development then you should laugh at the boneheaded mistakes that exist in other software systems and it usually makes your own projects seem trivial and mistake-free in comparison. Today’s post on workflows had me actually laughing out loud. The comments are usually worthwhile to read too because you invariably get someone who thinks that the daily wtf post is a valid solution and tries to defend it. There are some running jokes like the Paula “Brilliant” “Brillant” bean (I’ve since implemented this into every single package that I’ve coded). It’s a site worthy of your time.
Tags: brillant, development, humor, programming, software, Technology, the-daily-wtf
Inspired by Jason’s post about his Wikipedia Contrail I’ve decided to post my own. I’ll provide each item with a little blurb:
- Andrew Kahr – one of the reasons why Americans are in so much credit card debt
- Cube Route – a Piers Anthony book that I haven’t read (actually I haven’t read any Piers Anthony books)
- Home Depot – you can never know enough about the world’s 3rd largest retailer
- Kelley Blue Book – I’m trying to keep a more accurate appraisal of our car’s worth
- List of XML and HTML character entities – I needed to know what the XML representation for the pound symbol (#) was
- Tapestry (DHT) – I read an article that mentioned this so I wanted to look it up
I’m surprised the list is so short. It seems like I use Wikipedia much more often than it may seem here. In any case that’s my list for now.
Lifehacker has an interesting series of articles on Cygwin.
Here’s the deal, Windows users: the command line is your friend. But the Windows command line? It’s a really bad friend. You know, the kind that would ditch you in a minute if he got an offer to hang out with someone cooler, the kind who re-gifted that Chia pet from Cousin Jeb for your birthday, the kind who sticks you with the bill every time. With friends like that, who needs enemies?
I use Cygwin all of the time at work; it’s a great way to emulate a Unix command environment while still keeping Windows as your main desktop. It’s a very handy suite of tools and if you’re at all familiar with Unix commands then it’ll feel right at home. In addition it allows you to get around the nasty explorer.exe process that has a habit of holding onto files and folders for no apparent reason.
Via Joey I read this very funny (and true) comic about life before the Internet. It’s amazing how much of our lives have changed since the Internet became so widespread. Kids these days have grown up in a world that has always had Internet access and the next generation will have grown up in a world where there was always broadband access. It will be a different world in another ten years. We’re still in the middle of a revolution.
Tags: comic, Internet, Life, Technology
Well the new Government of Canada page [via] certainly isn’t subtle with its emphasis on political affiliations. I guess our new motto actually is “The true north strong and free” and that the new government is “turning a new leaf”. Oh and there’s an emphasis on the fact that it really is a new government. That’s really great to see. The old website was far too staid. We need a Web 2.0 version of our government’s website and hopefully the CPC will be the ones who can get that done.
I was looking at some of my stats this evening and noticed that my post about “Alumni in high places” has not seen any traffic since a couple of weeks ago. I went to the GoogleTalk blog post and noticed that my post is no longer in the list of sites linking to that post. Now I was a little bit critical about the Google Desktop Search in my post but I don’t really understand why the entire link would be removed. I’ve been more critical in other posts (that’s why I don’t expect to see a link from Jeff Ltd. anytime soon). I’m not sure what the point is of censoring pingbacks like this. Even so I’m not going to lose any sleep over this; I just thought it was worth mentioning.
Tags: censorship, ctv, google-talk, jeff-ltd., pingbacks
I was looking at my Last.fm’s RSS feed and found the description at the top to be rather humourous. You may remember my post on their service last week.
Anyway here’s what they say in the feed:
This is an RSS feed designed to be read by a computer. Which you aren’t.
What’s an RSS Feed?
RSS feeds allow you to soar above fields of data, much in the way a great eagle soars above mountain ranges, except without the endangered species designation…
It’s a nice use of XSLT.
Tags: eagle, endangered-species, last.fm, rss-feed, xslt
Our newest printer here at the office (some Minolta model) seems to be rather polite and civilized. The paper tray ran out of paper so it’s providing a nice warning about the status and urges someone to “Replenish paper”. That sounds nice.
It’s really interesting (to me at least) that DVDs offer a substantially better picture/sound experience than VHS tapes but yet they’re far less tolerant of errors. When there’s a scratch on a DVD it will seriously compromise the video playback to the point where you could end up with a fragmented, jolting movie that makes it very difficult to follow. Compare this with tapes where if there’s a problem with the tape it could get fuzzy (in which case auto-tracking could kick in) but you could still make out the picture. I realize the underlying technology is completely different and the laser is reading a tremendous amount of information on each spin of the disc but that doesn’t mean it isn’t annoying to watch a scratched DVD.
Tags: dvd, fault-tolerance, scratch, vhs
This site had a minor outage this morning. It seems that between 7 and 8 AM the site was completely unavailable. When I brought this site back online I switched to a hosted solution with Dreamhost. It’s laughably inexpensive per month and they provide some great utilities to manage your domain. A lot of popular server software is available as a one-click install.
Anyway this morning I noticed the site was down so I used the panel to ask for support. They were able to verify that the site was down and within 15 minutes it was up again. It’s pretty great service if you ask me (I don’t care if you do or not). This site is hardly critical but it is nice to have it online on a regular basis.
We got our monthly supply of coffee here at work this week. One of the new flavours/roasts is called “Eclipse Blend”. It’s a dark roast which I tend to like though the darker the roast the more bitter the coffee. I figured that it was an appropriate coffee for me to drink; not because I’m a bitter man but for the geeky reason that I use Eclipse at work. What’s a better way to honour this fantastic platform than drinking its namesake coffee? I can’t think of a more suitable tribute.
I’m subscribed to a few of the Google products/services blogs. One of them is the Google Talk one. The newest entry talks about the release of Google’s Desktop Search version 3.0 (causing some privacy concerns).
In any case I usually don’t read who posts the entries on the Google blogs because I didn’t think that I knew anyone who worked there besides Rob. Today though I happened to look and noticed that the name of the poster is John Abd-El-Malek. He was in my class at the University of Waterloo. He’s now a software engineer at Google. Not to be outdone, his brother is pursuing his Ph.D at Carnegie Mellon. And he’s not the only one I know doing their Ph.D. It’s great to see my classmates doing so well. We were a very smart bunch. The reunion in 2008 will be interesting.
Tags: abd-el-malek, alumni, blogs, google, google-desktop-search, google-talk, university-of-waterloo, UW
One of the neat things about Jabber is that you can be online multiple times at the time same. I noticed on Pandion that the resource when I’m using Google Talk is “Talk.v” plus a string of characters whereas when I’m using Gmail it’s “gmail.” plus a string of characters. I can choose which instance of myself and the message will only go to that resource. Unfortunately it doesn’t show the keyboard activity in the chat windows but that’s hardly a major feature. It’s more of a incrementally useful thing to me as I can determine if the conversation is active or not.
One other neat feature is being able to go “off the record”. Basically this means that the chat history won’t be saved (which itself is a new feature in Google Talk – the history gets sent to your Gmail account). I guess if you’re talking about something that you don’t want to save for later (for whatever reason) then you can mark it as such and the other person gets a visual indication of your settings. Of course if you’re not talking with someone with a Google account (like me) then this setting won’t work; my client saves the chat histories anyway. So be forewarned that “off the record” doesn’t apply to conversations with me. I’m secretly archiving all of these personal conversations for use in my tell-all book in 2009.
Tags: chat, gmail, google-talk, jabber, off-the-record, pandion
You can now chat with your Google Talk contacts through Gmail itself. You can read about the details here and this story has been all over the Internet for the last couple of days. I’m not sure how useful this will be for me especially since I recently switched to using Jabber but it looks like a neat application of Javascript and HTML. You can have the chat windows inside Gmail or you can pop them out into their own window.
People have spent the time to dig (not digg) into the Javascript source code and have some thoughts at some upcoming features that might be introduced into Gmail. If one thing holds true it’s that people are always anxious to dissect and analyze every new Google offering. It’s like trying to read tea leaves.
I’ve decided to revisit using Jabber as my main IM. If you happen to use Jabber you can add me at matt@theinflux.com. Also if you’re using Google Talk you can add me at the same address since Google Talk now supports other Jabber servers connecting to their clients. I’ve chosen to go with Pandion as my Jabber client. It’s pretty great so far. If I find any annoyances I’ll be sure to post them here.
Tags: google-talk, jabber, pandion
Not to be outdone by the hype surrounding IE7, it seems that the Mozilla group will be releasing the first alpha of Firefox 2 this Friday. Looking at the release plan, it seems that it’ll be ready for final release this June. I’ll likely be trying out the betas when they come out in a few weeks. Firefox will remain my browser until there is a major change in the features available in competing browsers.
Tags: alpha, beta, browsers, Firefox, internet-explorer
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’ve been trying out 30 Boxes. I said in that post that I couldn’t get the site to work in Firefox at home but that it worked ok here at work. Last night I tried the site again and found that I still couldn’t get it to work in Firefox. I’m not sure what is going wrong at home; I don’t have any crazy extensions installed but I do know that it doesn’t work. I haven’t seen any similar problems on their support forums so I’m not sure what I should do. I guess I could just suck it up and use IE but that’s hardly a good longterm solution for me. If I find some time maybe I’ll post on the forum to see if there’s anything that I’m doing that is causing it not to work.
Tags: 30-boxes, Firefox, ie, internet-explorer, support-forums
I posted last year about a plugin for Wordpress that allowed me to integrate my Creative Commons license with the blog. Well with me upgrading to Wordpress 2.0 (and then 2.0.1) after having lost most of my entries, it was time for me to redisplay this license information on the site because I think it’s extremely important to have an open copyright system.
I decided to use this new plugin called the Creative Commons Configurator. It made it remarkably easy to integrate. I just had to choose my license, copy the RDF into the plugin’s options page and then choose where I wanted to have it displayed. I choose three places: in the header so that bots can read it when spidering this site, in my RSS feed and also on a single post page so that when you’re viewing one post you can see what the rights are.
This is the license that I choose to go with. It’s the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Canada license. It’s great that they have regionally-targeted licenses now. The work of the Creative Commons group is one that I heartily endorse. If I didn’t then I wouldn’t be licensing my work in this way.
Tags: canada, cc, common-content, copyright, creative-commons, license, plugins, rss, wordpress
Yesterday I was able to sign up to be a beta tester for 30 boxes which is a new online calendaring site. I first read about it on Matt’s site and since then the buzz leading up to the public beta this past weekend has been deafening. Just look here and you’ll know what I mean. I tried it last night at home and found that it didn’t work quite as well with my installation of Firefox and I actually had to use IE to be able to enter new calendar items. Fortunately though when I got to work this morning I was able to use Firefox with the site without any difficulties. You can see my profile page here. I’m going to try and put the HTML/Javascript badge on the sidebar here to see how it looks. They have a lot of neat features planned like custom feeds based on tags/dates/whatever as well as an API for developers to leverage. They added iCal/ICS support over the weekend so that people can download their 30 boxes calendar into their desktop calendar applications (Outlook, Mozilla Calendar, whatever). Interoperability is key.
It’ll be interesting to see if this site becomes what Flickr has become for photos. There is a lot of competition for online calendars already.
Tags: 30-boxes, beta, calendars, Firefox, flickr, ical, ics, internet-explorer
Via AKMA I learned that The Onion has opened up their archives. You can now link to any old article. This is fantastic news. Building a firewall around your archives will only isolate yourself in this interdependent, interconnected world. Information needs to be free.
Tags: archives, firewall, Humour, information, the-onion
You may (or may not) have noticed that my archives have really been flushed out over the last few weeks. We lost all of the past entries here and when I came back online here I had to start from scratch again. I was disconcerted at first but then I remembered that Google had been visiting my site (noted here) and I had set my meta robots tag to index and follow links. I did a search for my site (old blog location) and noticed that there were quite a few results (over 1300) and that many of them were cached by Google (the same cache that was recently declared legal). All I had to do then was iterate through the results, visit the cached version of each result and copy the entry into this new installation. It took a lot of work and a lot of time but I think I managed to get about 95% of the entries back again which I’m pretty impressed with. There are still quite a few broken links in those old posts because they refer to other posts in the old blog location so I’ll have to go back and update them at some point but at least the base content is there. I’m currently in the process of importing my old Livejournal entries so that I’ll have all of my blog entries in one place. With Wordpress 2.0 I can backup the blog at any time so I’m going to start doing that just in case something catastrophic goes wrong. Sometimes it’s nice to have search engines crawling what you put online. I also could have used The Wayback Machine but it doesn’t seem to have much from my site. That’s not surprising considering how insignificant this site in the grand scheme of things.
Tags: archive.org, archives, blog, boing-boing, chang8ling, google, google-cache, livejournal, wayback-machine
I just finished upgrading this blog to Wordpress 2.0.1 which was released last night. 114 bugs fixed in this release! From a cursory search a few days ago, I noticed that there have been some general and specific complaints about Wordpress 2.0 so hopefully those will be resolved now. It’s nice to see such a dedicated group of developers trying to improve an already-great product.
I just finished installing IE7 Beta 2 (see this earlier post about IE7) which was released today. Edit: I should say that it’s not officially Beta 2 but rather a “Beta 2 Preview”. Apparently that makes a difference. It’s very similar to Firefox in many respects but differs in others. The menu items no longer exist along the top but rather are graphical pulldowns on the right side of the browser. It has an integrated phishing filter, supports IDN and has numerous fixes and improvements to IE6 and below. There’s also an integrated RSS feed reader that seems pretty nice (at least the styling of the feed looks nice) but I’m going to stick with my current feed reader for now. I’ll keep IE7 running to test it out with work-related sites but Firefox still remains my browser of choice.
Tags: feed-readers, Firefox, idn, ie6, ie7, internet-explorer, phishing, rss
I noticed on Technorati that I’ve been splogged today. This site (my first use of nofollow!) seems to have reproduced my entry from last night about having wireless Internet along with cordless phone use. Stupid sploggers.
Tags: 802.11, cordless-phone, nofollow, spam, splogs, technorati, wifi
I saw this on the 69 Stations blog (a neat project):
Today I fiddled with the Google Maps API, and came up with this. Some fine day, I’ll merge it with this project, to the great annoyance of several people who might otherwise have found it useful.
I took a look at the page and it’s pretty neat though it shows just how small our subway system is. It doesn’t cover much of the city at all yet it carries a significant population each day to and from work/school/events. What I’m really looking forward to is getting the TTC/GO/other transit agencies involved in building a Toronto version of Google Transit.
Tags: 69-stations, Commuting, google, google-maps, google-transit, Toronto, ttc
Right now I’m on the Internet (wirelessly) and Marcy’s on the cordless phone. This has never worked before; usually the phone’s frequency interferes with the wireless connection. I’m not sure why this is possible but I’ll use it while it works. I’m going to go back and tag some older posts.
Tags: 802.11, cordless-phone, Internet, wifi, wireless
I’m getting some pretty amazing speed uploading some old photos to my Flickr account. Maybe it only seems faster since they’re with my older camera and thus the file sizes are much smaller.
I installed Wordpress 2.0 today. Boy is it ever slick! The admin interface I was kind of familiar with since I had setup an account on wordpress.com. I also installed k2 which is optimized for Wordpress 2.0. The WYSIWYG post creation screen is very nice though. Wordpress has really evolved since I first installed it almost 2 years ago. It’s becoming a mature publishing platform.
Well in th’ evolution o’ this site it seems that there is inevitably some wafflin’ back and forth with various layours. I’m now tryin’ out K2 which is th’ sequel t’ Kubrick which ye may recall were bein’ one o’ th’ layouts I tried out last year (or maybe this year – I don’t remember now). And hoist the mainsail! The sharks will eat well tonight! I like th’ support fer various plugins that come with th’ layout so I’m goin’ t’ stick with this fer th’ time bein’. And swab the deck! Aarrr! The top header is a little bland but I’m goin’ t’ look into changin’ that. Keep watchin’ th’ evolution o’ th’ influx.
I am Google Talk-enabled. Hit me up at matt.clements.
Tags: google, google-talk
We you may have noticed that this space was dark for the last little while. I had to reinstall this machine which meant that I lost most of the entries that I had accumulated since last May. I have everything since February 17th of this year so all is not lost. It’s just going to be a long road to recovery.
Things have been really great in the last little while. I’ll post some more in a bit.
Tags: blog
Sorry for the unavailability of this site over the last few days but there was a power outage on Friday evening that seemed to corrupt my CMOS checksum on this machine. I only got around to fixing the problem last night and thus we are back up and running once again. With any luck I’ll have more time to post but it seems I’ve been saying that too often recently and not really delivering on the promise. No guarantees but I will try!
I’ve received strange spam before but I think this one takes the cake in terms of bizarreness factors and nicheness.
To: Mr. matt.clements We Supply Sodium Fluoride Formulae: NaF Molecular weight: 42UN. No: 83015 H.S. CODE: 2826.1100 Properties: White powder, soluble in water, slightly soluble in alcohol, poisonous goods; can be used as manufacturing of enamel, vermin destroyer, rat poison; as insecticide, preservatives for wood and food, antiseptic in alcohol distillation. Quality Standard Index NameMass Percent NaF Content≧98.0% Moisture≦0.5％ S04≦0.1% Water Insolubles≦0.7% PH≦0.1％ Sodium Carbonates≦0.5% Si02≦0.5% Packaging and transportation: Goods will be packed into two layers polyethylene knitting bags with its single net weight to be 25 kgs. per bag. Pay attention to the handling of the package bag for preventing the damages. Shenzhen Quantum Trade Co., Ltd. Rm. 437, Zhenhua Mansion, No. 25, Huafa North Rd., Futian Zone 518031, Shenzhen, PR China Tel: 86-755-83284339/83344724 Fax: 86-755-83284435 Mobile: 86-13500068242 e-mail
My guess is that they got my email address from the IEEE. Stupid harvesters!
At my last job we had a joke that SSIA stood for Source Safe Is Atrocious. After the last two weeks here at work I have a replacement meaning. SQL Server Is Atrocious. I hate it. I can’t wait to move to something else.
For some reason I’ve been getting a lot of comment spam recently touting the wonders of backgammon. Now I’m all for advertising lesser games of chance but the one thing I do mind is that their spelling of backgammon is all over the map. I’ve seen backgamon, backgammonn, backgammon – it’s ridiculous. I wonder if discussing backgammon on this post if I’ll receive even more comment spam.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Googlebot has returned to visiting my humble site. Welcome! Considering how much more traffic I’ve received via Yahoo! and MSN (their bots are constantly hitting this site) I was wondering if Googlebot was just being shy but lo and behold it has returned. Hopefully it’s more of an extended stay.
CBC News: Virgin Group to push for cellphone number portability
I like this idea. They passed a law in the U.S. that says that customers can take their phone number with them. I haven’t changed cellphone providers since I started in 2000 but if I were to change it would be nice if I could take my number with me. I still don’t like The Catch.
In reference to this previous post.
This is meant in the classical music, appreciation for art’s sake kind of way. The political connotation is far less pleasant and I like to think that this is a good cause.
I’ve been posting a lot of links recently to my del.icio.us account (it’s a very hard-to-type URL). I have the Foxylicious extension installed in Mozilla which makes it easy to have all of my bookmarks in the browser but I’ve been using the experimental “post to del.icio.us” bookmarklet. I like how it recommends tags for me to use based on my past tags and also the most popular tags. If you want to see what I’m linking to you (though I fail to see why you’d want to do so) you can either view my del.icio.us page or subscribe to my feed or even add me to your own del.icio.us inbox (if you have an account).
I’m in a post-y mood today.
Doing kottke.org as a full-time job (kottke.org)
Jason has decided to focus on kottke.org on a full-time basis. He’s looking for micropatrons to contribute whatever they can to enable him to do this. If I find some spare change I might consider contributing because Jason’s writing and posts are always entertaining (and his links are great too). It’ll be very interesting to see how this experiment unfolds. If it means more frequent posts then I’m all for it.
Boing Boing: Cracking car keys and Exxon Mobil’s SpeedPass
This isn’t good news. That’s one of the things that kept our car from being stolen back in December (I assume).
In my inbox this morning:
Hi there,
Thanks for signing up to be updated on the latest Gmail happenings. We hope it’s been worth the wait, because we’re excited to finally offer you an invitation to open a free Gmail account! Just click on this link to create your new account:
— insert link here —
Since last April, we’ve been working hard to create the best email service possible. It already comes with 1,000 megabytes of free storage, powerful Google search technology to find any message you want instantly, and a new way of organizing email that saves you time and helps you make sense of all the information in your inbox.
And here are just some of the things that we’ve added in the last few months:
– Free POP access: Take your messages with you. Download them, read them offline, access them using Outlook, your Blackberry or any other device that supports POP
– Gmail Notifier: Get new mail notifications and see the messages and their senders without having to open a browser
– Better contacts management: Import your contacts from Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, Outlook, and others to Gmail in just a few clicks. Add phone numbers, notes and more. Even use search to keep better track of it all.
We also wanted to thank you. For showing us your support and for being so patient. And to those who have already signed up for Gmail, thank you for giving it a try and for helping us make it better. Our users are what have made this product great. So whether you’re just signing up for your account or you’ve been with us since the beginning, keep letting us know how we can build you the best email service around.
That’s it for now. We hope you like Gmail and will share it with your friends. We’ve got lots of cool new stuff planned and we can’t wait for you to see our work in your Gmail accounts! Stay tuned…
Thanks,
The Gmail Team
It’s too bad I already have a Gmail account. I got it last April. I guess the service is moving out of invitation-only beta to public beta.
You may have noticed a fresh new look on this blog starting today. I decided to try out a new theme (not that Kubrick was getting old but I wanted to see what else was out there). This theme is called Benevolence and it’s by the talented designer Theron Parlin. I like it – the grass reminds me that spring is around the corner.
Soon I’m going to have to upgrade to the final release of Wordpress 1.5. I’ve been running the beta versions for quite a while but it would be nice to have the final release and that would wrap up any recent bug fixes.
A parent’s primer to computer slang [via]
A very funny attempt to de-mystify the magical language of “leetspeak” or “!337$p34k” as they spell it on the page.
One sentence struck me:
The first series is of particular concern, as their use could be an indicator that your teenager is involved in the theft of intellectual property, particularly licensed software.
The words are “warez”, “h4x” and “sploitz”. Of course seeing your teenager use these words would probably be an invasion of their privacy unless they speak like this in conversation with you. I doubt there are many tests or essays written at school that include “warez” as discussion material.
Yesterday you may have noticed that the server was inaccessible (unless you were using theinflux.dyndns.org – this should always be up-to-date). I’m switching my Internet access at home from Bell Sympatico to Primus. Primus is a lot cheaper and although it was a hassle getting the modem deilvered I think it will be better in the long run. We’ll see once I actually start using their DSL service. I need to cancel my Bell service and then call and activate my Primus service. Hopefully I can get all of this done before my next bill comes in for Sympatico on the 20th.
So if you see this site down over the next few days you’ll know why that is.
So we’re going to get an Internet Explorer version 7 this year (in beta). That should theoretically be good news but we’ll see what features it will support. I doubt they’re going to do any kind of tabbed browsing (which is what makes Firefox great) and their standards adherence is currently iffy at best so they have a long way to go to improve. That said it’s still the most popular browser on the planet – currently I get 70% of my hits from people using some version of IE.
If anything this proves that big companies can listen to its customers when there’s a need for software updates. Now Microsoft still has to prove that they really can listen and implement the features people are clamouring for.
Well the good folks at the Debian project have fixed the problem I was discussing last week. It turns out it was a problem in the Apache 2 packages and now that they’ve been updated the problems I was seeing earlier have disappeared. Hooray for that. I have my aggregator back again!
I’m having some PHP troubles on this machine today. I have the Debian packages for PHP and Apache2 installed and I think there’s a version conflict. PHP was held back and Apache 2 was upgraded and as a result a bunch of my PHP sites on this server aren’t working properly (for example my photo gallery). Hopefully the problem is resolved tomorrow when I upgrade again.
I’ve had a Hotmail account for what seems like forever and I only discovered recently that it will add “@hotmail.com” for you if you don’t complete the entire email address. I’m not sure why I never noticed this but it is quite handy because typing in a whole email address like that can become cumbersome. I wonder how many other things I have yet to discover about websites I use frequently.
I wish Jabber had more market penetration because this week MSN Messenger has had some serious connection issues. By that I mean there have been lengthy outages where I have no connection to their servers. It’s crazy that a big service like that can just go down. I hope there’s a good reason.
I saw this on Boing Boing this morning and disabled the configuration setting in question (’network.enableIDN’) and it seems to have fixed the exploit. No more DNS hijacking for me!
It’s been a very busy day today. I successfully executed a large-scale test of my code which makes me happy. That makes for a lot less to worry about over the weekend. Hooray!
Real posts later hopefully.
Sorry about having so many updated posts but I’ve gone back and added some Technorati tags to past posts. Things should settle down to normal soon enough.
I’ve decided to join the fray in using Technorati Tags in my posts. You’ll find tags at the bottom of each post linking me to the rest of the blogging world through Technorati. We’ll see how effective it is but judging from my traffic over the weekend it could prove useful. My post last week on Paan received a lot of hits (and some interesting comments) based on its being the #2 post for the Toronto tag at one point. Anyway, we’ll give it a try – the more people who participate the better the program will be. There are already a bunch of plugins available to manage the tags on your blog and thanks to Chris Lott I’m using the TechnoTags plugin for Wordpress.
I solved a major problem at work this morning, one that was giving the CEO troubles. I spent most of the day trying to figure out what was happening and in the end a simple STATIC keyword insertion fixed everything. This should fix the problems one of our clients was having and eliminate the number of runaway problems on the system. In the end I’ve made our system more stable and flexible. The client was following a use case that we never anticipated.
An update on this previous post. Bill Gates clarifies his statements about communism and intellectual property laws. [via]
An affordable Mac? It’s pretty neat looking and incredibly small. Maybe this will be my next computer. Speaking of tiny, the iPod shuffle is ridiculously small – one ounce, smaller than most packs of chewing gum. The downside? No screen. The upside? $99 for 512 MB, $149 for 1 GB. I need something to listen to on my TTC ride to/from work. Perhaps this will fill the gap?
Via Lawrence Lessig’s blog I discovered the invention of WP-CC, a plugin for Wordpress that lets you easily manage your Creative Commons license. I have previously discussed the inclusion of such a license in this space. You can see the license at the bottom of every page. This makes it very easy to modify my license if I ever need to do that. It also eliminates the need to copy and paste the license meta information each time I upgrade Wordpress to another beta version. Thanks to Firas!
There’s only so much secrecy available to you when you’re on the Internet. You can’t always control how people find out about your site (forums, searches, etc.) but you can control who you give your URLs to. You take a risk offending any new readers.
This is some good advice about making project estimates. If your manager isn’t too technical it’s a good approach to take as a compromise.
In honour of this post I’m labelling myself a copyright communist. I think “intellectual property” laws should be reformed. If Bill Gates thinks that such people are communist then so be it.
I discovered through looking at my log files that if you search for formal tea on Yahoo! or MSN my photos of our tea reception last summer rank #3 on each site. I’m nowhere to be found on Google because apparently Google has stopped indexing my site for whatever reason. I’m sure people who are looking for instructions on how to serve a formal tea will be much appreciative of pictorial evidence of our formal tea. I say enjoy!
I should note that the pictures are only result #8 on MSN’s beta search site. Not bad for having near-zero web visibility!
Via the Farm I read about this great advice for college computer science students from Joel. He has 7 (+1 bonus) things that should be done while you’re in college:
- Learn how to write before graduating.
- Learn C before graduating.
- Learn microeconomics before graduating.
- Don’t blow off non-CS classes just because they’re boring.
- Take programming-intensive courses.
- Stop worrying about all the jobs going to India.
- No matter what you do, get a good summer internship.
- Seek professional help for that self-esteem thing.
Number 7 is definitely important. Being a Waterloo alumnus I was fortunate enough to get good-to-excellent internships via the co-op program. Having in sum two years of practical, applicable work experience in my field is a definite bonus when looking for jobs. That’s not to say that jobs are flying through the door and begging me to join them but I know that having a degree plus work experience increases my chances of landing a good job. More than anything, that’s what drives Waterloo’s technology reputation. Sure the system has issues and the quality of jobs has perhaps declined somewhat after the tech bubble blew up but it’s still a respected program.
The most that I can personally hope for is that it continues to be respected and that in combination with my work since graduation will land me another job, whenever I decide/am forced to look for one next. With luck that won’t be anytime soon – I’m really enjoying my work here.
I got an email this morning:
Matt,
I am contacting you with a non-work related matter. Saddly, it is pertaining to the desperate situation transpiring in South East Asia. As you are aware, efforts from all over the world to help the surviving victims rebuild their lives has been in full force since December 26th. However, the demand for aid and support is still desperate.
Hence, our desire to spread the word about who you could safely make a donation that you are comfortable with if you have not already done so.
Now I’m all for raising funds for South East Asia but I’ve never met this guy or corresponded with him before. I can only guess that he got my email from one of the many job-related sites that I signed up for in the summer. At least it’s not totally spammy; the links provided point to real donations sites. It’s still unsolicited email in my books.
I knew that subscribing to my own Wiki’s RSS feed would come in handy. I subscribe to the Recent Changes page on the Wiki just in case something like what I’m about to describe happens.
Some spammer created a page called RecentVisitors on my Wiki. That page (which is now deleted) is created on installations of PHPWiki (which I used to use; I’ve since switched to MediaWiki). It’s meant to be like a guestbook however the nature of the Wiki leaves it very open to abuse.
So this spammer created this page. He then added “Jacob from [some spammer’s site]” to the page. The page isn’t linked to or from any other page; I would have had to have known that it existed to find it. However since I subscribe to the RSS feed, it tells me every single change to the Wiki. I knew within the hour what had occurred and quickly deleted the page.
The whole point of these spams (spem?) is to increase the page rank of the linked site. Since more and more search engines are indexing blogs, comment spam is not going to go away. Though this is the first encounter I’ve had with Wiki spam, I’m sure it won’t be the last. If it becomes more of a problem then I’m going to have to investigate ways to lock that down. As much as I like Wiki’s (and it’s a lot), I can’t afford to have my own Wiki turn into a cesspool of spam links.
I think I need to revamp my categories here. I think they’re too broad and/or vague. Of course with new categories it means that I need to go through the 400-odd posts that I’ve written here and re-categorize them. But if the end reuslt is a cleaner set of archives then I’ll for investing the time.
Last week I was bombarded with comment spam in this space. This isn’t the first time this has happened (as evidenced by these previous posts) but this time it was pretty severe – over 360 comments were in the moderation queue. Fortunately I have enough protective elements on this blog that none of them made it onto the site itself but I still had to delete 360 comments and mark them as spam so that my spam filters are smarter in the future. It didn’t take that long but it was kind of annoying. I suppose it could be worse – deleting live comments or having several times the number of comments to delete. I guess that’s one of the good things about being the 3,121,966th blog by traffic according to Alexa – I’m flying under most spammers’ radar.
An interesting article by Joel. Pricing things, particularly software, is an extremely inexact artform. If it were formulaic then there would be such thing as bad sales.
I haven’t had much comment spam recently mainly due to the robust safeguards I’ve installed on this server. This morning though there were a few and they were interesting in their content. All linked to gambling sites but to try and get through the filters they use choice language. Here are some of the award winners:
- He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.
- Modern science disclaims any intention of understanding the hidden nature of things; its philosophy condemns any such endeavour as vague, misleading and altogether unscientific….But I refuse to heed this warning. I agree that the process of understanding leads beyond – indeed far beyond – what a strict empiricism regards as the domain of legitimate knowledge; but I reject such an empiricism. If consistently applied, it would discredit any knowledge whatever and it can be upheld only by allowing it to remain inconsistent. It is permitted this inconsistency because its ruthless mutilation of human experience lends it such a high reputation for scientific severity, that its prestige overrides the defensiveness of its own foundations. Our acknowledgement of understanding as a valid form of knowing will go a long way towards liberating our minds from this violent and inefficient despotism.
- One of the most constant characteristics of beliefs is their intolerance. The stronger the belief, the greater its intolerance. Men dominated by a certitude cannot tolerate those who do not accept it.
- False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils, except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm those only who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.
- From infancy, almost, the average girl is told that marriage is her ultimate goal; therefore her training and education must be directed towards that end. Like the mute beast fattened for slaughter, she is prepared for that.
I guess that the comment spam scripts have access to Bartlett’s Famous Quotations.
The CBC now has RSS feeds! Though not full-content feeds it’s still better than nothing. I’ve subscribed to a bunch of them though I’ll still visit the site regularly. The End-User License Agreement has some interesting clauses. If I don’t click through does that still mean that I agree to the agreement? That’s a murky area. All aboard the RSS bandwagon!
Google Suggest beta suggests search terms as you type [via]. This is pretty neat.
So the site has been unavailable to the outside world for the past couple of days, unless you knew my new IP address. I didn’t even know it yesterday since it changed while I was sleeping and I didn’t bother to confirm that it was still the same before I left for work. It isn’t like the old days when I can go home at lunch (walking the way there) and configure things at home and then make it back to work in a reasonable amount of time. Those days are long gone. I do have in mind a plan to avoid future DNS hiccups like this though or rather to make the outages shorter.
Thank goodness it’s Friday.
It seems that the IP address used by my home connection changed in the middle of the afternoon today. As a result, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to read this until the new DNS information has propagated around the Internet. It’s unfortunate when this happens but seeing as I’m hosting everything myself there’s little that I can do to avoid this kind of thing. When the router tries to renew, it’s out of its control what comes back. Being in Toronto where there are a higher number of Internet users (due to the increased population compared with Kitchener), it’s inevitable that someone else in the city/region will be trying to request an IP address at the same time.
Time for bed. Another day begins in 7 hours.
We are the tech-support generation [via].
I really don’t mind fixing computers and electronics. What I do mind is someone assuming that since I have a degree in computer engineering that I should automatically know what is wrong and how to remedy certain problems. Fortunately this issue hasn’t come up in a long time.
This morning I upgraded this to be running the latest nightly build of Wordpress, 1.3-alpha-5. It took a little bit of work to get things working with the themes and configuration files/plugins but we should be good to go (again). I haven’t noticed many major changes between the previous version I was using (alpha-3) and this one. Mostly they are minor user interface-type changes.
That said, Wordpress still rocks and is going to rock even more in the future.
I got an email last night:
During routine maintenance on www.microsoft.com/careers, it was determined that there was a discrepancy within your customer record which has resulted in your account information being deleted.
We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience, but encourage and invite you to re-visit www.microsoft.com/careers to set up a new user profile so you can continue to explore the many career opportunities available at Microsoft.
Thank you for your time, and for considering Microsoft Corporation as a potential employer.
Staffing Department
Microsoft Corporation
Well that’s pretty great news now isn’t it? I really hope that every company deletes my customer record like this. Note that they don’t tell me what the discrepancy was or how I could avoid repeating the discrepancy in the future. My information is lost and there’s nothing that I can do about it.
A few months back I was applying to Microsoft jobs very regularly but stopped once it was decided that we would be moving to Toronto instead. However I’m still not very happy with this. Someday we might end up moving to Seattle though we’re pretty comfortable here right now. The point is that despite their “sincere apologies”, the data that I had provided to them is lost. My tailored resume, my job searches, the jobs that I had applied to, they’re all gone.
It doesn’t exactly leave me with a positive feeling.
I just read about Shaw Cable’s horrible new policy of blocking network traffic:
When customers of Canada’s Shaw Cable high-speed Internet service noticed that their filesharing activity had slowed down dramatically, they didn’t know what to make of it. Calling the ISP didn’t help: Shaw’s tech support people swore that they were delivering all the packets they received from their customers, just as you’d expect. After all, who’d want an ISP that picked and chose which of your communications got through — imagine if the phone company or the post office just silently threw away some of your messages based on secret criteria!
So the Shaw customers went to DSL Reports, a community site for posting about DSL and other high-speed providers, and they found that they were not alone and not imagining things. Lots of Shaw customers were getting really crummy performance out of their Internet connections.
Then someone claiming to be a Shaw insider posted an explanation: Shaw had secretly installed a packet-filter on its network that was using hidden rules to silently discard some of its customers’ packets. And they’d instructed their tech people to lie about it when customers called in and asked.
It might have been a fake, but not long after, DSL Reports got a letter from Shaw’s lawyers telling them that this was confidential info from a Shaw employee and that they’d be sued if they didn’t take it offline, so it looks like its true (says DSL Reports, “Needless to say, we’ve never bent over for an ISP upset at bad publicity, or forked over anyones identity, and we’re not about to start.”)
Here’s the facts, then:
1. Shaw is indiscriminately censoring its customers’ Internet feeds. It’s not blocking infringing files (hell, Shaw can’t even know for certain what files are and aren’t infringing for each customer), it’s blocking protocols, applications used to transmit and receive tens, hundreds of millions of public-domain, copylefted and non-copyrightable works.
2. Shaw is lying about censoring its customers’ Internet feeds.
3. Shaw is threatening to sue people who tell the world about its lies.Are you a Shaw customer? Do you still want to be, in light of the above? Link
Why Shaw would do this I have no idea. One thing is becoming frightfully obvious to me is that ISPs are a) scared and b) too powerful. This is one of the most important lessons that I learned from reading Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas – when you can control several components of the hierarchy (hardware, access, content), it’s a dangerous mix. No one company should have that power.
Truly the battles between me and a printer have been going on for centuries now. Last night was just the latest installment of me versus our current printer incarnation, a Brother MFC3320CN. When it works it’s far beyond what our old printer (approximate model) could do. Getting it to work however can be a real challenge. I’m not sure what the deal is but often the printer will claim that it’s jammed when in fact we can clearly see that there is no paper inside. Other times it’ll refuse to print. You turn the printer off and then back on again and it starts printing. Definitely a reliable piece of machinery.
Last night was very frustrating because the printer wasn’t even being recognized by Windows when you plugged it in (via USB). I tried searching online for what could be the cause. I downloaded new drivers, I removed unused drivers and while I was at it I removed other software that I haven’t been using. I rebooted the machine a very high number of times. Each time I tried something new, the printer would fail to be recognized by the computer. Growing more and more frustrated, I decided to try a new USB printer cable. Sure enough this seemed to do the trick. It at least made the computer recognize what kind of device I was attaching which was a far cry from the state of affairs a few minutes before.
I installed the drivers again and tried printing a test page. The printer received the data fine and a page went through the printer.
The problem now? We’re out of ink. This printer is deliberately taunting me.
From Boing Boing this morning:
Firefox, an Internet Explorer killer, has gone 1.0
Firefox, the finest, most secure Web browser ever created for average-user applications, went 1.0 today. You can download it below, toss out Internet Explorer, and be relatively assured that you computer won’t be compromised due to Microsoft’s bad design decisions and lax security maintenance. Link, Direct link to FTP server
The FTP server has BitTorrent links so use those if possible to remove the bandwidth burden from the Mozilla Foundation. Their servers are getting hammered today and it’s important that people are able to get Firefox 1.0. The revolution continues today.
Edit: The release was announced with this final change to the website:
steven%silverorange.com 2004-11-09 00:50
People of Earth, I give you Firefox 1.0
Hopefully the People of Earth are appreciative.
I’m using Trillian 3!
I got this email this morning:
Hello,
Congratulations! You are receiving this e-mail because of your expressed
interest in testing pre-release builds of Trillian 3. You have been chosen as a
part of the first phase of deployment. There are precious few others among your
hyper-elite inner circle of badasses, young and old.
Personally I do feel pretty special. I’ve been subscribed to the Cerulean Studios blog for a while now and was excited when I saw today’s post.
We’ve started sending out builds to those of you who signed up. Not everyone will receive a build from us, and we will be doing it in stages, randomly.
I’ll send out a few more tomorrow morning, but tonight we’re going to crash. In the meantime, check out the website — there will be a new flash link to a sneak preview tour shortly.
Enjoy!
I had signed up a while ago in the hopes that I’d be able to try out the new Trillian. So far I really like it – it features integrated lookups to Wikipedia for certain keywords. Mark says that that should be a built-in feature to Windows. I can only dream of such a thing. The user interface has been streamlined and certain options are enabled by default. I expect it to crash since it’s still alpha software but I look forward to using this as my new IM application.
It seems that my former employer has jumped on the blogwagon! That’s pretty cool! They’re using .TEXT which is the software running on blogs.msdn.com. Right now there’s only one post (from Phil) but I’ve subscribed to the main feed in the hopes that there will be more entries soon. Booksoft’s sister company also has a blog portal but it’s empty right now. Hopefully they populate that with content soon too. I’m not sure if havings corporate blogs where I work now would be useful at all. Perhaps it’s something to investigate.
So Marcy and I are getting more and more settled into our new lives here in Toronto. Almost all of the boxes that we moved have been unpacked and the remainder are being stored in the spare bedroom (man it’s great to have one of those). We’ve already picked out our paint for the entire apartment and are looking forward to decorating together. It will make a huge difference. We’re also looking at new leather furniture for the living room as it seems that all of the furniture stores in the area are having these crazy promotional deals (buy 3 pieces, get a big-screen tv). We’re thinking of going with a 4-piece black leather-split set from Leon’s because we think it’s the best value for the dollar and gives us plenty of space to sit in the new living room. We’ll probably give our existing couch (after the addition of a new slip cover). We won’t need a third couch after buying this new furniture.
Work has been extremely exciting so far so that’s definitely a positive sign. There are many differences between this job and my previous one but I won’t mention anything here. The job is very interesting, the people are great and things are really moving quickly sales-wise. We have an offsite meeting tomorrow. I’m not sure exactly what that entails but it sounds interesting!
Marcy and I are going to have to purchase a car quite soon. Her car is having some troubles and it’s not worth risking her driving an hour per day and getting stuck on the 401. Today we commuted together and after work we’re going to look at some used cars in this area. We’re looking at a 2000-2002 Honda Accord and fortunately for us there are plenty to choose from in the area.
Yesterday we went to clothes shopping and I bought a whole whack of new things to wear. Pants, shirts, shoes, even a belt! It’s very exciting. The new shoes I love – they’re slip-on leathers that looks nice and feel great. I’m wearing them today.
I have lots of photos to upload this week so stay tuned to the gallery! Now that I have consistent Internet access at home (and I can connect to the server from work), there should be more frequent updates in this space.
We’re back online here at the new homestead. It’s such a relief to have Internet access again. Stay tuned for more posts!
I noticed something about the new Hotmail the other day (the one with 250MB of storage). When you have a link in a URL now, it doesn’t open it up in a new framed window with that annoying Hotmail text at the top (”You are visiting a site outside of Hotmail” or something like that). Also the actual URL is no longer encoded into some Hotmail-based URL. Instead they’re using Javscript (or I guess JScript since it’s Microsoft-based) to open a new window. It makes the URL cleaner and also it’s less intrusive on the new window since you can actually read what the new URL is. Of course they’re still tracking what you visit inside of the Javascript/JScript function but most people probably don’t know or mind that that is happening.
A short postscript on my previous post: what this means implicitly is that this server will be offline until we get Internet access again. I hope it won’t be more than 10 days. I’ll post in the meantime on my other blog. I got an email from Livejournal this morning saying that my paid account was expiring soon. I’ll have to renew.
So as an update to yesterday’s post about moving utilities to our new location, I present with you the next installment.
I went home at lunch again and I called back our building manager. She said that yes it’s true that they don’t offer high-speed in the building but that it is planned for the future. She can’t put a timeframe on the process and she mentioned that a lot of people in the building have Bell Sympatico (DSL). I’ve had that service before and it was pretty good, the highest-speed is comparable to Rogers Extreme.
I tried calling the Sympatico number and spent a good 20 minutes lost in their voicemail system. My problem was that the number I wanted to get the service on isn’t activated yet and the menu items depend strongly on what number you enter. I finally abandoned the automated service and got a hold of a “customer representative”. I explained the situation and she told me that I can’t get Internet until the phone number has been activated. This means that I’ll have to call them back on Saturday evening or Sunday to schedule a delivery of the modem. That’s kind of frustrating but there’s not much I can do about it.
I wish Rogers had digital cable available in the building. Perhaps they’ll have it soon.
Well seeing as I’m not sure if this server will be online after the weekend, I should update on the status of this blog.
September has been a fantastic month for traffic. I’ve had more than 3700 unique visitors, up from 300 in August. Most of the traffic is because of the Ken Jennings-related posts that I made earlier this month linking to Jason’s site.
I recently had a shout-out on Dana Blankenhorn’s blog because I have him on my links list on the side of this page. He talked about my Last Casino post. I should let him know that I am indeed planning on pitching my reality show idea to the networks and look for me next fall!
My Map24 post from last week made it to Scoble’s linkblog on Friday though I’m not sure how many people saw it due to the volume of links that are on that site. It was still neat to be seen on there.
I’ve also seen a decent amount of traffic from pinging a couple of Accordion Guy’s posts. His recent PSA is probably more true than I’d like to admit.
Finally, James kindly linked to my post about First Daughter, concurring with me that Mr. Cranky does give some scathing reviews. He continues to talk about Total Recall which I must admit I enjoy from time-to-time despite its implausibility. There are some definitive Arnold lines in there and it’s too good to pass up on a rainy Saturday afternoon.
I had two of our utilities changed today at lunch – telephone and cable (tv and Internet). I had tried to use both companies’ online moving tools but one didn’t give me a success/failure answer at the end (blank screen in the browser) and the other sent me an email saying they couldn’t migrate my service and to call them (that was the cable company).
I called them at lunch. I first had the phone service transferred and that took a while because they had trouble finding my building in their system. I’ve now seen the building listed under Toronto, North York and York (this is where the phone company found us). Complying with utility policy, there is a $55 charge for moving my service like this. It should be working Saturday morning at 10. Our number is XXX-XXX-XXXX so give us a call after Saturday!
The frustrating episode with the cable company came next. I said that I wanted to move my digital television and Internet services. She took my address and suggested that I get “digital television” and “cable Internet” with them to have a cheaper overall rate (by being a V.I.P. member). I said to her that I already had Internet service through them, in fact I paid to buy their modem to get faster speeds. She realized her mistake and put me on hold. She came back and told me that the building that I’m moving into does not have an agreement with the cable company to provide digital television and cable Internet service. Now that definitely is not a good thing because that means I’m going to have to look for an alternative solution if this is in fact true (I left a message with the building manager).
In preparation for the inevitable “this is true” response from the building manager, I took a quick look at satellite service this afternoon. I can get a comparable package for a bit cheaper for month but I need to purchase the dish. The other thing that might cause complications is that we don’t face southwest as is required when you live east of Manitoba. We face due East though we can certainly point something southeast. Southwest though? That seems out of the question. I can get my Internet access through the phone company so that’s definitely a potential though I’m sure I can find cheaper/better service with a local ISP. That requires a bit more work however.
So right now things aren’t looking very good for us to continue our enjoyment that is digital cable, high-speed Internet service. I’m hoping to get this resolved this week either way.
So last night I drove to Whitby (as I mentioned) and then back again this morning. I’m tired but it’s worth it to see Marcy for the evening. I had a couple of errands to run before I left town, namely try to find a copy of The Crucible for Marcy to show her Grade 11 class. I haven’t seen the movie or read the book but we have the movie until next Wednesday so perhaps I’ll watch it before then.
Traffic wasn’t too bad seeing as I left a bit later than last Friday. Leaving a little past the main rush home made a huge difference and I barely had any slowdown at all going through Toronto. I left earlier this morning than I have in the past (before 7) and it didn’t make a huge difference in the time it took me to get back here. The only advantage really is that I get to work earlier and seeing as the deadline looms once again I suppose that isn’t such a bad thing. Traffic was slow in “the usual spots” (more on that term at a later date) but generally ok. One thing that really doesn’t agree with me eyes is when a pickup truck has something sticking off the back like a ladder or something. For some reason it seems like it’s going to hit my eye. I can’t really explain it and it doesn’t make much sense but there you go.
When I got to Marcy’s house it seemed like no one was home. I tried ringing the doorbell a couple of times but all of the lights were off inside so I figured that I’d just wait until someone showed up. Marcy was home; she had just fallen asleep. She’s been feeling sick this week and I think she might have a throat infection or something. I had some homemade pizza and chili for dinner (tasted great!) and watched tv for a little bit.
We watched the series premiere of CSI: NY. For a first episode, I’d give it a passing grade but I wasn’t overwhelmed by the episode. The story seemed to fall apart near the end. We did see a new magical technology introduced however – the triangulation modelling application. Now the principles behind this are sound (for once) but I highly doubt that it’s that easy to match up landmarks in a photo using software. Perhaps I’m just ignorant of the software that crime labs have available to them but I suspect the process would be more involved than what they show there. Anyway, the new show is most likely something that I’ll keep watching though I notice that it’s on against Law & Order, another favourite. I’ll have to see how they integrate the new character into that show seeing as Lennie is now gone.
I’ve been meaning to write about this since I read about it yesterday on Scoble’s blog.
See, in my quest for a great map I started with Mapquest. Many of you might even use Mapquest. It was among the first sites where you could stick in an address and get a map. Or, stick in two addresses and get directions.
It was the coolest thing. And everytime someone shows up to a party, invariably they have a printout from Mapquest.
But, something was missing. The maps were small and weren’t really nice. I was looking for something, um, more glorious.
One day a coworker said “visit Mappoint.” Oh, these are nicer, larger, more colorful, easier to read maps! And life was good. My quest for a better map was satisfied.
At least until I saw Jamie’s post tonight.
He pointed me to a new map: Map24. Now, this is a Java deal. But, whew, zooming maps?
Oh, Jamie, why did you need to shake my perfect map world up?
So I tried out Map24. I was hesitant to change from Mappoint because it does what I need it to do so well – give me a general idea of where a location and is and occasionally give me directions on how to get there. I don’t need more than that most times.
I tried it out by typing in my address. Now as you know, I live in Kitchener overlooking Victoria Park. I give this preamble because when I typed in my address, Map24 indicated that there is an airport in Victoria Park. Now I know that I can miss details when looking around for something but I think I would notice an airport in my local park. I think I’ll be staying with Mappoint though the ideas behind Map24 is rather neat.
I really shouldn’t be very surprised at this though – most web services don’t provide much relevant content for Canada. Google just announced the creation of Google Local Canada. I tried searching for “coffee shops” near “Kitchener” and it gave me a list with places that are as much as an hour away. Ah ok, now I see that by default it searches for spots 75 km away but even when I narrow it down to 2 km it doesn’t find nearly as many as I would expect. Perhaps they mean “coffee shops” in the other sense. Maybe that would explain why the example search is “coffee shops” near “Vancouver”. Oh those crazy people who live in British Columbia – all they do is smoke marijuana right? That’s the impression a lot of people have I’m sure though it seems some residents like to heckle the Governor General when she comes to town.
I saw mention of Canon’s new professional digital camera, the EOS-1DS Mark II this morning on the Digital Photography Review site. You can see 4 sample images. They are extremely large files mainly because the camera is capable of taking 16.7 million pixels with each shot. That’s more than 3 times my camera’s 5 Megapixel count. That’s an incredible amount of detail and looking at the sample images, the results are absolutely incredible.
Of course at an estimated street price of $8000 USD, I think it’s far far far outside of my price range. I can dream though.
I was watching the real-time web log statistics for my web server a little while ago and noticed that the MSNBot was requesting pictures that it wasn’t supposed to have access to in my gallery (I won’t say which ones). Concerned, I investigated and found that the album permissions were correct but the individual item permissions were not. That wasn’t good at all but I quickly remedied the situation. Thankfully Gallery 2 is powerful enough to do that. This has taught me to be more diligent in setting permissions on things like pictures.
I’ve discovered a couple of really neat photo sites this morning.
The first one is called “I Found Some Of Your Life“. I saw it in Photo Matt’s feed and even if it is fictional, it’s still a neat idea for a weblog. Mark calls it “a Mark Approved use for a blog”. It would be fun to invent a storyline for a series of pictures. I wonder what such a storyline would look like for my photos.
The other site is called “Goodbye Romania“. The catch here is that each time someone visits the site, a pixel is taken from each photo so eventually the site will be destroyed by the actions of the visitors. I don’t have enough time to make up something like that.
Remember how on Friday I mused about the possibility of having Kubrick as a theme for Wordpress? Well it’s been done. I installed it last night and have it working with the latest Wordpress code. I haven’t had a chance to integrate the threaded comments yet. Hopefully I’ll find some time for that tonight.
I saw a neat tip about Firefox this afternoon – your open tabs are accessible by cycling through CTRL and 0-9. I didn’t know that. I did know that you can use CTRL + TAB to move through your tab list sequentially (SHIFT + TAB for the opposite direction).
Any way I can reduce the amount of mouse usage is of benefit to me. I still need to discuss Firefox 0.10 at some point.
Well if you were to act out the question above using cats then this video might help solve it for you. Joey hypothesizes that you could use the video as a metaphor for the dominance of Internet Explorer and how the browser wars were originally won back in the late ’90s. I think that’s a pretty fair assessment though with any luck browsers like Firefox will bring back the Internet as platform idea.
I’ve seen our cats act like those in the video very often though the weight disparity between Pumpkin and Elle is not nearly as big as with those two cats.
I just upgraded to the latest nightly build of Wordpress (though they’re not really “builds” so much as they’re a packaging of the PHP source files). I hadn’t updated in a while (since this day) and there were a few changes that I could see. The main problem right now is that when I upgrade I need to backup my current setup, move the new files and then replace certain files so that the site looks and behaves similarly. That can be challenging but I think I have all of the kinks worked out. One of the neat things that I see is the “Presentation” manager which lets you have different themes for your installation. I’m hoping that eventually Kubrick (which I love) will be a theme (or even the default theme).
I’ve talked about comment spam before and about once a week I get a bunch of comments that need moderating. It’s a trivial task and so far I haven’t had any false positives or false negatives. The moderation capabilities of Wordpress are truly great. I have to laugh at this comment spam though:
I have always looked for a possibility to find information as quick as I can. Now there is the internet. And I really appreciate people like you who take their chance in such an excellent way to give an impression on certain topics. Thanks for having me here.
[Link to some random casino site]
It makes me feel good that the spammers find me such a great resource “on certain topics”.
I’ve decided to use a plugin for Wordpress that allows for Threaded Comments (capitals are required). It was fairly easy to integrate with the Kubrick theme that I’ve installed on here.
If I have some time tonight I’m going to try and have the Kubrick comment form with the Threaded Comments feature because I like the look of that comment form over the plugin’s version.
So what does this allow for? Basically you can now respond to individual comments and have a threaded conversation as opposed to having just a flat conversation where the comments jump from one thread to another. If I ever get more commenters then this might make a difference. For now it’s just more convenient and nicer-looking to me.
You know how you read about people who spill things on their keyboards? You know how you laugh at people who do that? Well that just happened to me and boy am I not happy about it. I bought a Dr. Pepper at the variety store just now and when I opened it up it exploded all over my desk. Great news! My backspace key doesn’t work properly, it outputs a “u” instead of deleting a character. I’m going to need to get a new keyboard I suppose. My desk is also very sticky now which doesn’t make for a nice work environment. Oh well, I’ll get oer it (I can’t type the letter after “u” now either).
Edit: I’ve switched keyboards to another natural keyboard (my long-time preference) and we’re back in business in the office.
I’ve decided to include a bunch of links that I frequently visit to the sidebar of this blog. Mostly it’s a subset of my feed list on Bloglines but at least it’ll give visitors to this site an idea of what I like to read. So go explore these linked sites! They’re well worth your while.
I love Wikipedia. It’s a fantastic resource. I think I first espoused its greatness in this post last January but I’ve used it on countless occasions for information on obscure and mainstream topics alike. I liked the Wiki software so much that I switched my own Wiki from using PHPWiki to MediaWiki.
Last week there was some uproar around a lot of blogs because a journalist said that the Wikipedia was unreliable as a resource because anyone could change the contents. Here are a couple of Boing Boing posts on the topic. I especially like the last post because this journalist made a bunch of changes to some articles thinking that they’d never be found but they were all corrected within hours (mainly because a lot of people read the recent changes feed).
Anyway, this morning on Tim Bray’s blog, I read a nice summary of how he feels about the Wikipedia:
The Wikipedia is beautiful. It’s an unexpected and unexplainable triumph of collective creativity and of order over entropy. I hope it lasts a long time, and those who criticize it Just Don’t Get It.
He’s right, it is a beautiful thing. Who would have guessed that such a wonderful resource could have grown out of the wilderness that is the Internet? With all of the centralized, controlled content available online now, it’s refreshing to find an open, collaborative site like this.
When I visited the Wikipedia site this morning, I noticed for the first time the list of sister sites that are available:
- Meta-Wiki – Coordination of all Wikimedia projects
- Wiktionary – A dictionary and thesaurus
- Wikibooks – Free textbooks and manuals
- Wikiquote – A collection of quotations (note the correct usage)
- Wikisource – Free source documents
Wow that’s really awesome! I’ll have to make use of these new resources (to me).
I decided to upgrade my Wordpress installation to 1.3-alpha-2 (or the latest nightly build). I don’t see much harm in running this code – the worst that could happen is that it loses data and since I’ve been keeping backups lately it should be ok. I had a little difficulty getting everything working properly with my Kubrick layout but I think we’re back up and running successfully now. I like the new options and capabilities of Wordpress 1.3 and I look forward to seeing it roll out in final release soon!
If you’ve watched movies or television shows with me then you might know that it irks me to no end how the forensics labs have amazing photo manipulation tools that inevitably reveal the truth about a crime or person’s identity. This happens most times you turn on the tv or watch a movie. It happened most recently to me when Marcy and I watched Foolproof last week. The trio were trying to read a new combination for a fancy safe and they had installed a camera in the ceiling of the office to capture the view of paper. It of course was very fuzzy so they asked the computer whiz to “clean it up a little”. The end result, you guessed it, was a crystal-clear image of the new combination, enabling them to break into the office the next night. Argh!
Has anyone in the entertainment industry ever used photo manipulation software? It doesn’t work that way. To prove a point, Darren goes through a typical scenario featured in these shows and movies. It’s amusing because in some ways you get less information from the image after “he’s cleaned it up a little”.
Apart from Darren’s mention about the customized software they use, it always amuses me how specific their searching capabilities are. You use one software application to search for felons in the tri-state area. Another one is used for sexual assaults in these counties. Yet another is used to track different fingerprints. Also amusing – the fact that a positive search result takes so long and inevitably displays hundreds of different “possible matches”, eventually ending up on the one result we want. Negative search results? They take very little time at all and sometimes don’t display any of the possible matches.
Ah well, I guess we all have our pet peeves with television and the movies. I know I’m not alone in having this one as mine though. I’m sure it’s a common tech-person annoyance.
Update: Ian points me to this comic that illustrates the differences between Hollywood and reality quite aptly – one, two and three.
I’ve had the fantastic IE View extension installed in Firefox for quite a while and it has come in handy on some occasions. There are some sites that stubbornly only work properly in Internet Explorer (why, I don’t know). These sites depend on errorneous programming constructs such as assuming that “document.all” exists (sorry, it’s an Internet Explorer-only thing) for their functionality.
This morning though I learned (from Phil) about an even cooler extension, Firefox View. Though it’s an extension for Firefox, it really adds a context menu item to Internet Explorer that says “view this page in Firefox”. That’s great! Who needs crumby old Internet Explorer these days, especially when you have such “minor” “security holes” as this one (thanks Dan!).
Phil also pokes fun at the .NET application that I mentioned previously this week. It’s ridiculous how many configuration options Firefox has but it’s great to have that kind of flexibility and to give the users the ultimate control over how everything behaves and performs.
Last night I had my first experience with comment spam in this space. I checked my mail around 11 o’clock and found that I had 34 new comments here. Now at first I was surprised because the most comments I think I’ve ever received on any post was 10 and I didn’t think that what I wrote yesterday was that interesting. I then looked at what the comments were and they were all spam. Advertising online casinos or business grants or government grants. Fortunately I’m using Wordpress so all but two of the comments were waiting for my moderation and didn’t appear on the site. I quickly bulk deleted the comments and updated my moderation expression list to catch the two stragglers next time.
I think I made the right choice with Wordpress. As Matt details in this post, the comment features alone make it worthwhile. I’m looking forward to the 1.3 release because it looks to push the envelope even further and reduce the presence of comment spam on my site to a negligible amount (hopefully). I’ve seen MovableType sites complain endlessly about the presence of these spam comments, even if they have MT Blacklist installed. It’s really too bad that people find it worthwhile to create scripts that spam like this. I guess for some, money rules all.
I read this morning on Scoble’s blog that there’s a .NET application that adds “30 tweaks” to Firefox.
I looked at this application and in the screenshots I noticed that the tweaks being advertised were very familiar. Things like “Windows XP styled menus” and “Use error pages instead of dialog boxes”. Then it all fell into place. These aren’t new tweaks at all. What they’ve done is taken all of the tips on this page (below the original Firefox home page) and added a button that adds the text into the appropriate configuration files. I would think that most people would not be bothered to configure Firefox in the old way – finding the files on your drive and editing them by hand but when you have a cool extension like this why wouldn’t you just use that? Plus this extension doesn’t require the .NET framework which some people might not want to install.
I guess I shouldn’t begrudge people for developing an application like this. Maybe it was a way to learn new programming techniques. From this user’s perspective though, it seems kind of useless.
I was walking back from the bank just now and I had a couple of bizarre sightings.
First of all was The Tricycle Lady. I don’t think I’ve mentioned her before but she’s a rather robust woman who rides this enormous tricycle. That might be so bad but she rides her tricycle in traffic here downtown. She doesn’t ride exactly speedily either so cars are forced to slowly travel down the street. I haven’t seen her in many months and was afraid that she had gone with the wind. Just her though because I had seen her tricycle locked to one of the railings at City Hall last month.
The second weird sighting was a tall, lanky guy walking beside me. He had just crossed the street and I didn’t take much notice of him until I looked at his face. He was wearing a furry bunny mask. He seemed to be walking like it was the most normal thing in the world to wear. I’ve lived downtown long enough not to ask questions or even to wonder. He met up with some friends and they didn’t seem particularly surprised that he was wearing this mask. Maybe he’s part of a cult. It wouldn’t surprise me.
Aside: It’s nice to see that the City of Kitchener’s site renders a bit nicer on Firefox now. For the longest time it looked horrible. Perhaps they’re starting to pay attention to web standards. More sites should do that.
I’ve noticed around the blogs that I read (and in particular here) that BugMeNot has been brought down by its hosts. Well that’s fantastic news if you’re in the newspaper business. If you’re a regular consumer then of course it’s less-good. As the number of sites that force users to “register” has increased dramatically over the last little while, it was important (for me) to have a way around the registration procedure. Why should I have to give personal information to read an article in your newspaper? I have ad blocking enabled for my browser so any of the “targeted ads” that you’d want to push to me probably won’t even be seen by these eyes. When I read your newspaper in the library or at Chapters, do I need to register there too? Not the last time I checked. It’s very unfortunate that the “big media” companies are winning this war. I can dream for the day when all newspaper content is available to me but I know that day won’t be coming around the mountain soon.
Update: It seems (from this Boing Boing post) that BugMeNot will be back up again with a few days. That’s great news!
The past three weeks have been absolutely crazy. I’ve never felt so drained and yet so absolutely productive. I look back at what I’ve accomplished over this last crunch period and I can’t help but feel proud. I’m not sure at what cost to myself and to others this was made however. Two weeks ago I worked 74 hours. Last week I worked 88 hours. This week will be 45 at the maximum. I just can’t continue at that torrid pace and to be honest, I don’t want to.
In other news, I’ve decided to meander along the path that Amanda has tentatively stepped down. I’m not sure what will come of it but it’s important to try.
My ear has been hurting this week. Suffice to say that I will never again be using a Q-Tip. I’m just lucky it didn’t result in an infection. I just need my ears to unplug now.
I mostly have this new server set up to handle everything I had the old server was handling (poorly). The specs for this new machine are:
- AMD XP 2400+
- 768 MB DDR memory
- 200 GB HDDs (3 drives, 200 GB total)
- ATI Radeon 7000 graphics card (not really used that much yet)
- Samsung DVD, CD-R/W combo drive (big improvement on my old burner – a lowly 4x)
I’ve been extremely impressed with this machine. It’s so nice having new hardware and not have to worry about the machine crashing or being unusably slow.
Today we’re doing a demonstration of all of the new features introduced into our software. It’s been delayed for 3 days due to absences but it’s finally on today. I need to eat my lunch beforehand though!
I’d just like to announce that I now have a brand new server powering this site! I’m so excited about this. I managed to get everything up and running (server-wise) very quickly and easily. The next step will be to get the desktop environment working at home. You should hopefully notice some speed improvements. I’ll post more details later. Work is (still) calling.
As annoying my experience with this computer here at work was, it cannot possibly compare to the annoyance levels I feel in regards to this server. I’ve had enough at last. Today at lunch I’m buying a new machine from N*E*W*S*. Hopefully that system will give me no headaches (unlikley I know but I can still dream). I’m going to put a Linux desktop installation on it. I just need to find the time to do that. I just dumped my database and found that the file is 23 MB and is 310,000 lines long. That’s a lot of database!
I really don’t have much luck with my machine here at work. You may remember my incident this past March which lost a full day’s work and presented countless headaches. Well last night I came back to work after dinner and was intending on getting a lot of work done when after a reboot, my machine would not get past the Windows start screen. I tried everything that I could think of to no avail. I ended up completely reinstalling Windows except this time I decided to upgrade to XP since it seems that it is now a little more tolerated here in the office. I’m still installing applications that I’m going to need. I haven’t really done any work yet today. It’s all been about setting up my development environment so that I can continue where I left off last night. I’m hoping to be productive again soon.
Found via Angie McKaig is this very interesting article about one of my most-visited sites, IMDB. I’ve been using IMDB for movie and television questions for many years now and I remember the days when you had to pick a mirror. Fortunately now that’s not required but it’s neat to see how humble IMDB’s beginnings were and considering the vastness of the site (only AllMusic comes close) it’s remarkable how current and frequently updated the content is. I had no idea that IMDB was actually owned by Amazon but considering the number of Amazon links on each page it’s really no surprise. I was telling Stephen today that who knows where his site might be in 5 years’ time. He seems to think that he’ll either be in jail or filthy rich. Maybe he’ll have both.
I’ve decided to license the content here under a Creative Commons license. I’ve been thinking of doing this for quite a while now. I started reading my (autographed!) copy of Lawrence Lessig’s book, The Future Of Ideas this week and it has spurned me to formally define how I want my content to be protected. Basically this is what you’re allowed to do:
You are free:
- to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
- to make derivative works
Under the following conditions:
Attribution. You must give the original author credit.
Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.
- For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.
- Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
Consider me a part of the commons though it’s dubious how creative I can be.
Without fail when you come across a problem that is really bogging you down, it ends up being something insanely stupid that has tripped you up. Failing to initialize a variable properly, misspelling a word, it’s always the simple things that drag down productivity. On to bigger and better things!
I think one of the next steps that I’m going to make is creating a proper “favicon” for this site. Currently I have the MediaWiki “W” as the icon and that was mainly because MediaWiki was complaining (i.e. giving a lot of 404 errors) about not being able to find the icon file. However a big black “W” doesn’t really represent me in any way. I don’t really have any ideas of yet as to what I would want to have as my icon. I’m sure I’ll come up with something.
I was reading Matt’s blog this morning and noticed that he linked to a new template for Wordpress. Intrigued, I checked it out and liked the look. I was becoming disenchanted with the old design (a vast change from my enthusiasm two months ago). I downloaded the zip file, carefully read the instructions and went about integrating this new design, named Kubrick, into this blog. Since I don’t have the blog installed on the document root there were some changes that needed to be made to eliminate the 404 errors but I think I have everything fixed now.
I suppose the next step will be to customize the look to fit what I have in my creative head. I like how Michael included the Photoshop file because if I were so inclined, it would be rather easy to change the look completely. Also the modularity of the template jives well with my programming background.
One thing that this template makes glaringly obvious though is the time required to create a page. If you look at the bottom it tells you how long it takes to process. The main page takes about 24 seconds right now and that is an absolutely dreadful time. Compared to Matt’s page (0.3 seconds for the main page) or Michael’s page (6 seconds), my server is terrible. This I already knew but it will serve as a constant reminder until I get a new machine (soon I’m hoping). Oh man how nice it would be to be able to serve a webpage in under one second.
Well in the ever-expanding series of posts about my move to Rogers Extreme High Speed (now even warranting its own category) we have another post.
Last night around 10:30 I noticed that I was no longer connected to the Internet. Marcy’s MSN Messenger had signed off and I couldn’t access any site. I checked my router’s configuration site and noticed that I was now assigned an IP address of 192.168.100.11. That’s an internal IP address and is much different from the IP address that I had had up until then. On top of that, the lease time for the IP address (since I’m using DHCP) was a mere 20 seconds. When I was previously connected the lease time was on the order of 160 hours. I tried releasing the assigned IP address and renewing but it always came back with the same address. Confused, I went to bed thinking that it was a problem on Rogers’ end.
Now you know you think about technology too much when you actually dream about your cable modem. I had several dreams that the modem was connected again and people were freely accessing the resources on here. Geeky, I know. I was also afraid that the reason I was not connected was because of some fault of my own (non-payment, violation of the EULA, etc.). I woke up around 4:00 to check to see if I was connected and the status was the same.
I woke up again around 7:30 (to get ready for work) and this time I remembered the cardinal rule of cable modems – check the lights. If you can’t reconnect yourself, try cycling the power and see if that changes anything. So I looked at the modem and noticed that only the “standby” light was on. I thought this odd so I unplugged the modem and plugged it back in. The rest of the lights illuminated briefly before turning off and having only the “standby” light on again. I wasn’t really sure what the “standby” mode was used for. Am I standing by until I contact Rogers for disciplining? I found the box that the modem came in and there was a little insert that said that if the “standby” light was on, then press the “standby” button. At first I had a hard time finding the button but then I found it on top of the modem. Pressing it caused all of the good lights (the green ones) to illuminate again and I was connected to the Internet at last. My only guess is that somehow the “standby” button was pushed, forcing the modem into this mysterious mode (read: the cats probably hit it). I guess I’m going to have to be more careful about that but at least now I know what to look for if this happens again.
I’m in the habit of trackbacking myself when it’s appropriate. If I link to a past post on this site then I’ll also trackback it so that if someone were to view the original post alone, they’d know that there was also discussion in the future relevant to that post. Beginning this morning with this post, my internal trackbacks weren’t working. The software said that they were working but I wasn’t seeing any actual trackbacks. I tried pinging my site using an external tool and that worked fine and my trackbacks out of this domain worked fine too. So what was the problem? Well as I alluded to in my update post this morning, the DNS servers for Rogers haven’t recognized the change in IP address for www.theinflux.com. So the trackbacks that I was sending out to this site were getting lost because the server can’t find the IP address that was previously associated here. While I wait for the DNS server to update I’ve added a map to my hosts file so that internal trackbacks stay internal to this network. No external queries should be required.
Well an update to Friday’s post is in order. Marcy and I went to the Rogers Video store closest to us and were greeted with a hand-written note saying that they were out of swap modems and that they were expecting a shipment in Friday to help cope with the crush of people needing to exchange their cable modems. Since it was Friday and especially since I wasn’t swapping (I was upgrading to become extreme) I didn’t really concern myself with the note. However that didn’t affect my disappointment with the size of the line at the customer service desk. It was long. Being the end of the month, there were people paying their bills and since the desk also deals a little with Rogers Wireless customers, there were some of them thrown in for good measure.
I felt very badly for the customer service people behind the desk. Customers generally aren’t very nice but when they have a time constraint on an upgrade that they probably don’t understand why they have to do it, the annoyance levels skyrocket. On top of everything else, only the account holder could pick up a new modem so you had a lot of people whose spouses/whatever could not come to the store and the customer service people had to turn them away. Of course you could go to a website and order a courier to pick up your old modem (free of charge) but most people probably thought that it would be easier to go to the store. How wrong they were! I fail to understand why Rogers didn’t distribute enough modems to the various stores. They knew how many needed replacing and where these people lived. Wouldn’t it make sense to anticipate exchanges? Maybe they thought that more people would go with the courier plan.
The wireless customers were especially irritating. One guy was convinced that he could check his phone balance through the desk and even though the girl said “I don’t have access to Wireless here” he remained dogged in his pursuit of his balance. Finally he left though I still think he believed the girl was lying.
At any rate, the customer service person that dealt with me was “pleased as punch” (you can quote me on that) when I asked if I could upgrade to the Extreme high-speed. I guess anything different from what he had been dealing with was a welcome change. I paid my $79 plus tax to purchase my new Motorola modem. It gives me up to 5 Mbps downstream and 800 kbps upstream – a big improvement over the regular high-speed… speeds. Now all I need to do is get a new server capable of handling more than 5 requests at a time and I’ll be living in a golden paradise. Not Golden mind you but golden in the abstract sense.
Now the only problem that I have is having the new IP address propagate across the Internet. For some reason it’s taking a long time for my own ISP to update its DNS servers. I’m hoping that most people can now locate me and that the IP address won’t change too much in the future (who knows with the DHCP service that I get around here). Judging from my web server logs, most of the traffic has resumed so I think perhaps my DNS server is an isolated case right now.
Since I’m probably far down the list of URLs that Phil needs to check for Mozilla promotion on their site, I figured that I’d beat him to the punch and put the Mozilla Firefox button on my site this morning. You can see it on the right hand side near the bottom of the links section. I know I’ve written a couple of posts about Firefox on this blog and probably even more on my other one so I figure it’s only fair to join the promotion camp and actually include a button for the fantastic Firefox browser. Consider me a good Internet citizen now please.
This server will be going down for about an hour today as I need to replace my cable modem. I’m thinking of going with the new Rogers Extreme modem but we’ll see when I go to the store. It requires a $99.95 purchase but offers far higher speeds. Have patience. We’ll be back before you know it.
I just had a bot crawl this blog with an IP address that resolves to a subdomain.hyperspace. Dot-hyperspace? That seems a little strange. I’m pretty sure it might be related to this site’s crawler but I can’t be certain.
I’m not sure why but I feel like someone who pries when I look at my webserver stats in real-time. I find it fascinating how people browse around the material on this server. I also like analyzing the day’s stats (prepared by awstats) when I wake up. It’s interesting to me how the stats change day-to-day. There aren’t many people who reach this site via a search engine but that’s primarily because I’m constructed my robots.txt file to restrict most of the content (except for this blog). It’s mostly direct links from my other blog or via trackbacks that I’ve put on other blogs around the Internet.
I know I’m not the only one who does this either. Mel wrote a fine piece about web stats yesterday. It seems that Typepad provides a much more thorough analysis of visitors than awstats does however so she can get a much better view into the people reading her material.
Last week I posted about Ken Jennings, Jeopardy player extraordinaire. In that post I linked to this amusing post on Jason Kottke’s site. I also did a trackback on the post and thus was listed at the side under the other trackbacks. I received a lot of referral traffic from Jason which is not surprising since he is one of the more widely-read blogs on the Internet. Also, as Hello, Typepad says, he is Mr. Google since his post about Ken Jennings is the #1 hit when you search for him on Google.
The traffic did level off somewhat until Jason posted an update on his last 100 posts. More referral traffic was directed my way as a result of people reading Jason’s original post about Ken Jennings. To get a sense of the popularity of his blog, I’ve received over 550 hits from people clicking directly from his post. Since I’m just an obscure blogger, I can imagine that the actual number of people reading that post (and not clicking on my link) is far higher.
I would imagine that the traffic will die down as Ken Jennings is forgotten until the show starts up again in September. For me, I’m just happy that my server has withstodd the traffic, as it’s not exactly the most reliable of machines.
Edit: Augie has a nice summary of why Ken Jennings is such a strong contestant.
Yesterday Marcy was on the computer when something really strange happened. All of a sudden there was a sound of gas escaping or something similar to that at any rate. It was kind of frightening so I tried to find the source of the noise and it turned out that the power cord from my Cambridge Soundworks speakers was emitting some kind of strange vapour. It was white in colour and potentially dangerous (melting plastic is never a good thing). I quickly turned off the computer and then isolated the area. At first it was difficult to confirm that the power cord was in fact the source of the problems but when I sniffed it I could smell the odour that hung around the area far more strongly so it must have been that. I really can’t think of a reason why the power cord would suddenly start emitting smoke like that but for the time being I have the speakers unplugged and turned off because I don’t want anything to happen when we’re out of the house. I am going to have to do some more investigations at some point this week to determine exactly what went wrong yesterday.
Well the first alpha release of Gallery, Version 2 has been released. Its codename is Cowbell for some inside-joke reason. I’ve been running nightly “builds” of the software (quotation marks because it’s just a slew of PHP scripts) for the last couple of months and I’ve been very impressed by the progress and sheer flexibility of the application now. It’s miles ahead of the previous release, which was only really useful for small-ish installations with a few pictures. Since I’m on the verge of eclipsing the 11,000 picture mark, the database-driven design of Gallery 2 definitely meets my needs and I can’t wait to see the upcoming fixes and optimizations that will occur as the developers march towards Gold.
That said, when I updated my CVS code this morning, I noticed that certain things were broken, notably the cache. The install keeps a cache of each “entity” in a directory format depending on the database id of each derivative image. Well it seems like they’ve changed the format, using 2 directories per id instead of just 1 as before. This meant that my gallery didn’t work properly and this exposed a couple of other smaller problems that I had not noticed until now. Since I had so much fun building the derivatives in the first place (this continues to be the weak point of the whole “adding pictures” process), I didn’t really feel like rebuilding them a second time so I had to manually create the second directory in each separate cache directory and then move the derivatives into the proper location. I’m pretty sure I have everything in the right location now but it’s entirely possible that I’ve missed something. If I were following the proper upgrade path then I would not have all of my pictures in the database and it would be a trivial task to reinitialize the gallery everyday. Since I don’t feel like doing that (it’s taken a good two months to get the structure set up to where I like it), I’ll have to keep my eyes peeled on the commit logs and discussion forums for any significant changes that could affect my installation.
Well the server crashed once again this morning and was inaccessible all day. Fortunately there’s a chance that I might be able to get a new machine for free soon and that will be the answer to my prayers.
So what do you when you have very unstable hardware controlling your main server and it crashes while creating thumbnails and resized images for your latest pictures?
Well you wake up the next morning to find that some of the records in your database (which contains a not-insignificant amount of data) have been corrupted. Your gallery software spits out an error and you go off to investigate. You figure out which table is giving the error and then run a database integrity checker (myisamchk) on the suspect table and hopefully that fixes it. Thank goodness for tools like this because losing all of your data and being forced to start again is not something you’d like to face. You’re happy with the way your gallery is laid out and you think about the countless hours spent getting it set up and running smoothly. You forget that you’re running a pre-alpha build of a complicated software package on relatively unstable hardware that is used for a variety of other purposes. You long for the day that you can afford a new computer for this purpose and how wonderful it will be. Then you can throw the existing machine off of a steep cliff. It has given you countless problems since you took it last June. What a cursed machine.
Edit: Equally fun is going through about 30 images and creating thumbnail and resized versions of them. Yet another reason why I love how frequently this machine crashes.
So I pointed out this photo a couple of days ago and said that I was excited to be surprised.
Bloglines birthday
Well this morning I was greeted with quite the surprise. Bloglines has completely reconfigured their interface. I’m really loving it. They’ve added the ability to automatically sort new feeds, the ability to publish your “clippings folder” (individual blog posts that you have saved) and also the ability to create your own blog right through Bloglines. I’ve created mine here but I’m not sure if it’s going to be used all that much. They’ve made it incredibly easy to post new feed items to your blog or “clippings folder”. Also the way they present the data has changed as well and it’s more intuitive and also has more information contained within each feeds. The number of subscribers is displayed right there in the title bar. Also they now have a directory of blogs to make it easier to find new feeds.
Overall I’m incredibly impressed by the new design. Bloglines is an amazing service and I’m amazed that they can provide it for free. If they did decide to charge for it though, I would definitely pay.
I spent a good portion of the afternoon’s break time trying to figure out why I can’t move pictures in my gallery. I traced through the code but couldn’t find anything obvious. Then I looked at the CVS commit logs for the appropriate classes and discovered that there was a limit set on a cache data structure and the number of albums in my gallery surpassed this limit, causing errors. So I increased the limit and was on my way. Sometimes it pays to understand what is happening under the hood.
It’s a good thing there’s the Livejournal status page:
At 5:27 am GMT on Wednesday, June 30th, A LiveJournal admin writes :
Many users are experiencing difficulty accessing the site right now, due to a flood of malicious traffic. Please note: it’s not “hackers” taking us down. If hackers were people who hotwired cars to steal them, these people are just punks slashing tires with shiny knives they didn’t even make. We’re working with a number of people to get this stopped, including the FBI. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience.
It’s beyond me why anyone would bother wasting their time doing this kind of tomfoolery.
This blog hasn’t been in existence for too long but I’ve had a few (very few) comments so far and over the weekend I had a comment on this post.
It’s not the comment so much as the identity of the commentor that intrigues me. I’m wondering how they found this space. I haven’t advertised this blog anywhere and even though I can’t possibly imagine that it’ll be possible to keep this space private, I’m still interested in hearing how my cover was so-called “blown” so-called “this” so-called “quickly“.
Tomorrow is the one-month anniversary of this space of mine and so far I’ve managed to write almost 20,000 words and have more than 80 posts. To me that’s impressive. I’m extremely happy with the Wordpress software and I hope to continue to diversify between this blog and my other one. It never hurts to write more and if people want to read what you write then that’s pure gravy on your chicken-fried steak.
I received this email this morning:
Your account mdclemen on the following host(s) will expire on 07-25-2004:
engmail www.eng engage
If you will require use of these computer accounts(s) beyond 07-25-2004
in accordance withhttp://www.adm.uwaterloo.ca/infocist/use98.htm
please contact the computer consulting office in your faculty or department.
This is an automated message – Please do not respond
My university email address has given me a lot over the years – a way to keep in touch with others, a non-web-based email address that I could safely give out, an air of legitimacy to my online persona with email coming from a university (if they only knew), a place to subscribe to mailing lists and last summer a source of a lot of pain (from one email address). Lots of emails were sent to and from this address over the 6 years that I’ve had it. I lost most of the emails in several hard drive crashes but the shared experiences are still there.
As varied as the experiences has been the software used. From Pine to Outlook to KMail to Horde to Thunderbird, I’ve used a lot of mail applications. Thunderbird is my current favourite (as I’ve mentioned before) but each of the above applications has its own benefits.
I’ll miss my old email address but it wasn’t something that I could hold onto forever. I have my alumni email address from the university and that can forward to any email address I’ll ever have.
Yet another item in the “you’re really done university” checklist can be crossed off.
Technology can be very unreliable. I’ve had problems with my computer at work before (read this story) and today I had another experience (and lost some more work). I was typing an email when Thunderbird crashed. I tried starting it again but it wouldn’t start and then the whole computer halted. I turned off the power and tried turning it on again but nothing happened. I looked at the power supply and when I turned on the machine it wouldn’t turn. The power supply was scalding to the touch.
My power supply fan had stopped working.
Fortunately since we’ve had so many power supply problems here, we always have one or two in stock as a backup. I switched power supplies and was back on my way. Now I have to retype a draft I had been writing and remake my changes to a design document I was working on.
As you may or may not know, I also maintain a blog on Livejournal (I’m chang8ling). Obviously I also have this blog, running Wordpress, which I’m quite happy with. Recently I’ve had a lot more posts here than on Livejournal mainly because I like the relative anonymity of this space and the features that I can’t do with a Livejournal blog, namely TrackBack. I have a feeling that more people will be reading this blog than the other one (well more people not on Livejournal that is) simply because I can easily let others know that I’m referencing what they write through a TrackBack.
So if you’re a reader of both sites (unlikely as of right now), I apologize if you see material twice. I don’t want to abandon my Livejournal account but I also want to build up a healthy archive of posts on this site too. I’m going to try and find a way to make the two blogs distinct but for now they will appear quite similar.
This person has a lot of patience going through a 250 kB Javascript file and discerning the web application we all know as GMail. As a result of this patience though comes a really cool hack that lets you link directly to the GMail compose page with a lot of optional parameters.
As the person says, the steps to riches are pretty easy:
- Click
- Send email
- …
- Profits
I’ve found so many good links off of del.icio.us’s popular feed over the last few months. It’s interesting to watch how pages appear on that list.
I think I’d be scared if I saw this warning on an actual product or item:
Grey Goo
HP now has ads for nanotechnology on the backs of magazines. Is nanotechnology actually becoming more mainstream?
Found via the Scobleizer.
You really have to see this movie. This guy made a computer-animated movie using only his Athlon machine. It took him 23 months to complete. You can watch the entire movie here. It’s pretty amazing and inspirational.
Related to my post from last week about Firefox 0.9 RC (Release Candidate), I see that Joel (of Joel On Software fame) has upgraded to 0.9 as well. He mentions a few reasons to switch to Firefox (beyond the sheer coolness of the application). I like his third point:
You’ll help break the Microsoft Monopoly on web browsers. Microsoft took over the browser market fair and square by making a better product, but they were so afraid that Web-based applications would eliminate the need for Windows that they locked the IE team in a dark dungeon and they haven’t allowed improvements to IE for several years now. Now Firefox is the better product and there’s a glimmer of hope that one day DHTML will actually improve to the point where web-based applications are just as good as Windows-based applications.
I’m seeing this argument a lot and I think it’s a valid one. Microsoft essentially halted development on any browser standards (including proper support for PNG and CSS2) which means that Web applications have suffered from a usability and aesthetic viewpoint. With Firefox gaining ground in the market share department (though it’s still relatively tiny), hopefully this will bring about a revolution in new Web standards support and we’ll all be able to partake in the promised utopia that was supposed to be Internet applications.
I upgraded to Thunderbird 0.7 RC this afternoon. It’s nice to see so many good applications coming from the Mozilla group these days.
Phil, whose dry sarcasm I find quite enjoyable, pointed out the ridiculousness of alleging that people are responsible for every chain linked from their site.
I agree with Phil though – the only solution is to link to nothing because if you link to anything else, you can surely get to some “inappropriate content” through a chain of N links. That’s the whole beauty of the Internet: things are interconnected.
The sad thing is that the candidate in question, Ms. Juanita Doyon won’t be able to read about the foolishness of her claim. Someone should forward the post to her. They could even include some context-appropriate spam.
Augie doesn’t like the installation process for Debian.
I like the installation process myself but perhaps that’s because I’m too familiar with it. I know exactly which steps that I need to go through to get my Debian system up and running. Maybe that’s not such a good thing because I have had to install Debian so many times (most of them on one machine). I think that’s more due to fallible hardware than Debian’s source.
The thing that I like about the Debian installation process (compared to others) is that you can end up with a very slim, minimal install in very little time. I don’t want any extraneous applications installed if all I want to do is have a basic web and file server on my network. Debian allows me to do that. Also apt-get is one of the most versatile applications that I’ve ever used. I’m sure you can get apt for other Linux distributions but on Debian it’s very useful. I remember the hours I used to have to spend getting Redhat’s compatability issues resolved for some of the packages. Apt handles that for me.
I haven’t had much experience setting up a Debian machine for use as a desktop environment so I can’t really comment on that part of the installation process. What I do know though is that it’s very adept at setting up a server system for me.
My computer at work this morning sounds like a distant train. I hope it’s ok. Me and this computer have had a tenuous relationship at best and a few months ago things came to a head and the whole system went down for the count. The drive was completely destroyed and I was faced with the prospect of rebuilding my machine and getting my development environment set up again. This during a semi-crucial push in code development too which made my mood ever so cheerful. I’m going to put some music on to drown out the sound of my machine. If I ignore the problem, it’s bound to go away.
Yesterday I noticed an announcement about Mozilla Firefox Release Candidate 0.9.
I hadn’t been keeping up to date with nightly builds like I had been so I figured that I should upgrade my version of Firefox. The upgrade was very smooth and I only had to re-install a few of my extensions (because the whole extension interface was revamped).
At first I didn’t like the new theme at all but I’m growing to tolerate it. In time I may even enjoy looking at it.
Here’s a nice overview of the new Firefox.
I’ve modified the look of this space this afternoon and I really like it. I’ve modified the layout found on Cowpimp Productions which seems to be based on the layout of Simple Bits. At first I wanted a wider body but the tiled image that makes up the background is of a certain size so I’ll have to modify it myself if I want something wider (I probably still do). This was my first try at modifying CSS files and I think it went really well. I’m nowhere near as proficient as the people at CSS Zen Garden (which is really amazing) but if I spent enough time I’m sure I’d get to be quite good.
Scoble writes a really interesting review of the Fellowship Church in Dallas. I’d like to see this mecca of computers and worship blended together.
Tea may be a soothing thing for the soul to drink but computers tend not to be so fond of the tempting liquid.
It would be nice if computers that needed a drink of tea (*cough* like this one *cough*) could take their medecine instead of exploding and not working like they’re supposed to. That would make my life so much easier.
I just discovered a relatively neat feature of Royal Bank’s online banking – you can view an image of your past cheques. It costs $1.50 per view but I think it’s kind of a nifty feature. Probably not something that I’ll use often (if at all) but it’s nice to know that we can still prove that money does pass through paper means at times.
Initially I went to RBC’s online banking this morning because of this blog post on the fantastic Manifesto Multilinko. Losing millions of transactions over a couple of days is indeed a scary thing. I’m just glad that I didn’t do any bank transactions on those days. There are benefits to carrying around cash.
Today’s lesson: be careful which files you delete. I moved from the latest package of phpwiki available through Debian/unstable today. Initially I had it using db4 like the package but then I decided to go through with something that I wanted to do anyway – that is using MySQL as the storage facility. It wasn’t working properly so I deleted some of the files in the old data directory and in the process I deleted the old 1.3.7 database. Fortunately I made a backup last week but I’m still missing a week’s worth of music and some DVD links. Oh well, the DVD links are on the computer at home and I won’t really miss the music.
At least the new wiki is neat. Having my own domain name is proving to be really quite cool.
Hi and welcome to my new blog. This is running Wordpress which seems to be incredibly easy to set up and maintain. I’ll be keeping my other blog located at Livejournal but I’m trying to consolidate all of my applications here now that I have my own domain name.
Comments
September 9, 2005 in Blog Discussions by matt | No comments
Here I was thinking that no one was commenting and in fact I had some comments in the moderation queue. Hooray for comments and readers!
Tags: blog, comments, popularity