It’s that magical, magical time again when I’ve grown completely frustrated with my feed reader and am looking for recommendations for a Linux feed reader that isn’t a machine killing hog.

Liferea (1.6.1-1) used to be my default choice but its performance over the past couple of months has caused me a ton of frustrating downtime where my desktop is completely unusable while Liferea updates 130 feeds or so. It might be Arch’s package or not but it isn’t really an option. I thought about building it from and then decided against it.

I also tried Akregator for a while and it was a lot less antagonistic towards my CPU(s). It also has some pretty buggy behavior, though, and instances like the below finally convinced me that it was a stopgap rather than a good replacement for Liferea. It’s also a KDE which makes it look pretty strange in Gtk-land.

I even fired up Flock with the intent of using is just for feed reading. It doesn’t work so swell these days — a bit too monolithic and tuned for its own purposes rather than mine. I toyed with it for awhile and then shuffled it off to /dev/null.

So, anyone have any good suggestions for me? I like lightweight, GUI (preferably Gtk+ but I can deal with whatever for the sake of working), and capable of importing OPML. Thanks

There is a fan-fucking-tastic article on The Globe and Mail about the future of the book in the face of the rising popularity of ebook readers. The general gist of the article is that ebooks work phenomenally for everyone but publishers. I feel the same way about this as I do record companies, especially now that the more industrial means of production (note: there really needs to be a ‘commie’ HTML tag so I could nest it in sarcasm tags) for printed material have largely been rendered optional. You don’t need an expensive to produce trade paperback to have a fair number of folks able to read your work.

I hope that over the course of time this evolves to make self publication easier for writers who aren’t political wingnuts with an agenda to push and works to erode the control publishers currently have over what is available to the masses. This doesn’t necessarily mean that spare bedroom fiction writers are going to storm the marketplace (and they probably shouldn’t) but that you could feasibly have a book out there with a large means of distribution without the overhead of having a publishing company and all of the baggage that typically comes with influencing that availability. The downside to this is that, as is typically the case when something gets easier and becomes more visible, the marketplace will likely be flooded with (e)reams of unreadable genre fiction that will make discerning between half-assed experiments and totally assed experiments in publishing difficult if not impossible. This flood might be the savior of traditional publishers, enabling them to gain additional cachet as a litmus for quality or at least works that have been checked for spelling and grammar. This might even convince publishing houses that they might need to do a bit of marketing that matters to promote books instead of limiting it to the typical book signing events and review copies.

The interesting part about this is the role that Amazon is beginning to take in shaping the pricing structure of ebooks. Rather than directly fighting publishers prices, Amazon just started selling them for less and sometimes at a loss. Media types have done no small amount of speculation on how free Kindle offerings are going to skew the popularity of ebooks on the whole and this plays out when you look at the digital bestsellers list. The hole in this particular theory about free ruining the market is that most of what is listed and is zero cost is genre fiction that wouldn’t ordinarily be at the top of any list much less a bestseller list. The authors (or, maybe, publishers) have made a conscious choice to make their books available at no cost in exchange for the increased visibility. Amazon then takes care of the distribution end of the deal and gives people a little more impetus for buying a Kindle. Seems like a pretty good deal for everyone at the party other than publishers. They would largely love to pretend that ebooks never happened or that things remained the way they were when readers were still expensive or next to useless in terms of functionality and that paper books were still the absolute nadir of written word consumption where they had more control even when dealing with the world of one stop distributors (which are famously vicious about their terms for selling a product that is not a bestseller). I have precious little sympathy for this weird protectionist stuff and almost no patience for folks moaning about their deflating bottom line while others are actually doing pretty well by, you know, adapting to the circumstances.

I’m no marketing dude and despite the fact that I work for a publishing company of sorts, I’m the IT guy so I have no idea how all of this will play out. Maybe it will mean the end of the written word as we know it (insert ominous music here) but, as someone who reads a lot and dislikes most of the physical aspects of the book format (especially the dreaded hardcover edition that always precedes the mass market edition), I hope that the growing multitude of forces that have a stake in the future of both ebooks and publishing manage to shake things up in a productive way that might provide the appropriate shaking out of stupor and slap of reality. People who write, keep on writing. Thanks.

I have a bunch of Google Wave invites which is good since, so far, Wave is a bit like an MMORPG with few players. You log in, look at the same handful of objects you had last time that may look slightly different, and then you log out again. That said, you want one?

I haven’t posted much here over the past few months and I can’t say that I feel much of anything about that. I can’t really feel any sort of guilt or sense of laziness about that because, in truth, I’ve been incredibly busy and none of it has been anything to proverbially write home about. I have an increasing number of balls that I’m obligated to keep continually aloft and precious little energy for tech fetishist pseudo-intrigue. Excuses begone:

1. I’ll own a Kindle in a few days which I’m pretty excited about. I can’t really comment a whole lot on the controversial DRM because I buy books pretty consistently and hate the fact that I’m left with an all but useless husk when I’ve finished the book. I also dislike the fact that the cheap trade paperbacks that I favor when thinking about the comparatively small amount of disposable income that I have to blow on fiction are not durable at all. I’m much happier with access to sanely formatted text than I am with twenty more pounds of paperback to cart around until I eventually spill coffee on them and they are destroyed.

A former co-worker was kind enough to let me mess around with hers a bit and I’m pretty happy with the e ink display. I’m pretty sensitive to glare after too many years of squinting at bad monitors attached to server room KVMs and making the mistake of buying more porous contact lenses and the Kindle display is ridiculously glare resistant.

The only real downside that I can see is the issue of expense — no more super cheap used books but I think there is some exchange in value there simply because I can’t lose or physically destroy the book. I’ll write some more on this when I’ve actually had some time to beat on it and figure out if the interface is as good as it seemed after using it for a few minutes.

2. New job. I finally found a new job which is apparently something akin to a miracle while the economy is being nudged down the shitslide into eternal torment and damnation or something like that. It’s the same basic deal as always but pays a lot more and will (hopefully) give me more time to do system administration and less call to delete normal.dot and play seek and destroy in the Windows registry. This is wishful thinking because, although I sincerely feel as though I’ve paid my desktop support dues, I will be the entire IT department for a 60-85 user environment. This is pretty similar to the situation I just left but the money certainly helps. I start tomorrow and feel better already.

3. Ubuntu. I’ve finally settled on using Ubuntu on my desktop machines instead of the other distributions that I’ve known and sorta loved. I really tried to keep a couple of installs of Debian unstable sane but they eventually broke or conflicted in a way that made them useless. I’ve always held Ubuntu in mild to moderate disdain as a luser-oriented distribution in contrast to Debian’s QA-centric take on building the stable branch of the distribution. Unfortunately, I’m mainly using Linux on the desktop these days so I typically need newer/sexier versions of applications and libraries and can’t deal with unfucking dpkg/apt after every update. Ubuntu is a fairly good compromise between the tendency towards bleeding edge and having your shit actually work. Feel free to heckle me so I can give you the interWeb equivalent to a blank stare. That is oddly fulfilling.

I’m trying out Chrome as my primary browser on this machine for a couple of days. I’ve converted all of my *nix boxes back to Debian because, whether I’m comfortable admitting or not, I like the way that things work in Deb land and most other distributions are frustrating. I’m even running the stock kernel (2.6.30-2-686) which doesn’t happen very often.

Anyway, back to Chrome because that was my intent when I opened emacs to write this. I installed the developer release straight from the mouth of the beast which seems wiser than the community built Chromium releases that I’ve found pretty crashy and not very much fun. Most of those early builds were missing any of preferences which are scant but at least accessible on this version. I’m hoping that one day I’ll be able to run Chrome and control which fonts it uses. Right now, that isn’t a presented option which was disappointing because I do a fair amount of reading from web sites and being unable to bypass the demonic urges that cause some folks to force us to read in small, serif fonts is making me kinda headachey.

Other than that rather small glitch (which is perfectly acceptable for somethng that is released for developers), my Chrome use has been really stable and easy on resources. It’s a much lighter browser than Firefox by miles and with the inclusion of Flashblock basically disappears from the process landscape when I’m not actively using it. This works out great for me since I typically have somewhere between 15 and 30 tabs open in a browser. I tend to open links people have mailed me or from things I want to read from an RSS reader and Chrome has yet to freak out and freeze or crash. That is exactly what I needed and here’s hoping that the eventual move from beta to something closer to a final release doesn’t change that sentiment drastically. Remember when Phoenix was jaw droppingly awesome? Sigh.

I’d nearly forgotten that MariaDB existed or that it was nearing the point of being a viable replacement for MySQL but Jeremy Zawodny mentioned the project and its progress today on his linkblog. It’s pretty surprising how well things are coming along and the features it offers in comparison to MySQL. Given the questions surrounding the future of MySQL now is an ideal time to start looking into alternatives in case Oracle decides that they can suddenly reap huge profits by making that software less accessible or something equally inane.

The really super duper good news is that the devs have organized a Debian and Ubuntu repository for packaged versions so taking MariaDB for a spin is a much simpler process than I first imagined. I’m hoping to set aside a little time to install and configure it on a test machine tomorrow. If that actually happens I’ll try to write something about the observable differences or at least how well a clean install or conversion went.

Question posed to no one in particular:

Has anyone ever seen an actual implementation of the Coda file system. I started reading the CM site sometime in the past couple of weeks and noticed that it was updated within the past year. You couldn’t tell that from the available documentation though since most of it is nearly ten years old and does its comparisons with Linux based on ext2 and seems pretty ambiguously hostile towards file systems that are actually used. Just curious if anyone knows about any actual uses of it and how it fared under real world stress and being accessed by the usual gamut of applications.

I’ve been looking for a new job for the past couple of months and I’ve reached an epiphany of sorts about it. I’m starting not to care at all about potential environments and thinking more about the potential money. This is probably a pretty solid indicator that I need to move on to something else. I’ve grown pretty weary of the dichotomy between HR-heavy interviews where I’m asked too many questions about teamwork and the developer-esque interviews where people try to stump me according to their favorite hangups and and amounts to a dick measuring contest. Although I really do want another job that doesn’t require me to jump through so many ridiculous hoops crafted from years of laziness and incompetence, I’m also less willing than I’ve ever been to keep cranking on the dimmer switch for my actual personality predictively for each and every loathesome interview. Perhaps the more correct methodology would be to wear a tiara and just answer: a best effort to fix all of your broken shit because I hate things that don’t work the way they’re supposed to. Also, I’m tired of simultaneously nodding and rolling my eyes when asked about Vista experience without screaming “You deployed that bullshit!?!?” at people interviewing me.

School? Shit, maybe.

Had a particularly poignant moment of realization this afternoon about the real reasons that I loathe searching for a job when I saw one re-listed. I interviewed (well I thought) for the position and was operating under the assumption that I was at least in the top three. Today the exact same position was re-listed on the major job site site with $10,000 knocked off the bottom level salary they’d posted a month or so before. I imagine that I will see it again in the weeks to follow listed as a paid internship or something. I’m glad that this search is out of wanting something better and not necessity or desperation. If I were in the market due to hand to mouth issues I would be in some shitty bar drinking myself stupid.

I don’t keep very close tabs on the state of culture in other countries but it seems like the U.S is creeping slowly towards a sort of fundamentalist culture where pure dogma (the rules, man, the rules) is steamrollering interpretation. I think of interpretation as a matter of being engaged in something, a sniff test for making sure that you’re actually awake when you’re outside of your home and acknowledging that there are other people walking the surface of the Earth that are not you.

I think that inane tendency to simply look out for your own interests by a very narrow (or non) interpretation of rules put in place mainly for good reasons is what makes situations like the one this six year old has to deal with so infuriating. If the contents of the article are reasonably accurate then the faculty of this kid’s school ignored all of the things they knew about him and instead sketched in the potential for a statistical anomaly. As a student, what do you take away from this? That you’re actually a prisoner? That is simply embarrassing.

It’s a snowy day so I’m doing snowy day things like playing with Oscar and reading twice my RDA of stupid crap on the web. One of the things that I’ve truly enjoyed (other than chasing the little monkey around) is a post by Ted Dziuba entitled “I don’t code in my free time” which is a spectacular summary of all the reasons that even the whippersnappers ought to think of languages as tools instead of canned solutions to a given problem. I also agree that solving actual problems (and getting past that particular problem) is much more rewarding than trying to rush ahead to learn every flavor of the month that might be really, really useful in a hypothetical situation in an imagined future.

That said, if I were charged with hiring programmers I don’t think I’d really bother with folks who did obsessively learn new languages. That seems to me more the earmark of an intern who is viciously underpaid because they need to get the ‘this new widget will cure cancer if only I can get through a few more rote exercises using it’ syndrome worked through their systems. Despite the fact that the old guys might not follow each and every twist and turn on dev mailing lists, the old guys have an alternative approach to throwing everything at a problem to see what sticks: they actually know a bit about how to solve problems with tools they’re actually skilled at using. I don’t hate questions but I hate people that answer any given question/problem by posing a hundred other problems. Sometimes trying to look smart makes you look really fucking stupid.

To Ted, good work and thanks for being cranky. That’s something the world could use a lot more of. Dealing with cranky fuckers who know what they’re doing adds some pressure to the showboaters to actually get things done. God forbid.

If anyone has an extra, I would love to play around with it. The recent videos captivated the thirteen year old that secretly lives inside me. I expect at this point that I am mainly talking to myself but just in case…