I’ve often made fun of the complete despair the infomercial actors find themselves mired in while trying to do utterly basic tasks. While I just chuckled and moved my attention elsewhere, others found inspiration:

Discovered via Jason Kottke.

The developer of NewzJournal was nice enough to ask me to take a look at his Windows feed reader in the comments attached to a post from years ago. The requirements specifically state Windows Vista as a requirement for installation (I think due to .Net requirements) but given the fact that I think Vista is completely unneccessary for anything I went ahead and installed it on my work XP machine. The environment is pretty bare since I think of the Windows box as a pretty wrapper around gpedit, services.msc, regedit, and mstsc and don’t actually use it for much other than a couple of work applications that I scarcely touch unless they’re broken. Now that I’ve painted myself into a corner with disclaimers, here’s what I thought.

NewzJournal is really, really basic for a feed reader. You won’t find a lot of extra stuff other than subscribe, delete, and a couple of preferences you can monkey with. Interface wise, the reading panel really needs to be turned on by default. If I need to double click something to see it in a feed reader I’ve spent nearly as much effort as I would opening a new tab in a browser. When you do enable the third pane then NJ starts to look more like an application. Adding subscriptions is also pretty straightforward: you plug in a URL, it does its discovery song and dance, and you save it under x name. That works very well. There is also an import/export function for OPML. I had nothing to import since I tend to do that manually when setting up a new reader but I did export a copy of the OPML for the five or so feeds I’d subscribed to and successfully imported them into Liferea with no isssues. Another strangely missing feature is the ubiquitous ‘update all’ button that most readers usually place within easy reach. The only way that I was able to find to update subscribed feeds was via a right click context menu — there isn’t a menu entry to handle either individual feeds or the entire list of feeds. I’m not sure if that is a showstopper for many people but it would make me hesitate before pulling in a huge list of feeds. Again, at that point, I’m probably better off using a browser than a reader. I also noticed that the application seemed pretty unresponsive at times as was the case when trying to add a subscription from the button on the upper left side of the main window. After three attempts I just moved over to the drop down menus and did it that way. This might also be related somehow to the mysterious Vista requirement and versions of the .Net libraries but I didn’t get that far.

The good:

It’s free

It does feed discovery pretty well and without too much craziness. It only failed to find a feed for the Gentoo website out of the ten or twelve that I tried to pull in.

It’s a pretty reasonable and simple feed reader once you configure some sane settings through the application preferences.

It handles the import and export of OPML well. I’m not a Windows developer so I dunno if this has more to do with existing libraries than stupid coding tricks so bear that in mind.

The not so good:

Not only Windows-only but Vista only. Regardless of whether or not it will actually run is immaterial.

Intermittantly unresponsive UI that doesn’t give feedback when parts of it aren’t working.

Frustrating update controls. Updating all of your feeds in a oneshot isn’t an option.

Here’s a screenshot. It’s pretty basic:

Mike Gravel you are an inspired sort of crazy given the evidence below:

Unfortunately, it reminds me too much of this bit of history:

These days I just feel like posting videos that have very limited shelf life. Enjoy or not.

This probably the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long while. Brush your teeth.

I’m always amazed at how patient and tolerant I am of ridiculous errors on Myspace given how often that parts of the site are entirely inaccessible or downright broken. The above is a banner ad and that should be excusable, right? The advertiser is at fault for putting together such utter crap and blah blah blah and end of story. The funny part isn’t this particular error as much as the fact that it took me a really long time to actually see that it was an error. The randomly broken nature of Myspace is sufficient camouflage to make nearly any trainwreck of nasty HTML and half-witted CSS blend right in.

My one hope is that the kids who rely heavily on Myspace as some kind of latter day IRC grow accustomed to breakage and being barraged by errors and features that may or may not work depending on whether or not the wind is blowing in a certain direction will become more tolerant of software that doesn’t really work and allow the rest of us to get even lazier and more sloppy about the steaming piles of crap we unleash on the world.

I really like the design work on this combo conference room chair and desktop as it works well in every aspect from use (at least from the images) to storage. While this is dandy and clever what pisses me off is that the designer’s web site is an atrocious and unreadable stack of poo done in Flash which makes it impossible to scale the text which might give us a bit more information about the designs. Even the images are scaled for what seems to be a target viewer looking at a 400X600 display. I guess folks holding on to their trusty WebTV consoles in a death grip while simultaneously being world class voracious aesthetes looking for new design concepts to waggle the remote at.

Unfortunately most of the rest of the world isn’t or don’t have Mister-fucking-Magoo oriented resolutions set on our, um, periscopes. It’s unfortunate because I’d love to actually see some of the other work this designer has done but until I’m able to score some adaptive technology (peri-microscope?) I am not willing to squint until my eyes burst just to read some text even when it may contain additional information about something I’m admittedly very curious about.

Another great exhibition of lack of artificial intelligence from Google News unless it was temporarily taken over by some Fox News bot eager to draw parallels between the Democratic Party candidates and fruity coffee drinks:

Fuck. Nevermind
My mistake. This image was actually linked to a story at Patent Baristas and used their masthead image as the image for the news link. Context free but still a little more sensible than what I’d originally thought.

Man, if this were an actual movie I would so totally go see it. Luckily there are others to compile and edit the dream for us — a world where robots are fighting it out and one of them is not currently the governor of California. This is really well done and looks so freakishly close to an actual trailer that I found myself trying to think of clever titles for it. It is a distant dream but one we must pursue nonetheless:

Marie mentioned this a few days ago and I finally got around to playing with the less-mediocre-than-I-thought seal generator. It’s fun like most useless web toys. This is what I came up with:

Found via Jeremy Zawodny’s always entertaining and time squandering linkblog today, at least for me who reads his aggregator data exploded in a browser while riding the bus, was this article about the hype/marketing versus reality when building application with frameworks. There are a number of really good questions that need to be considered when evaluating these sorts of claims in this post. It’s also a pretty realistic summary of the sort of toil you are in for when designing an application that replaces an existing one especially when you have to carry all the data with you. He also made some decisions along the way that cost a considerable amount of time (the decision to switch to PostgreSQL during development) and some tasks that most sane folk wouldn’t even consider like rewriting chunks of API (!) that didn’t suit his purposes. If you’ve ever been faced with the choice between rolling your own or using a large framework or library when doing a project and ending up somewhere in between most of this will sound ominously familiar or possibly reopen some old wounds or at least headaches.

The only disagreement I could really find with his methodology is the question raised about using the appropriateness of the toolkit as an issue for debunking when looking at the amount of time that it require to build an application using it. You should be doing most of this before you decide to hand your life over to a framework. This is what becomes so worrisome about addressing all problems with a particular set of tools. Rails seems to be gaining on the Perl abuses of the good old days as it gains popularity and all of the trappings of duh-ness that come with getting religion all involved in your programming languages.

An side order of diversion-jitsu and disclaimer-fu here that needs to be made before the flaming begins: I’m blaming popularity for the abuse and zealous overuse and not the actual language here so drop it before it gets hot. I know it write things in far too many words but I expect you to read and comprehend some of them before I’m going to take any of your ham-fisted ‘corrections’ to my woeful ineptitude in the properly appraising the One True Flavor Of The Month according to the One True Source Of All Wisdom For Imbecilic Ponderers of Alleged Truth About Things Read About or Otherwise First Considered Ten Minutes Ago terribly seriously. Yes, too many words now please move on before I spill any more in anticipatory defenses of stupid, stupid acts performed by the invisible hordes of idiotic barbarians against my honor. This reminds me that I must get out the CrankyPhone at nearest convenience to demand Southern accent tags from W3C immediately, posthaste, and with damn-the-torpedoes style speeds of delivery… Please choose wisely your hammer oaf-y. Um, so, I kinda lost my train of though in approaching this paragraph or whatever other funny name you would like to give this train wreck of a construction so I will move on immediately before my word count exceeds that of the weblog post I intended to make a brief mention and quick commentary on…

I do think that one of the more enthusiastic positive notes for a first application developed in Django might be the inclusion of a link to the source code for the project which we’ll have to shave a eighth of point or so off the overall delivery as it is mentioned as comment appended to post. Most first time developers in a new framework are too busy recovering from their newest ulcer and explaining copious new night sweats to their significant others to bother posting the actual source and/or discussing it in great detail. I think that more explicit discussions like these with some of both good and bad are more valuable as advocacy for a given framework or platform than marketing talk could ever be.  

Okay, I’ll admit it: for what many have been slagging off as a pretty insignificant bump upgrade I have to admit that I’m impressed with the new Mac Pro machines and the vaporous promises of Leopard. The base specifications of the Mac Pro are pretty hard to argue with and I really like the fact that you can pretty much roll your own machine instead of the age old choice between three radio buttons that has represented new Apple offerings in the past. Another break — I think as I haven’t been paying very much attention for the past three or four years or so — is the ability to actually roll back the default specs and drive the base price down for those of us who are not afraid to open a machine and rearrange its guts to our liking usually for a price about half of what Apple would charge. That is much more reasonable than the hermetically sealed desktop that were default in the past. Obviously this change has been the course of slow evolution over a long time from the less friendly days when you needed a tool from a third party to even open the fuckers to the point now where the chassis are actually built with ease of access in mind. I used to have a PowerMac 7100/66 that was a complete terror to open and I’m glad to see that the booming ‘Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain’ voice has receded into the background. That’s good.

The OS is still in demo mode so it’s hard to actually gauge what they’re offering there by any standard other than sheer audio/visual impression. The 64 bit-ness falls into the ‘it’s about time’ category but seems more wise at least in retrospect than the train wreck that Windows users encountered with 64 bit processors. I’ve heard numerous folks who I consider pretty technically competent tell heartbreaking tales of woe when using it and the sheer horror of the Gentoo Bugs site stopped me from buying a 64 bit chipset despite its novelty and sexiness when I built my last machine. That said, only the folks who attended WWDC and are first in line to get one of the new machines are really going to have much insight into how well Leopard functions until Apple actually releases the final product. I’m more than a little curious about how that will actually go especially since the amount of new hardware in the configuration for the Mac Pro machines seems a whole lot more expansive than I remember for Apple. The combination of 64 bit drivers and a brand new OS makes me a little hesitant to lower myself into more crushing debt in the near future. I’ve almost got the MacBook Pro (stupid camel casing) paid off but Yoon needs a Macbook before I go wandering off in that direction and get eaten by a grue.

One thing that has cracked me up a couple of times is the roar from the peanut gallery that the new version of the OS is essentially a point release and that precious time is being wasted on things that do not create new screenshots or whatever. Yeah, I know creeping feature-itis is how most people gauge new software releases but the whole three fucking architectures things is pretty killer for a single release without adding in a bunch of crap on top of it to further complicate things. Arguing the relative value of each announced feature especially when comparing it directly to announced features in Vista seems pretty stupid and I’m not feeling much like an analyst or anything so I’ll skip it entirely. Well, I’m happy about the inclusion of virtual desktops or something that allegedly works like them but I’m glad that the issue is finally being addressed.