We just got back from the mountains an hour or two ago and I’ve spent more time than I can ever remember pointing email addresses back to their correct destinations and looking at a Gmail spam folder with nearly twenty thousand pieces accumulated over three days. Confronted with messes like these all I can feel is some grey middle point between total apathy and resigned despair. If you emailed me over the past three days and haven’t heard back today (I’m not kidding) please give it another shot in the very near future ’cause we’re taking off for SF on the fifth and the whole process starts over again only with even less money. I don’t think I can bring myself to skim that many subject lines ever again.

The mountains were interesting although I did more coding, watching the Democratic National Convention, and couch duty than anything else. Someone told me before we left that there was an alpine slide near Winter Park but that just sounded too much like something I did accidentally on a fishing trip long ago to hold much real appeal. A couple soaks in a hot tub will do wonders for moral even if you can’t get anything to eat after 9 p.m. I feel well rested at the moment which is good because rough shit is coming up in the not-so-distant future. The little coffee place on the main drag (which is about four blocks long) actually had a wi-fi hot spot. I guess this is the last nudge that I needed to drop the ten paltry dollars on a wireless card for my old and chubby laptop. I did take advantage of the utter lack of internet connection to remain pretty much on task with what I was doing though. You pay for that sort of concentration in thousands of pieces of spam, I suppose.

When I have more than ten minutes to hang out at my desk I’d like to play around with PyPy. A working runtime would be very handy. I haven’t even looked through the Gentoo Packages for it yet so that shows you where I’m at. Pho, I guess and then some wingnut band from Austin called Invincible Czars later tonight. The name is awful but I liked what little I heard from their website and I need to shake off this case of cabin fever.

Two things:

A Firefox parody that is pretty funny. Pay special attention to the differentiation between technology preview and production usage. Too bad the alternatives are even worse, eh?

A pending class action lawsuit against PayPal. The site is dying at the moment under the strain of all us trying to recover the thirty six cents this suit will probably reward in the end. Also somewhat funny.

I’m finished with summer classes and Yoon and I are getting out of the city for a couple of days to hang out in a hot tub equipped cabin. This means no connectivity, no kitten, and exposure to the sun for extended periods of time. I have that totally deflated feeling after staggering through a couple of hyper-condensed and academically rigorous classes. I guess that isn’t deflated in the sense that I’m apathetic and couch-with-Cheetos bound or anything but I keep anticipating some horrible surprise to happen that requires me to labor endlessly to impress and/or sate morons. That probably has more to do with the general direction that work has taken over the past month or so than anything else. The recent onslaught of viruses and worms has really made work seem like running in Habitrail while having bad instructions/orders shouted at you. Then again, maybe I’m just really tired.

I had a two hour long telephone conversation with an old friend last night.This fact is remarkable only if you’ve ever talked with me on the phone, a technology that I use a whole lot like a walkie-talkie or a telegraph. He’s one of the people that I perpetually worry about on this subconscious and indirect level. It was reassuring to hear that everything is going well. We spent way too much of the conversation on SF punk rock gossip but it was worth the time if only to realize that you can transparently reconnect with people that you’ve barely communicated with for years and years. I’m hating the telephone a little less at the moment though I doubt this epiphany will actually cause me to answer the phone when it rings.

Yes. This is burn out.

Speaking of caching, there’s a nice comparison of how a few PHP/MySQL CMSs held up under the much maligned stress of a Slashdotting which really shows you how well e107 implements caching. I use .htaccess rules to keep that sort of direct linking under control which would doubtless collapse in a flaming heap under any real stress but it’s good to see that other folks are thinking ahead and trying to minimize that sort of punishment for more community oriented sites. The whole thing is simulated by scripts but stress testing makes me happy. Drupal also held up pretty well at the 300 hits per second mark. I’m not surprised at the relative success of either one since both projects are absolutely crazy about continually refining their code base.

Three thousand laborious words later I am finished with the summer semester and given the gift of a couple weeks to intellectually fuck off. Yup. The party starts with a link dump. I’d feel better about this if Yoon wasn’t off seeing Sonic Youth at a semi-secret warehouse show right now.

A GIF animation of an autopsy that really, really makes me wish that this was a video game. Sorta.

I have no idea how I’ve used an X based desktop for this long without realizing what utter genius unclutter is. I cranked mine up to 2 seconds in my Fluxbox startup file and I am much, much happier working in terms and dealing with web forms. Gotta tip the hat to Debian Package A Day for the nudge to give unclutter a try. Deb Package A Day is a really great little project as well for keeping you interested in new software that might be tersely described by your distribution’s packaging or whatever and gives you a glimpse into how you might actually use software instead of just an objective description of what it does. Adding to the links section…

I’ve been playing around with Pears a little bit between spasmodical typing. It’s another Python and wxPython conglomeration and while it doesn’t feel as responsive as other aggregators I’ve messed with lately it’s still pretty good and relatively stable. The only problem that I’ve found so far is that Pears froze (I actually had to kill the process) the first time I tried to import a huge OPML list. The browser selection dialog also seems broken because anything but the default cannot be set with the current interface. You can also adjust the cache for each feed which is a really nice feature. The “about” dialog also gives you stats on uptime, number of times used, and other things that ring geek bells. Cross platform is good. There’s also apparently a plug in structure but I haven’t been able to figure that out from either the site or messing with the application itself but I did just figure out that right clicking a feed refreshes it. Woo. No screenshot because do you really need to see another huge screenshot of a 3 pane aggregator? Didn’t think so.

There’s a new version of the Ultimate Boot CD out. Time to fix your broken shit. I should probably play some Frozen Bubble and pass the hell out.

Ignore me for I am short lived and content free.

This one is actually going to hang out for a while silently moldering into obscurity as a test post that I can reuse again and again. In this case it was to test the new version of the Staticize plug in. Seems quick and less break-the-holy-crap-outta-everything than the first version. Yay!

Two things that I’m thinking about:

1. It would be great if Netflix provided a 35 character text field next to movies in your cue. Two of us share one account and I hear about a lot of things third hand, write them down on the back of a fast food receipt, and then forget all about why I wanted to see that film after a couple of weeks. I can’t imagine that it would be too costly in terms of database abuse since the Netflix site seems to do a gazillion db calls every page load anyway. I’d also love improvements in the recommendation system. We’ve rated something like 600 movies and get almost no recommendations in a given category. Something about that says that it should’ve stayed in development a wee bit longer.

2. The next time someone refers to RMS and anyone who has similar beliefs as a communist I’m going to bludgeon them to death with a hard drive in a sock. Seriously, they don’t require MBAs to take a single political science class at Matchbook Business College? What makes this even more offensive is that Stallman is such a freak about semantics and that is such a central part of the problems that many have with him.

Those are two things. Now I will go see loud music and drink cheap swill.

Interesting enough but kind of sad: There’s a collective Internet Explorer weblog which links other IE developers weblogs and so on. The site I linked seems a little on the PR puff side while the dev weblogs are (of course) more infolicious. IE is in such catch up mode that nothing short of a monopoly on the corporate desktop will… oh shit.

Sarcasm aside (and all of the bitter rage that I feel towards cleaning up after such an outrageously outdated yet ubiquitous piece of software), I’m glad the browser is moving forward albeit by baby steps. Read the dev weblogs because some of the posts are very, very funny in the best/worst senses. That can’t be fun work in general. I picture the IE devs as something akin to the janitors walking behind the elephants in the beginning of Fractured Fairy Tales.

I really have to agree with Hans Nowak when he says most of the time an IDE is annoying as hell when coding Python. There are just too many features in most IDEs or editors that want to be IDEs that are enabled by default and pop up with jack in the box regularity to annoy the fuck out of people who are accustomed to something more austere. The code completion thing drives me batty in a matter of minutes. One of the first things that I dug around in the pile of horrors that is the configuration interface for Quanta Plus to disable is the auto completion of parentheses and whatnot. I know it’s not the right editor for programming per se but it is pretty good/efficient for PHP.

People could easily give me shit here, were they inclined to do so, for eschewing the minimalist splendor of vi for the sprawling, many tentacled horror of emacs. Yes, emacs can do way too many things but most of those things don’t come clawing their way out of the box on a beeline to your crotch where they’ll eat your testicles and convert all of your tabs to spaces without even a “Hello! I’m going to eat your nuts if you don’t mind.” Hell, the mouse scroll isn’t even turned on in the version included with most distributions. I won’t say that using the emacs interface to toggle options/features on and off is fun or anything but at least you don’t have to deal with singing and dancing tip windows stealing focus from the application by default. That is the key right there and one of the strengths of both emacs and vi/Vim; you’re not forced to use anything you don’t want to excepting the colon and the control key.

Anyone have any really compelling arguments against programming in black boxes? I mean other than prettiness or whatever because I know some dumb motherfucker is going to get all rah-rah about Clippy or something.

Ok, so another thing to play around with as mentioned by Edd Dumbill over at his site is the Mozilla compatible (and it works with that one icky browser that so many people think of as shorthand for the Internet) text editor called Kupu. I messed with the live demo and was pretty impressed there were a couple things available on the menu bar that didn’t work the way that I expected them to or at all but this is a temporary version of the demo so I can’t really get picky about issues of permissions and whatnot. What is really frightening and I wouldn’t have really noticed this had Edd not pointed it out in his mention of Kupu: the thing is Javascript. Jeez. There is something incredibly masochistic about trying to do big implementations in a language that limited in scope but I’m impressed with the results.

Go give it a shot. I’d love to hear feedback from folks using IE. I don’t even have a copy loaded in the Codeweavers stuff on this machine. Let the rest of us know how it goes. I’ve gotta get some sleep.

Just dragged my sorry ass through a long and difficult paper that cost me a crazy amount of sleep and time that I would ordinarily spend doing something more fun than reading Ph.D dissertations as research material. I ended up working through the night and on until seven this morning. That said, I needed some five or ten minute breaks pretty frequently while writing that paper so the Bloglines clipping feature was pretty handy for that purpose. I’m becoming more of a linkdumper than I’ve ever been and while that sort of bothers me on one level I’m also trying to break the habit of working myself to death on things that are absolutely necessary. I’m much more apt to spend insane amounts of times on interesting problems than anything else which is ultimately more rewarding than most of the byproducts of weblogging. There’s that whole sleeping thing to consider on occasion as well.

While I love, love, love aggregators for the most part all of them have incredibly annoying and what seems like very obvious flaws to me. With syndication becoming omnipresent and increasingly less annoying than actually visiting web sites the aggregator is approaching the importance of a web browser with the dependence on a zillion shitty plugins to simply read some text buried somewhere in all the singing, dancing trash. I imagine this stupid future will be brought to you by your non-dividend paying friends Microsoft. I’ve mentioned a million different Linux aggregators here and I’m never quite happy with them although Liferea the one disclaimed on its site as “under development” is about the closest to a perfect fit that I’ve found so far. It’s pretty damn good for where it’s at in development. I gave the new KDE aggregrator Akregator which unfortunately clings to that awful and arbitrary rule of all applications having a ‘K’ stuck in their name somewhere. I was impressed with its simplicity and speed. Importing the OPML file from all my Bloglines subscriptions took less than two seconds and I was up and running afterwards. The only thing that does annoy is the ‘save as’ dialog that pops up when you want to save your subscriptions. Dotfiles exist to keep you from doing this sort of thing and other applications that I’ve seen that use multiple configuration files often give you the option to create or open those files separately but never require you to create the initial or default file. It is a beta, though, so I can’t fault the entire application for a design decision that I don’t agree with when it functions very well already. Screenshot? Oh, why not:

I’m sure everyone with a weblog that spans more than a year or so is baked far enough into Google to have the ancient post that still picks up comments. Mine is here and was about being blocked as a sexually oriented site by Websense. Incidentally if you Google ‘fuck websense’ that post is the first result. Anyway, what’s interesting is that that post has taken on a life entirely apart from its original purpose which was to allow me to vent some spleen about the inherent problems with filtering ‘bots. I had more objections to being labelled a sexually oriented site than actually being blacklisted for being a potty mouth. Luckily the kids and by kids I mean folks who go to school in places where Websense is used in an out of the box configuration don’t arbitrarily read anything and that aspect has been largely ignored. The comments attached to the post are where things get interesting.

I’ve only deleted one comment attached to it because it was so blatantly stupid and abrasive that I couldn’t just leave it there. So there is a fair amount of grade school humor and non-pejorative use of words like ‘fag’ but after people started floating in on searches like ‘fuck websense’ I just had to sit back and see what happened without trying to steer the direction that comments took. There were actually a fair amount of helpful exchanges between people and an equal number of 3l33tists berating the others for coming here instead of Googling a better answer. The comment someone left today is a perfect example of this and is so full of posturing that it completely cracked me up. The Websense ban has since been lifted on this site at least as far as I’m aware of so it would be easy to just delete the post now especially after two years of sitting there accumulating cruft but I can’t bring myself to do it unless I could somehow preserve the comments apart from the actual post. The sort of pseudo-TAZ that results from throwing your hands up in the air and relinquishing control is more interesting to me than ninety percent of anything that I’ve written here. It makes me want to spout some nonsense about the subculture of youth making use of our forgotten spaces and adapting them within the original framework to their own uses but I’m just not feeling the fruity sociological vibe tonight. Thinking about this means that I should probably just go to sleep and possibly delete this entry tomorrow.