As of Tuesday, we'll bring to an end our decades-old relationship with Telus. There'll no longer be a POTS (Plain old telephone system) line (with its defacto negative option billing) hooked up to our home and office.
Why? Simply put, there is better value, and service, elsewhere.
Today I revamped the Douglas Elementary and Annex Parent Advisory Council web site. I’m using it and other pro-bono sites to refine a suite of CSS templates that will be used in some other application work I am doing. (150 words) More …
After a little sleuthing I managed to get SlimServer to connect (via `mplayer`) to CBC‘s Internet audio streams and all was well and good in the world. (212 words) More …
Slimserver is a streaming audio server designed for home use; it has an attractive web interface; a Java-based emulator of the Squeezebox hardware product is also part of the package, plus most any streaming music player can act as a slightly more brain-dead slimserver client – xmms, winamp, madplay, py-mad, whatever… if you are looking for a good solid music server solution, there’s lots to recommend about this one. (525 words) More …
Anyone remember Framework? Text based ‘windows’ multifunction software, and surprisingly useful as I recall. (266 words) More …
Last week I found myself in a new apartment, a permanent address at last, and a laptop that’s so riddled with spyware as to be unusable. While watching Katrina on CNN and MSNBC, I ran all the spyware removal tools I had, they’re known to work, but then I couldn’t bring myself to launch MSIE, because that’s how the spyware comes back. Then I had an epiphany. I didn’t use Firefox on this computer in the past because it was so strange, so different from MSIE as to be jarring Dave Winer, Easing into Firefox (447 words) More …
Suggestion: Don’t write one line of code, not one XML spec, until you’ve worked a week in a Red Cross call center on family reunification tasks. (244 words) More …
Courtesy of Phil at codestream, a quick Mozilla Firefox ‘greasemonkey’ script to strip the annoying /. (and other) adverts out of RSS feeds.
I read my RSS in rawdog.
Basically anything in between the pipe character “configdir=|some commands|” gets executed. Yes. (152 words) More …
Mark Pilgrim released Butler, a ‘user script’ designed to run under the Mozilla Firefox Greasemonkey extension. Among other things, Butler strips ads from Google search results. I suspect we’ll be seeing many more Greasemonkey scripts – terrific idea – giving us all a little more control from web/media gone wild.
It’d be nice if the script could be modified to allow a single edit for the top-level domain Google is using – here Google always defaults to google.ca even if I initially visit google.com. In the interim, I hacked the script for my purposes: butler_ca.user.js
There are a whole range of situations for which these issues aren’t really issues at all and relational persistence has its own set of issues. But in my experience, making the decision between ZODB and relational has been less about what’s better for the code and more about what’s better for the data. (286 words) More …
Adding to the collection started in yesterday’s post:
I still run Windows for specific market analysis applications that I just can’t get on *nix, and I must say over the last year X and *nix have moved from being “just a little more work” to being “just a little bit easier” to deal with than Windows. Perhaps its my own knowledge level rising, but I think the underlying applications and OS deserve most of the credit. It does feel like the Open Source world is closer to making a breakthrough with ordinary folks than ever before. (221 words) More …
A loud click tells you you are done for, and then the operating system—doesn’t matter which, both Windows and FreeBSD have succumbed to this beast of an issue—can’t go on and gives up. (170 words) More …
1,168,288 estimated downloads of Mozilla Firefox browser so far, the fastest adoption rate for a new browser, period. Spread the word.
Sure, they claim that their lack of enthusiasm for this first utilization of RSS in a mainstream browser is because its not apparent to them whether this first support is useful or not, as if that would truly damage the continued evolution of RSS / Atom / aggregators and all things XML and holy. (147 words) More …
Just became aware of a drive to promote Firefox. 1,000,000 user download drive. Great idea, although www.spreadfirefox.com response is so slow it might well turn folks off. If you haven’t already been arm-twisted (or had a bad spyware experience with Internet Explorer and are already convinced) the link on the page side bar (look right) points to the main Mozilla.org download site and is much more responsive. Get your shiny new copy of version 1 Preview today…
Or, switch to Firefox – its free, offers additional (and even useful) features, and I’ve not had a single popup since switching to Firefox (and its predecessors) well over a year ago. (115 words) More …
Happy birthday, o’ reliable servers and operating system. This particular box only ever goes down when I upgrade the OS. Last time: Fri Aug 22 17:37:09 PDT 2003.
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