The Middle

SI has a blog. "What took them so long?" -- Coolest Dad Ever.

Firefox Bloglines notifier extension. This should save considerable wear and tear on my F5 key.

As mentioned here, those newly-rich folks at Google have seemingly gone crazy with the gmail invites. Everytime I give some out, my supply is replenished within hours.

Is this one last push for stress testing before the public release? Will gmail, like several other google experiments, maintain its 'beta' status indefinitely? How many people are currently in the beta? How many more do they expect once registration is open to the general public? Will it ever be open to the public, or is this an Orkut type thing, where it will always be invite only? (Haven't been there in months...is Orkut still invite only? (Man I ask a lot of questions)). When is gcal, the RSS-based calendar super-javascript webapp coming out to compliment gmail?

All that aside, it's a damn nice webmail system, I highly recommend giving it a whirl.

The Eve Project: LDAP + stored procedures and triggers. Mmmm...LDAP

Sorry, my OCD demands that I document things like this.

• Tombstone


• Field of Dreams


• Old Yeller

I'm not even too sure about Old Yeller. I just needed at least a third, lest I come off as some heartless SOB. For explanation, see here

Q: What's the difference between Michigan stadium and a porcupine? A: Michigan stadium has 100,000 pricks on the inside. Many more

Starting about two weeks ago, my brain has completely refused to cooperate with my normal life. The zone eludes me at work, I can't type a full sentence without my mind wondering away into some weird train of thought, and I just have this general feeling like I've got something on the tip of my mind's toungue, I just can't for the life of me spit it out.

This has happened to me before, and I know that any day now I'm going to bolt upright, throw my hands in the air, and say "Of course! That's how you cure cancer/fix email/adjust the throttle on an '83 Honda". (Don't hold your breath on the cancer thing, my revalations tend more towards the digital realm)

I just wish my brain would get with the program and spit it out already, so I could return to normal.

There's been a great deal of commotion lately regarding Java and its merits, collected and documented neatly by J$ here.

As someone who works in and around Java all day, I just have to chime in with my two cents.

Java is not cool. Say it with me again, it'll help. Java is not cool.

Java is old. In fact, you could almost call it a mature technology. So much maturity that's it has gained a great deal of ubiquity over the last serveral years. Finally, there are a great deal of companies with large sums of $$ riding on Java. As a direct consequence of this, it has shed itself almost completely of its coolness as a technology.

Maturity. Ubiquity. Money.

Those three E's can completely suck the cool out of anything, to the geeks of the world. I'd go so far as to say that the absence of those three things is what makes a technology cool in the first place.

Redhat? Not cool, try Gentoo.

Movable Type? That's so 2002, use WordPress.

Apache 1.3.x? Who cares about billions of pages served? Bring on 2.0!

CVS? How old is that? Have you never heard of subversion?

I'm as guilty as anyone of subjecting myself to something just because it's cool (I've hit at least 3 of the above examples). The appropriateness of the tool is irrelevant, any geek worth his salt will go for the cool factor, just because he can, or just becuase he's bored to tears by the 'appropriate' solution.

I feel like this is what Graham was getting at in his essay. Any code monkey can learn Java and become proficient with it, but the real hackers don't stop there, collecting paychecks and coding 10-4 every day.

Java is a solved problem. The people who are looking for the next problem on the list are the exciting ones to hire.

I can't praise Lawrence Lessig enough. Read the blog. Buy the books. He's our man on the inside, give him some love.

Ahhh, new laptop smell. The generous folks at my employer apparently get a pretty good deal on laptops, so I recently acquireed a shiny new Thinkpad T41p. An extra gig of RAM (bumping me to 2GB), an extra 80 gig hard drive (bumping me to 160GB!), and all the USB/Bluetooth/CDR loving a guy could handle.

This review pretty much sums up my findings: Awesome

I also wanted to throw in a little rant. Why in the world don't wintel laptops include Firewire? Is it the licensing fees? The Mac-ness of it? It's not like external hard drives and camcorders are platform specfic. I've got 17 USB 2.0 ports, what's a guy got to do to get some Firewire action? If I had to guess, I'd say it's just a symptom of Intel being stubborn on their USB 2.0 bet, so manufacturers don't get Firewire 'free' like they do with USB 2.0, NIC's, and wireless chipsets that all come with the Intel motherboard designs. That said, it's still annoying.

All that aside, here's my favorite part: I spend a few days preparing the laptop for my switch. Finally, Saturday afternoon rolls around, and via the magic of dragging three folders (I have filesystem OCD, sue me), all my stuff is moved over. Hours and hours of the drive in my old laptop chugging away laborously, I check on the new machine late Saturday night, and all the files have been copied. I go to bed anticipating a long Sunday of geekery tweaking the new machine.

However, I awoke to realize that my Saturday night virus scan on the old machine, shortly after the culmination of the massive file copying, had completely shot the old hard drive, which had been making the 'clicking noise of death' for some time now. How's that for timing?

It would appear that the strain was more than it could bear.

But on the flip side, I've got a shiny new laptop, and it's fantastic. I still need a Powerbook, but hey, beggers can't be choosers.

Update: 2.5 hours of surfing on the porch later, I've still got 60% battery left. Awesome.

I will forever mark as my entry into old man adulthood the fact that this news doesn't make me jump up and down with glee - My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with the girl who saw Lucas pass out NDAs at 31 Flavors last night. I guess it's pretty serious.

Note: It's still perfectly acceptable, even for an old man, to quote the magic that is Ferris Bueller's Day Off

For some reason, I am wicked good at this game

Man, I have the greatest MT admin in the universe, J$. Mere hours after the new MT-Blacklist plugin was released, I've got mad 3.01 MT and shiny new blacklisting features.

If you live in Cleveland, and I'm looking at you here, Prall, buy that man a beer.

So, I spent some time stealing CSS from J$ this evening...and I found yet another gem in the super-code that is Firefox. While I'm sitting there tweaking my CSS, I needed to re-enable my web-developer plugin toolbar, which I had disabled to save screen real-estate on my 1024x768 loaner laptop.

So I mouse up to the 'View' menu, and accidentally enable the web developer sidebar, not toolbar. All of a sudden, I've got an inline CSS editor that lets me view changes in realtime.

That's just awesome.

All I had wanted was the button to 'view stylesheets', similar to the standard 'view source'. I'm no super CSS guru (as my nearly-stock MT layout would suggest..), so I'm sure other tools do this as well, I just had no idea it was a part of the web developer plugin. Man, I love that thing.

On a related note, I tweaked some of the side layout, removing the boring "This Month" calendar, and the 2 year old blogrolling.com blogrolls. Need to see what my options are for including my bloglines blogroll, as I've been using that for months now.

And on a final note, I think I'm going to rename this site "Andy sings the praises of Bloglines and Firefox".

It's like crack. Expensive, and I need it.

I enjoyed 8 hungover hours of The Monk Marathon yesterday. That guy's a hoot.

ground off, hot off, swap, hot on, ground on. Orson Welles.

With all the recent talk of browser integration of RSS content, I felt the need to see what sort of features were out there. Since I'm not cool enough to have a powerbook and a spare hard drive sitting around (but I do need one in a bad way), I decided to see what those crazy Firefox guys had come up with.

A fresh download of the 08/09/2004 Firefox nightly secured, I loaded it up and started to play with it. Basically, when a site has an RSS/Atom feed available, you get a nice little lightening bolt in the corner (next to the alternate stylesheets), alerting you that a livemark is available. Upon clicking it, you can add the site to any location in your bookmarks collection. You've then created what the UI exposes as a bookmark folder, the contents of which are links to the entries from the feed. Overall, it's a nice little feature, but there is no way it's going to get me to switch from the uber-aggregator.

I have three main gripes with the functionality as it's currently implemented: (I know it's a nightly, and some of this stuff may indeed be forthcoming)

1. It's tied to my browser. My browser goes a lot of places with me, but it doesn't go everywhere. Bloglines goes everywhere.

2. No 'new stuff' alerts. When a feed is updated, I have no way of knowing, unless of course I take the time to commit to memory the last n posts from each feed I read. With dozens or hundreds of feeds, this just doesn't fly.

3. No reload time settings. From my rough experiments, it seems that the feeds are updated (A) when the browser restarts, or (B) when I click on a livemark and choose 'Refresh Live Bookmark'. This is both ugly and does not scale. I fire up my browser once in the morning, and I'm lucky to dig through my mountain of 'To Read' tabs before midnight. I'm not restarting my browser to see if J$ has anything new to say. Not that I'd know if he did, as point #2 illustrates. The second option is also not feasible, as I'm not about to right-click and update a hundred-odd feeds.

So, that's my off the cuff review of Firefox's new Livemarks feature. Not bad, but not enough for an RSS power user.

On another interesting note, as of about an 10:00PM, my Firefox nightly started alerting me that "Firefox 1.0 Preview Release is available". Mmmmmm...Firefox.

As a sane person who understands technology and reads Slashdot, I've been inundated with the lunacy that is commonly referred to as the Inducing Infringement of Copyright Act (the Induce Act, S.2560). The whole thing is a desperate attempt by everyone's favorite entertainment monopolies to make your iPod illegal.

Anyway, this has been said numerous times in much more elegant fashion, and I've sent my emails and faxes to my reps, even printed out two letters to my fine North Carolina Senators (even though I think Mr. Edwards might be a little too busy to read it these days). I just want to chime in with the part that burns me up the most. It's not that this law will likely come to pass, essentially eradicating any prayer of continued US leadership in the technology sector, the dollars involved to our 'representatives' in Congress are likely too great to stop that - it's how this law is justified:

Supporters describe the bill as a narrow measure aimed mainly at a handful of companies whose business amounts to an information-age form of child abuse - inducing children and teenagers to violate copyright laws. -New York Times

Now, child abuse is a horrible, heinous crime that deserves all the infamy it so rightly receives. But to claim that this legislation is "for the children" (queue violins), is just low. And anyone who honestly thinks that passing this law is going to "help the children" vs. "help the dated, copycat, monopolistic RIAA/MPAA" or "help the Senator buy another boat" has got his or her head on backwards.

But you can't speak against it, it's "for the children".

Guess what, Senator Hatch, the children are smarter than you. After you pass this bill and destroy all innovation in the US electronics industry, those kids are going to grow up infringing anyway, importing 'illegal' hardware and software that let's them do what they want to do, rather than what the conglomerates say they can.

RIAA/MPAA, stop trying to stick your fingers in a dam that's been breaking for ten years. It's over, fellas. Start dealing with it.

Football's back! w00t!

So, the SciFi channel lines up some good stuff, and I've gotten completely hooked on Stargate, but there's a catch - the damn new episodes are only shown on Friday nights! I realize it is the SciFi channel and all, but I can't believe there aren't more geeks in the world with shit to do.

I live in the South and have no friends, but even I can muster up some Friday-night plans, come on. I've lusted for a Tivo for years now, but it's never reached the magical fever-pitch of need to push it into my 'must-have' category of electronics. Fortunately for those of us with lives, there is a non-DVR answer: BitTorrents and RSS.

Hungover Saturday mornings with good TV shows to watch. God bless the internet. And Bloglines