...more recent posts
A howtoforge.com article on installing mod_cband bandwidth limiting module for Apache 2. Great! I've been waiting for some bandwidth limiting module to step up (and for someone to write a nice clear installation article.) This is one of the things I feel like I lost by going with Apache 2 over 1.3 - the older version had much better bandwidth limiting modules. But hopefully that is no longer the case. This gets moved way up towards the top of the list.
Supposedly Nokia is releasing an S60 Symbian port of the Apache webserver, along with a gateway that will allow for the addressing of a mobile webserver with a regular web address (URI.) Wow. To me that's some sort of geek litmus test - if you really want to run a webserver on your phone you are a geek. Or at least a web geek. Sign me up. I want a Symbian phone so bad, but the new models take so long to reach the U.S. I will never understand the wireless carriers here. You couldn't move any more slowly if you tried.
I've written about Joi Ito before. He seems like a very interesting guy. It's sort of hard to figure out exactly what he does - I guess mostly because he does a lot of different things. But they add up to him being a very influential figure in the computer scene. He's an expert networker. He puts people together with other people, and money together with projects, and just generally seems to make things happen.
Interestingly, I never knew about his Tim Leary connection, but here is a post of his on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of T.L.'s death, which explains just how important that relationship was.
Did they change a flight pattern this morning? It sounds like jets are roaring about 4 inches over my apartment. This is quite unsettling.
Working on web feeds yesterday and today. This is really picky stuff. Very easy to make malformed xml. But I think I have all the main problems worked out.
But riddle me this - why does a link like this:
http://example.com/foo/bar/#123
not work in my feed reader (NetNewsWire), but this one does:
http://example.com/foo/bar#123
The first formation makes more sense to me since the 123 anchor is really attached to the implied index.html that would come after .../bar/ (i.e., .../bar/index.html#123 not /barindex.html#123) Neither way throws a parse error, but the first way just doesn't work as a link (I can click it, but it won't open in my browser,) while the second way works. Strange.
This tip from a digg discussion just made me 12% more efficient when working in the bash shell:
...note that the most efficent way to search your history is to hit Ctrl R and type the start of the command. It will autocomplete as soon as there's a match to a history entry, then you just hit enter...The internets are just full of useful information.
(bash is a unix shell. A shell session is where you interact with the command line - sort of like dropping into DOS and getting a C> from Windows, except better.)
Palm finally announced the Treo 700p on Monday. Damn the cellphone industry takes *so* long to come out with new models. I just don't understand. This would have been a killer phone 8 months ago.
Sprint says they'll have it by the end of this month. I might have to get it because my habit of always waiting for the next thing is getting sort of annoying. On the other hand, the Nokia N93 will probably only be 1 month out at that point, so I might not be able to help myself.
The problem with the 700p is that besides the EV-DO (which, to be fair, completely rocks) it isn't really any better than the 650 which I could have bought like a year ago. So it kind of makes me feel like I waited for nothing. And strangely, this makes me want to not buy it and wait even longer.
Apple announced new MacBooks yesterday. That's the new monicker for the old iBook. Very nice machines. The high end now comes in black in addition to the traditional white still offered across the line. But it's $150 more for no apparent reason. That's kind of silly. Otherwise these machines are great, and plenty powerful. Starting at $1199 (well, $1099, but you need at least 1 GB of RAM, so $1199.) I'd just get the cheapest one (with the added RAM.)
Unfortunately I need to milk my 867 TiBook for a while more. If I can make some money by January I'll get the Memron MacBook Pro when it comes out, but that's a pretty big "if".
Anyway, I know at least 3 people who were waiting for the MacBooks so maybe I'll get to play around with one.
Just off several solid days of coding. It's so fun to be able to dive in deep and not come up for a while. It's hard work, but at the same time I feel lucky to be able to do it. I wish I could explain more what I am working on. I'm not very good at that though (or writing documentation which is sort of the same thing.) In any case, the deal is that I am about to put this software behind several customer sites, but once I do that I effectively freeze any substantial overhaul of the software, since I can't break compatibility (like different URL schemes, say,) with already running sites, and I don't want to have a bunch of different forks of the same project (because that's what happened last time and it is a nightmare for maintenance.)
So everything is going to run on the same version of the software, and I need to have the core of it set in stone before I start or it's just going to be a headache. And after this past week (well okay, I was useless on Sunday, but otherwise...) I'm pretty much there.
Now I just need a little attention on the mail server to stem the spam deluge and I will be ready to go. Not finished, by any means, but ready to start finally. God I am slow. But I guess slow is better than nothing.
Hopefully I can write something about the software at greater length. It really is sort of interesting. It goes way beyond blogs.
Video downloader Firefox add-on:
Download videos from Youtube, Google, Metacafe, iFilm, Dailymotion... and other 60+ video sites! And all embedded objects on a webpage (movies, mp3s, flash, quicktime, etc)! Directly!Very nice. Of course it's always possible to download the movies yourself, without this add-on, but sometimes it takes some real detective work viewing the page source to figure out what the "real" URL of some embedded media is. And if you can't decipher HTML you really probably can't do it without this. Might get me to switch. I'll certainly just jump to Firefox for those situations.
VideoDownloader add a small icon on the status bar at the bottom of your firefox window, and a toolbar button. Just click that and download the video you are watching!