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Re: my syndicated feed
In addition to my blog posts, my syndicated feed also pulls in a daily summary of whatever I linked to via del.icio.us. I realize this can look a like a whole lot of noise to a typical LiveJournal user. If you'd like to subscribe to a 'friend' that doesn't have this daily noise, try adding syndication for this feed:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/GlobalResetBlog
Just pop that url into the bottom of this page:
http://www.livejournal.com/syn/
Let me know if you add it. |
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I stopped blogging here ages go and moved everything over to my own domain (http://blog.globalreset.org). That means that I occasionally have to send my 1 friend who only uses LJ (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) cbradfield) a direct link (since he can't be bothered to setup an rss reader). Well, now I know of 2 friends who only use LJ (add spoonless). As a paid user, Jeff was able to add my regular blog's rss feed to LiveJournal's syndicated blogs. So cbradfield and spoonless can add my feed to their friend's list and be notified right away on events like when I receive my MacBook Pro or when I crash my next attempt at ski jumping (if you can stand the wait!)...
Here's the syndicated feed that you want to add to your friend's list:
http://syndicated.livejournal.com/globalreset_syn/
Thanks Jeff!
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You'd think that given the high cost of rent we pay for the posh downtown apartment we're in, we wouldn't have to deal with crap like this. It's leaked since we moved in, but it really only drops any water if there is a horrendous storm outside... Which, thankfully, is rare in Dallas. We've made complaints to the management multiple times, but no action has been taken. I assume that either they don't want to re-shingle the roof since they did it right as we moved in about 2 years ago or they are waiting for us to move out to dig out the root of the problem.
And as much as I'd rather continue renting in downtown than move out to a house in the suburbs, crap like this really makes home ownership a no-brainer. I mean, sure, if you own a house problems like these are your own to deal with... But in my current situation, nobody is dealing with it.
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Take a look at this screen capture to see how I spent my 4th of July vacation weekend.
I ended up taking the libusb build of the 1-Wire Public Domain Kit and creating a JNI-wrapper around it. Now I've got a nice USB Adapter driver for the Java API (and hence for OneWireViewer). I'm going to look into modifying the WebStart download so that it will deliver the new USB adapter and the binary (JNI) portion of it. Possibly, I can sneak the libusb drivers along with that as well, without causing too much confusion. Maybe make 2 builds, one that includes libusb for people who aren't cmd-line savvy enough to build their own and one that doesn't.
The good news is that this should work on Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows. Windows users will have to install a .inf file first, but it will be a single-click application for Linux and Mac.
Update (7/10/2005): I used JarBundler to create a nice .App bundle of this for Mac OS X users. It's pretty nice to have a installable .App of OneWireViewer that supports both the USB Adapter (DS9490) and the Serial Adapter (DS9097U) on Mac OS X. Unfortunately, I don't have a good place to host it.. I'm not sure in it's current form if it's suitable for an official release to go up on the dalsemi ftp servers. So, if you'd like to try it, just leave a comment and include your email address (not in the comment, but in the regular email address field, where I will be able to see it but noone else will) and I can email you a copy of the app. It's 2.3mb compressed. |
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Presumably, you are as saddened as I am by the recent ruling of the supreme court which upholds the state's right to seize property from individuals to give to other individuals (if the state government will generate greater tax revenue as a result of the property "reassignment"). If so, you may be consoled a little by the fact that someone is trying to use the new ruling to seize the home of Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter. His idea for building a hotel on the property of the Justice's current home will, most likely, generate greater tax revenue for the area, but it's unlikely to succeed for obvious reasons... Clearly, the Supreme Court meant the state has a right to seize your homes, not theirs. My favorite bit from the press release:
The proposed development, called "The Lost Liberty Hotel" will feature the "Just Desserts Café" and include a museum, open to the public, featuring a permanent exhibit on the loss of freedom in America. Instead of a Gideon's Bible each guest will receive a free copy of Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged."
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| » Mac Mini Mess |
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A couple of weeks ago, I made a comment in Chris' blog post about how he tried to ruin his laptop with a bottle of water. For your convenience, here's my relevant addition to his story where I tried to ruin my delicate Apple hardware...
Last weekend, Nicole was using my brand new Mac Mini. Of course, that also means she was using my almost brand new Dell 2005fpw 20" lcd... Not to mention my mostly new wireless keyboard. And, she was drinking coffee while doing this. So, I'm playing fetch with the dog downstairs. The way our apt is laid out, we have a second floor with a sort of balcony over the living room which is where my mac mini lives. I decide to give the dog a good challenge by tossing his toy over the balcony edge to where Nicole is sitting. Nothing but net... The toy went straight into the coffeee, splashing coffee everywhere. Keyboard was the worst hit, but I did actually get a big splash on the Mac Mini. It looks like it's going to survive, but I have a nice brown stain on the felt in the slot loader to remind me of what an idiot I am. I think I got the keyboard back to a good state, though if the N sticks on me again, I'll have to buy a new one. Can't tolerate sticky keys, you know...
Today, thanks to a remnant of that mess, I learned a couple of things about my Mac Mini...
1. Dried coffee is like hardened cement when placed between my computer desk and the rubber bottom of the Mac Mini and will, in most circumstances, require an actual chisel to separate the two.
2. That little power cord in the back slips out of the Mac Mini like a frightened, greased pig at the county fair.
3. Mac OSX does not berate you for improper shutdown of your system, unlike Windows XP.
That third point is an interesting one to me. I'm very familiar with recovery on Windows, given that prior to WinXP crashes were quite frequent... I'm sure Mac OSX must have some sort of method for recovering orphaned files and, perhaps, booting into a safe mode if I installed something which hosed the boot process...
I need to add that to my "to research" list...
Jun. 27th, 2005 @ 08:14 pm
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| » SHA-1 Collisions Paper Online |
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The full paper describing the recent attack on SHA-1 is now available online, according to Bruce Schneier. Previously, only an excerpt was made available, but this was due to some misunderstanding about the rules for papers being submitted for the Crypto conference.
Admittedly, it is early and I've only had my first cup of coffee, but the methods described in the paper don't make much sense to me yet. Might take another cup of joe and one or two more reads.
If you feel up for it, you can give it a shot by grabbing a copy to read yourself.
Technorati Tags: Crypto
Jun. 27th, 2005 @ 10:08 am
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| » Skinning XP |
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I booted up my Windows XP machine to try out FlyakiteOSX. It's a suite of tools to help skin your XP desktop to look a lot like OSX. If nothing else, you should check out the website. It's a very slick Javascript implementation of an OSX desktop. It's kind of a painful way to navigate a website, but it's really amazing how well it's put together. I hope the idea does not catch on though... I think one or two desktops is enough. I don't need another one in my web browser.
In any case, the FlyakiteOSX suite works remarkably well. It doesn't change many of the tiny user interface issues that I was hoping for (i.e. double-click on title bar still maximizes, unlike OSX which minimizes.) But it does add transparency to pop-up menus and a pretty drop shadow to every window. I have a reasonably speedy AMD box, so I didn't notice if this was a severe drain on resources. It might stay on my home machine (which rarely gets any power-on time since I got the Mac Mini), but I probably won't propagate it to my work PC.
Experimenting with that got me curious about getting widgets on my Windows XP machine, so I also tried out Konfabulator. This is actually a bit different from the Dashboard included with OSX Tiger. It allows widgets to run floating on your desktop, above your normal apps... Versus Dashboard which only runs on an invisible layer which must be summoned to the foreground. Konfabulator does have a layer which isolates just the widgets, so it ends up looking a lot like Dashboard. I haven't experimented with many widgets, but the default ones are useful enough to convince me I'll like it. This will be propagated to all of my machines. I may even use the OSX version of Konfabulator instead of Dashboard, just so I can be assured that any widget I grow to love will work everywhere I go.
Technorati Tags: Apple, MacOSX
Jun. 22nd, 2005 @ 01:03 pm
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| » Truncated RSS Feeds: A Suggestion |
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So, a few days ago I complained about sites who hosted RSS feeds without the full content in the RSS feed. Apparently, even sites which post only text can exceed their allotment of bandwidth. This is news to me... But I suppose I underestimated either the size of the readership or the common courtesy of the readers. Of course, by that I mean that you would be doing your favorite blogs a nice favor if you could avoid fetching their RSS feed once per minute... Especially blogs which are only updated once or twice daily.
I use BlogLines for all of my news reading, which seems to be on an update schedule somewhere between 20 minutes and an hour. The good thing about BlogLines though is that it fetches your feed only once for all the users of BlogLines who read your feed.
I'd like to make a suggestion though for site owners whose RSS feed does consume a lot of their bandwidth... Host your feed with FeedBurner. They provide a pretty good set of "circulation" statistics, to help you track the size of your readership. But, perhaps most useful of all, they actually cache your feed and serve it up for you. They refresh their cached version once every 30 minutes. And it's free. They have a "pro" version which offers more statistics and other advertising-related features, but the basic statistics and feed hosting is a free service. If you'd like to try it, but also be able to switch back transparent to your readership, they have a good suggestion on how to do that in one of their FAQs.
Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with FeedBurner, nor do I receive any sort of referral bonus if you try their service. I'm just a happy user.
Jun. 20th, 2005 @ 12:24 pm
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| » Truncated RSS Feeds |
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On principle, I have to start being more strict about unsubscribing from feeds with a truncated RSS feed. The whole point of this syndication stuff, is that I gather all of my news into a centralized location and I format it how I want it formatted. When certain bloggers only offer a truncated feed, I have to exit my feed depot to visit their website. In certain cases, I assume the site is trying to conserve bandwidth. That must be the case for sites like Cox and Forkum. I guess the bandwidth adds up quickly when the content you are distributing is primarily a large image, rather than text.
But what excuse does Diana Mertz Hsieh and Patrick Oscar Boykin have for their truncated feeds? Most of their posts are relatively short... They aren't making advertising money off the site... It's possible they don't realize that a truncated RSS feed annoys some of us. I have no estimate of the size of their readership, so I guess it's also possible that I'm the only one. Diana is an interesting character in Objectivism in that she originally sided with David Kelly (in the infamous split with ARI and Peikoff), but after serious reflection has reconsidered her position and has written a lot of good articles about what's wrong with The Objectivist Center (in practice and in principal). I believe that her well-written articles do net her a large audience. Patrick is a friend from Georgia Tech. We were meant to be roommates, but he kicked me out of my own dorm room to squeeze a friend of his in. Consequently, we became very good friends. A couple of his publications on social networks have been recently slashdot'ed, so it stands to reason that his audience has to be more than a handful of readers.
I wonder if there is a service out there that parses popular blog layouts (wordpress, blogger, etc) and "screen-scrapes" the full blog post into a full RSS feed? Do truncated RSS feeds bother you also? If you aren't using RSS yet, check out BlogLines for a good example of "RSS made easy." You can start with my blogroll as a quick intro.
Update: No thanks to my petty complaints, Diana's RSS feed is no longer truncated. I no longer find her blog, in any way, inadequate. :) Though I did learn that bandwidth is a concern. Those of you using an RSS client would probably be doing all of your favorite blogs a solid if you toned down the polling rate. A couple of times a day should be more than adequate for anything but a "breaking news" blog.
Jun. 18th, 2005 @ 12:58 pm
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