Software

When you turn to the light and start to fully embrace the River of News, the sickening realisation slowly dawns that you might actually have been mistaken and partial feeds may just have some redeeming features while full feeds are indeed the work of the devil. Full feeds potentially interrupt the flow of the river. The title alone isn’t enough to determine whether the article merits further consideration. Expanding the article should give you just enough to determine whether you want to read the full text. ...

Google recently announced some enhancements to the Notebook and I must admit that, while the concept left me cold initially, I am now starting to make more use of this software. While I use Blinklist for shared (more permanent) bookmarks, I tend to use Google Notebook for snippets, jottings, interesting links and, err, notes that I may need to access from both home and work (in fact potentially from any computer). For example, yesterday I had a query about my online tax return and was forced to call the pension administrator followed by the Inland Revenue and jotted down answers to my questions. ...

I have an increasing tendency to skim all my RSS feeds in Netvibes just to finish reading them as quickly as possible and not really reading (or enjoying) the content. My therapist recommended some diversion therapy; install the Gregarius aggregator locally on my PC, import my OPML and experiment with Dave Winer’s controversial ' River of News’ concept. Now my previous experiments with Joomla and subsequently WordPress and Drupal have been made incredibly easy by Wamp (a packaged distribution of mySQL, PHP and Apache). ...

[With apologies to Cabaret Voltaire] I want to synchronise my Thunderbird address book between work and home and my Palm Vx. I also want to synchronise Google Calendar with Sunbird and my aging Palm. This is for two reasons; to synchronise and simultaneously back the data up. I feel nervous and exposed, like an Oracle DBA relying on nightly exports. One option was to repeatedly export/import the data between applications but that is far too time consuming and I am lazy. ...

I briefly used Box.net as a virtual 1GB memory stick. Briefly because after the initial transfer of important files, the onus was on me to identify files I had changed recently and upload them. Mozy seems better suited to lazy people. You simply download a lightweight client, identify folders you want mirrored and Mozy encrypts and mirrors them, quietly in the background. When you add new files, Mozy mirrors the incremental changes. Mozy offers 2GB of storage for free. ...

Holy Father It is 23 years and 7 months since my last confession. Since then, I have downloaded Ethereal and started to sniff packets off the network. I know it was wrong but we had worked for a week on this problem. We had all exhaustively checked everything (twice) and we were tired, hungry and increasingly desperate. I fervently wished this was a conventional database problem or even an unconventional Siebel problem but the symptoms, the controlled tests and all the hard evidence increasingly pointed to ’the network'. ...

Preloadr is an interesting, free utility that allows seamless manipulation of Flickr photos. The standard features (crop, resize, flip, rotate, sharpen, brightness) are there but red eye removal is absent which seems a curious, but important, omission.

I just changed my Thunderbird setup to move all messages from the IMAP server to local folders and then apply the various filters locally as opposed to applying filters on the server. This means that all messages are visible even when disconnected so I will be able to do email housekeeping in airport lounges. I tested each new message filter in turn and everything worked fine. Unfortunately I discovered that, contrary to the documentation, Thunderbird 1.5.0.5 does not appear to automatically apply all filters to new messages in ‘Local Folders-Inbox’. Sigh. ...

Back in the old days, things were very simple. We had a camera. We took photographs. We sent the prints away to BonusPrint. We discarded mistakes. We filed the photos in albums. We ordered duplicates for grandparents. Best of all, my involvement in the whole process was negligible. Then some idiot invented the digital camera. We still took photos but the whole issue of printing became more complicated. You could be adventurous and attempt to print on your inkjet printer at home. This would result in ludicrously sized and distorted A4 images, drenched in ink, that gave small children nightmares. ...

Tough week. Lots of driving to and from the bleak, industrial North. Lots of head scratching, pouring over computers and log files, talking to different people, all working together to try to fix a difficult, long standing, non-reproducible, high-profile problem. Arrive home. After the emotional reunions, hugs and tears, I am immediately asked to fix a difficult problem that is (thankfully) reproducible. Son took advantage of my absence to buy another PC game. Game launches splash screen and immediately crashes. ...