Archive for October, 2005
-
28 Oct 2005
I just spent the time this morning making a single over-arching RSS feed for Plutor.org. It should now include my Flickr photos, del.icio.us links, and moblog and blog posts, like the HTML version of the site does. Please use the new URL to follow my incoherent ramblings and unrelated links. For the uninitiated: What is RSS?
Discuss (1) -
21 Oct 2005
Red Hat Enterprise Linux has ridiculously old versions of packages — especially those that are intended for a desktop audience. The GIMP 1.2.3 is so old that it's hardly worth using, so yesterday I spent an hour getting the latest version (2.2.8) working. There were a lot of steps involved because almost all of the prerequisites were a bunch of versions behind, too. So here's what I had to do to get Gimp installed and working on RHEL3.
- You'll need some Red Hat packages installed. XFree86-devel, libart, and libart-devel are necessary, and you'll probably want some image libraries, too. I installed libjpeg, libpng, and libtiff, along with their respective -devel packages.
- Set environment variables PATH should include /install/dir/bin, LD_LIBRARY_PATH should include /install/dir/lib, and PKG_CONFIG_PATH should include both /install/dir/lib/pkgconfig and /usr/lib/pkgconfig. Don't use /usr or /usr/local as your install dir. Who knows how these updated libraries could affect things if they clobber the older versions. I installed in /opt/gimp.
- Get the sources for pkg-config, glib, fontconfig, freetype2, ATK, cairo, pango, GTK, Gimp. Links are located on the GIMP from Source page, except for cairo which is available from cairographics.org. I got the most recent version of all of these libraries except for freetype2. Version 2.1.10 will cause some problems that I haven't resolved, so I used 2.1.7.
- Unpack all of the sources, and compile them in this order: pkg-config, glib, fontconfig, freetype2, ATK, cairo, pango, GTK, Gimp. (This was the hard part, figuring out the right order.) For each package, just add the argument "--prefix=/install/dir" to configure. Then make and make install. No other flags are necessary.
- Gimp will be in /opt/gimp/bin/gimp. Delete the source files.
-
18 Oct 2005
The webcomic Goats is probably the second one I ever read on a regular basis (the first being the obvious and now-unreadable User Friendly). At some point, I lost my interest in Goats and it fell off my list. This was probably back when I used bookmarks instead of an RSS reader to read news and comics, and it was cumbersome to check more than a half-dozen a day. I re-found Goats recently, and started reading it from the present. I was intimidated by the huge archive, and was a little lost in the current story, but I remembered — vaguely — who most of the core cast was.
It wasn't until Jon Rosenberg discussed the current story and alluded to a series reboot three years ago that I was able to start from a point in the middle and get all the back stories. Now that I'm caught up, this comic strip is suddenly one of my favorites. It's definitely plot-driven, like Sluggy Freelance, but less epic (so it's easier to follow day-by-day) and far more surreal.
Give it a try.
-
13 Oct 2005
Am I the only one who doesn't like keyboard shortcuts on websites? I find it far easier to navigate on the web by, I don't know, clicking on things, than by remembering that "Y" means to archive, and shift-A means to reply-to-all-in-new-window. One of the things that stood in the back of my mind as not-too-nice about Google Reader was the fact that it forced these keyboard shortcuts upon you. Gmail is at least nice enough to default to shortcuts off.
And now Bloglines, thinking it needs to actually start (gasp) improving, took a look at Google Reader to see what they needed to do. Obviously, there was only one thing there they could learn from. Keyboard shortcuts! Don't hit shift-A in Bloglines or you'll end up marking all of your news items read. The "read all" feature itself is so ridiculous that even before they started "innovating", I had wished I could remove the link that did that. It's obnoxious — I end up with a page that's several megabytes long. It's dangerous — the only way I can undo it is by clicking "Mark all new" on every single feed's header. And it's totally unnecessary.
-
10 Oct 2005
I've figured out what I don't like about Google Reader, Google's new RSS aggregation service. I keep having to think. I'm not used to doing that with a Google product. Don't get me wrong, it's a solid feed reader, but the navigation isn't quite intuitive. "Down" should be at the bottom. There should be a way to scroll through the new posts without viewing them (or having to mark those you viewed as "keep unread", which, by the way, is really far away). But one of the things I'd really like, in contrast to Bloglines, is the ability to see which feeds have new items at a glance (and sort by that criterion). In the "My subscriptions" view in Google Reader, I can't tell what has new items nor can I even resort them as far as I can tell.
I have high hopes and I plan to keep coming back to it — it is the big G, after all, and they have a track record of improving services in response to user feedback — but I'm going to stick with Bloglines for now.
-
6 Oct 2005
The following is M's current draft list for where she's applying for residencies. In most cases, I don't know the actual hospitals or programs, so this is just a list of the cities. Farmington, CT; New Haven, CT; Boston, MA; Providence, RI; Philadelphia, PA; Washington, DC; and Portland, OR. Possibly also on the list are San Francisco, CA and Rochester, NY.
Update: Oh yeah, I forgot Baltimore, MD.
Update, 9 Oct:
WeShe applied today. Rochester, NY was on the final list, but not San Francisco or Baltimore.