Archive for April, 2007
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20 Apr 2007More and more US and world governments are taking stands against proprietary closed-source software. Will Massachusetts be next? I hope so.
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20 Apr 2007MeFiSwap 2007
My CDs for MeFiSwap 2007 are all done and I'm going to drop them in the mail over lunch.
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20 Apr 2007Huge update. My first impression is that it's great, but there's a lot here. It's going to take a while to soak it all in.
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19 Apr 2007A spelling-bee-esque competition to define words, tonight at the Brattle. For adults! With beer! $5 to attend or compete.
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19 Apr 2007
For the last year or so, I've been using Planet to aggregate my del.icio.us links (white background), Flickr photos (blue), blog posts (yellow), and recently Last.fm music history (tiny text with eighth notes). I knew from day one that there were a few shortcomings, but I was able to code around most of them, like collapsing multiple consecutive items from the same source into one (like how photos show up with "and 3 more"). And I needed to write plutor.org twice, in two totally different templating languages. But in the last few weeks, several minor annoyances have become bigger. I never liked having my archives across several different sites. And some feeds are too short (Flickr, occasionally, but definitely Last.fm). Since planet was totally stateless, and just grabbed the RSS on every execution, once something fell off the source feed, it'd be gone. Even if it didn't yet need to fall off plutor.org.
Starting today, I'm using FeedWordPress to import these external feeds directly into Wordpress. No more Planet necessary. There's a totally separate list of things I need to code around, and some of them are less trivial than they used to be. But I'm hoping that getting that data pulled into Wordpress will allow me to make plutor.org even more complete than it already is. Twitter? Netflix? What else can I integrate?
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18 Apr 2007♫
Recently listened to: Beastie Boys - To the 5 Boroughs, The Shins - Wincing The Night Away, The Thermals - The Body, The Blood, The Machine (more)
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17 Apr 2007The Law and Order font
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16 Apr 2007
A great new code improvement landed on the Firefox 3 codebase last Friday: Enhanced Page View. It adds a lot of information and makes it so much easier to find. But the notable thing about it is that -- like APNG support -- it was a Summer of Code project. For the second summer, Google paid college students for the summer to work on code for open source projects. In 2005, none of the Mozilla projects got very far, but the story was decidedly different this year. Gervase Markham's lookback indicated that 5 of the 12 projects were checked in (or nearly so). And a couple of the others made significant progress.
Google's doing a lot of good things here: indirectly supporting open source projects, helping college students do something for the summer that's related to their degree, and (probably most importantly) introducing the students to the experience of working in the open source community. Not just Mozilla, but plenty of other projects, big and small, got help: Gaim, Drupal, Wordpress, and dozens of other groups all owe Summer of Code for new features and bug fixes.
I only wish Summer of Code had been around when I was in college.
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14 Apr 2007Look out!
Brian helped me mount new minimalist baseboard. I was surprised how cheap and easy it was to rent a potentially lethal weapon for a day. No fingerprinting or DNA swabs necessary!
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13 Apr 2007At first, I didn't like DTD too much. But it's grown on me, and now it's at the point where I'm sad I can't play it on my cellphone.