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New iMac

New iMac

by R.I. Pienaar on 31. Jul, 2006 in Apple, Rantings

I mentioned the other day in the comments of my Ubuntu post that my girlfriend decided to get herself a iMac, this weekend we went to pick it up from the Apple store in Regents Street.
After the traumatising walk through soho carrying a computer in my arms when we got it home all seemed fine to begin with, but then when it came time to test out the iSight the thing was dead. It produced either pure white or pure green but nothing else.
I was really dreading taking it back as it would mean she would be without a computer for a while and just general be a total pain, I searched the Apple support forums and they got me nowhere but then I searched the forums and came across someone who had the same problem, they unplugged their iMac from the wall for 30 seconds and that fixed it, I did the same and voila, one happy mac.
So not too bad, but still a bit infuriating.


While we were there I also picked up a iPod Nano for Emma, I’ve not really looked at these in detail before and must say it’s a very sexy bit of kit. Though comparing it to my 3 year old iPod I have doubts about the build quality, for example the plug where the power/doc goes in doesn’t nicely click into place it’s more a matter of forcing it in, not sure if that is normal but it sure is annoying.

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Ubuntu is great.

by R.I. Pienaar on 26. Jul, 2006 in Rantings

So world and dog is nagging on about Ubuntu, how great it is and how they are switching from <insert anything on the planet> to Ubuntu.
I happened to have a spare 300gig drive lying around so I gave 6.06 a go. My machine is over 2 years old, its practically from the ark, you’d expect things to Just Work.
After install, screen resolution is absolutely dismal, slow refresh rate and random crashes while trying to set to a better resolutoin. Already here you’ve lost a large chunk of users.
Anyway, so I go off looking on Google using Firefox, it opens up with the familiar look of Firefox complete with Mycroft search box, except the search box does nothing by default, you can type into it, hit enter but nothing happens, by default it doesn’t search, have to go fiddle with it to get it working.
Came across a post, that points to another post that points to Wiki for getting ATI cards going. I basically had to do this in a terminal:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install linux-restricted-modules-$(uname -r)
sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx
sudo depmod -a
sudo aticonfig --initial
sudo aticonfig --overlay-type=Xv

and then reboot.
Yes, this distro is going places if it can’t even support a crap old ATI Radeon card out of the box and require new users to do stuff in terminals just to get rid of a headache inducing low refresh rate.
Get Real, your grandmother is not going to do this. Give her a Mac and the thing just works.

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Comment spam from photoblogdirectory.org

by R.I. Pienaar on 31. Jan, 2006 in Photography, Rantings

Today I received a comment on my photoblog from photoblogdirectory.org.

Our robot found your rss-feed you are providing
on your photoblog website (http://photoblog.devco.net/) and added it to our listings.
Would be nice to see you claiming your blog @

http://www.photoblogdirectory.org/claim/xxxxx/

http://www.photoblogdirectory.org is dedicated to support the photobloggers community,
feature new/interesting photoblogs on the scene, rate the best
and send visitors to the photobloggers sites.
regards,
Gloria Jones
Webmistress @

http://www.photoblogdirectory.org

What can I say? This is just the worst kind of site promotion I’ve ever seen, they are really showing that they are just one step above common viagra spammers, online casino spammers and the like.
I’d urge any photographers who read this site to boycot photoblogdirectory.org.

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Podcasts and Video Podcasts

by R.I. Pienaar on 29. Jan, 2006 in Rantings

Podcasting is all the rage these days and I can see why, there are some really good stuff out there, at the moment I really enjoy the Ricky Gervais podcast. Mostly its 3 guys talking absolute bollocks while being pretty funny about it, incredibly mindless fun.
On the video casting side there isn’t as much that I enjoy though I’ve only really checked into 4 or 5 shows. Now everyone seems to think that this is the future of entertainment, independent guys making tv shows or radio shows bypassing all the networks, syndicates and all that crap. I can see the value in that argument as well and for most of the videocasts this holds true, short, focussed niche type shows that you either enjoy or don’t and it’s very easy to just move on to the next thing.
One show though stands out to me in it’s incredible level of annoyance and outright insulting of its viewer base and that is the Photoshop TV show. Now this show has received a lot of raves in the past and this is the 2nd time I tried to watch it. The Photoshop related content is great, the tutorials are at many levels from beginner to advanced and the guys know their stuff, they’re a bit keyboard shortcut happy which makes it hard for people to know how what they are doing relates to the tons of Photoshop menus but that not the end of the world.
So what’s the problem? Like all of the podcast world they obviously have massive bandwidth bills to pay and they do this by promoting a number of sponsors, nothing wrong with that at all. The problem though is that the signal/noise ratio of the show is off the scales. As a little investigation I took their latest show and cut out all the advertising related content but leaving their inane chatter in. I was left with 2/3 of the 30 minute show. Cut out the chatter, startup jingle, ending jingle, competitions etc and you end up with less than 1/2 of the 30 minutes.
Apart from the signal/noise ratio they are obviously trying hard to look professional in the editing together of the show, things flow nicely into each other and so forth. Problem again is that the continuity of the thing is just crap. Person A hands Person B a PowerBook to do a Demo on, screen movie shows a XP box. Person B is done with the presentation and he is stood with a Windows Laptop in-front of him. Why? Why do they need to go and do silly things like that just put the box you’re going to use in-front of you and get it over with, don’t show of Apple kit cos it’s sexy or is this just another product placement deal?
Each week they give viewers some kind of homework assignment to review websites etc, well this week there were 3 websites – one from each presenter. The 2nd recommended website was from a training center where the person recommending it is teaching a class. The 3rd one was a recommendation of the website for one of their sponsors! Immediately followed by a ad for the particular sponsor as well. During the show the one guy was constantly pushing a book he wrote, giving copies away telling you to buy it, where to buy it etc. Shameless self promotion.
So I left a quick comment on their blog, something along the lines of:

The photoshop content of the show is great, pity its spoiled by the 1/3 advertising content, not even the worst of TV shows are that bad with advertising.

Naturally they didn’t approve my comment and it never showed up, nice one. I’d love to see how far television would get if for a hour show you end up with this level of absolute noise? The slashdot/digg crowd always go on a total freak out about the likes of Tivo moving towards not letting them skip over ads but then they stand for much worse from this grass roots tech that is supposed to save the video/audio entertainment world? I’m not sold.

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Friends don’t let friends use Feedster

Friends don’t let friends use Feedster

by R.I. Pienaar on 03. Nov, 2005 in Rantings

Anyone who has been reading my blog for a while know that I’ve got no time for Feedster and don’t mind saying so. My previous posts on this sad sad service:

So why do I rehash all this again now? Because if you look at those entries you’ll always see someone from Feedster post about how they’re improving, how I shouldn’t give up on them etc, but really it’s all just talk.
Tonight while trying to figure out why BSDUpdates is down I tried a Google blogs search but found little recent info, so I figured I’ll give Feedster another try, big mistake.
It also had very little useful content so I’m inclined to think people just don’t blog about BSDUpdates – fair enough. The problem is though Feedster is still broken!
First I do a search for ‘bsdupdates’ using the main feedster page, that went well and I found some stuff, then I tried the blog search button which will restrict the search to just blog posts. First there is the fact that the user experience is crap, if you do a Google search for whatever and click on one of the other search modes – like Images – it will know you searched for whatever and show you results immediately. Not feedster, no way, you have to just type your query in again.
So I type it in again, and get a page full of result, it looks like the screenshot below, all good so far.


See, next page, more results, all good there is hope for finding something useful, so I press on the next button.

Wtf? Maintenance? Seems more like their default internal server error page is claiming every problem is Maintenance related because this is not the first time I’ve seen it, and I don’t use this service often. It’s a bit like when the Underground in London says something is ‘Signal Failure’ it’s just something they say. The real problem seems to be database related.
So back a page, reload, do the search again which gives me (immediately, right in the middle of their ‘maintenance’ no less) a page similar to the first one. Try the next button again to get the promised more results:

And there it is, nothing, empty page, no results. Complete. Waste. Of. Time.
If you are still using Feedster you really should be doing yourself a favor and jump ship. There are a number of competitors, I can’t even list them all but here are some: Clusty, Blogdigger, Blogpulse, Daypop, Technorati, Google Blog Search, Yahoo! and many more. Natural selection on the internet is a great thing, Feedster had a chance to do it right but they didn’t. The big boys will run over them, rejoice.

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Feedster Sux in Safari as well

Feedster Sux in Safari as well

by R.I. Pienaar on 03. Apr, 2005 in Rantings

In my previous post about 5 minutes ago I slagged off feedster.com and I wondered now if it is a Firefox thing or a Feedster thing.
So I tried a few searches with Safari, it worked better actually, nice and quick even with obscure terms which I thought wouldn’t be cached, but after a while this happened.


I don’t even know what to say anymore, so I won’t.

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Feedster still Sux

Feedster still Sux

by R.I. Pienaar on 03. Apr, 2005 in Rantings

I have in the past been pretty hard on Feedster and I don’t like just beating someone down if I know they are really trying hard. So every now and then I give them another go because I think the service they provide will be a useful one and because the major search engines doesn’t seem to be jumping on the feed search bandwagon.
So today I thought I’d give them a go, I did 4 things:
1) Added a search into NetNewsWire, this just gave me no results, but I can’t be sure this isn’t the fault of NetNewsWire so no problem there.
2) I went to the actual page and searched for ‘pienaar’ halfway through rendering the page I got an error from Mozilla.
3) I searched for ‘pienaar’ again, it worked a charm.
4) After some time I searched for ‘apple’ and again, halfway through I got an error. Screenshot below.
Is this a problem with Firefox on the Apple? I am not sure, but I do recall getting this error before on my Windows machine too.


Any way, guess I will give it another go in a few months, its a shame.

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Unsubscribing

by R.I. Pienaar on 02. Apr, 2005 in Rantings

As before I am posting here when I unsubscribe from feeds. I do not bother mentioning ones that just stop updating etc, thats just the normal life cycle, some annoy me though and force me to unsubscribe.
As I mentioned before I understand why people put ads into RSS feeds, and I do not mind them in full text feeds. A very good example of good ads would be those found in the feeds from boingboing.
Now to todays offenders, the fine people from Security Focus have started putting ads into their feeds, their feeds contain like a 1 or 2 line summary of the article and does not even usually contain a very usable clickable link to the full story. Now though as if that isn’t stupid enough they also include a text ad that by my rough estimate is about 5 times as big as the actual readable text in the feed. Get Real people, would you watch TV if the advertisements lasted for 45 minutes and the program for 15?
I hope you lot get a clue soon, but I don’t think I’ll be rushing to subscribe to any of your feeds again soon.

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More feedster.com sillyness

by R.I. Pienaar on 11. Nov, 2004 in Rantings

Somehow, more than any other online service, Feedster really annoys me. For the last few days I noticed some 404 error on their feed of the day feed. I really should have unsubscribed from it when I said I would, but then they fixed it.
So this is what happens, they seem to be returning error codes based on user agent:

Connected to feedster.com.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
GET /search.php?q=f-botd&limit=15&type=rss HTTP/1.1
Host: feedster.com
User-Agent: NewzCrawler/1.7 (compatible; MSIE 6.00; Newz Crawler 1.7; http://www.newzcrawler.com/ )

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found

compare that 404 error with this:

Connected to feedster.com.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
GET /search.php?q=f-botd&limit=15&type=rss HTTP/1.1
Host: feedster.com
User-Agent: test

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

wtf? One less feed to worry about.

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Feedster

by R.I. Pienaar on 16. Oct, 2004 in Rantings

I really don’t know why I still bother checking feedster for things, I cannot remember the last time it returned anything useful for me. It’s just a pain in the arse. It is much faster now than before and that’s fine, but they are including tons of weird shit in their database now like news sources from places like Google News, Newsnation etc.
Why is this irritating? Because it means you cant actually find BLOGS easily because you are bombarded with tens of news aggregators spewing out the shit that organized news sources dish up as fact. Really, if I wanted to read crap that politicians pay to get into news papers I would buy one, or read Google News.
The world really do need a blog search engine :(

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