by R.I. Pienaar | Apr 3, 2005 | Uncategorized
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.
by R.I. Pienaar | Apr 2, 2005 | Uncategorized
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.
by R.I. Pienaar | Mar 19, 2005 | Code
Inbetween moving house I have also been playing with a little 12″ iBook, I think I am going to buy it since I do quite fancy it.
One of my big wishes in life has been to get Sunbird Sync’d up with my iPaq as I have mentioned here a few times before. The Apple has that ability, though not natively, but by buying a 3rd party application called The Missing Sync.
After failing to find a demo version I ended up buying this tool only to find that syncing the device with a Sunbird file loaded into iCal totally nukes the iPaq, needed a hard reset.
After much digging around these files and coming up with the types of entries I have, creating matching ones in a new file in iCal I finally got a good idea of the format that iCal likes. Seems there are 2 major problems with Sunbird data:
1) Sunbird puts things on multiple lines, for some reason iCal does not like this, so I just joined the lines together so that you now have SUMMARY:An Event on one line rather than 2.
2) Monthly repeating events should really have a BYMONTHDAY=nn clause at the end of the RRULE, Sunbird does not add them.
Once I had a perl script to do the fixup and loaded it into iCal syncing worked 100% and I now have a iPaq synced up with iCal files, though cant really edit them in Mozilla ๐
by R.I. Pienaar | Mar 11, 2005 | Usefull Things
I’ve been trying to think of a good way to start the exim greylistd which does not by default run in the background.
I remember reading about daemonize long ago and found it again via Google. I checked if my FreeBSD machines has this command and stumbled on daemon(8).
It was introduced around FreeBSD 4.7 and supports running any command in the background complete with pid file support.
I put the following command in a simple rc script so now I have a full start, stop, restart style command for greylistd.
/usr/sbin/daemon -cf -p /var/run/greylistd.pid /usr/local/sbin/greylistd
by R.I. Pienaar | Mar 4, 2005 | Photography
There is a nice collection of links on guides, rules etc on composing images on Digital Photography Blog.
Possibly the most useful advice comes from the same site:
..sometimes in knowingly breaking compositional rules we actually create some of the most interesting and emotion provoking images possible.
Following the rules is all about getting a feeling for photography, breaking them is about getting your own style and standing out amongst the rest.
The full article can be seen here
