How to Read Quickly Without Really Trying – this is a good K5 article w/ some pretty contentious discussion attached. Personally, I’m all for reading more quickly, especially with the amount I go through on the web/email each day (I’m estimating, especially when going through long threads, I’ll average tens, if not hundreds of thousands of words a day). Aside: while I think it could be great for online reading, I imagine it’ll be awhile before good, lightweight Tablet PCs w/ high resolution (200dpi+) screens come out, though.
It seems that Apple is pushing their Switch campaign in the wrong direction. Yah, who would have thunk that Steve Jobs is a total asshole and control freak. *snicker*
Milestones in the Annals of Junkmail
Web pages are a great source of postal
addresses for direct mailers. Judging by some of the
addresses we’ve seen recently, it’s evident that the data is
harvested not by humans, but by computer programs that scan web
pages for names and addresses. Several weeks ago we (the
Project at
announced a new release of our Kermit 95
communication software for Windows — SSH, secure FTP, etc; cousin
of C-Kermit
for Unix (search Freshmeat). Since this was a major release, we
chose a new icon for it: the Columbia
crown. A web page
explained that this is the emblem of Columbia University: the
crown of King George the II of England (1727-1760), who founded
Columbia in 1754. JUST ONE WEEK LATER guess who received a
postcard from Dell.
The other week when I was writing a style guide for student workers entering content (these are the only block level elements they’re using: h3, h4, p, ul, ol, li, dl, dd, dt, hr), and looking at common entities and while reading Peter K. Sheerin’s old A List Apart Article, The Trouble With EM ‘n EN, got to Pete’s Guide. Among the articles, I found his Guide for Print and Web to be the most interesting, and am in agreement for two of his grammar peeves (I don’t have a problem with email, perhaps it’s just from having seen it that way for so many years).
TortoiseCVS is an open source tool front-end for CVS that integrates CVS items with the Windows Explorer. Checked out items appear in your the explorer, are available from the file open dialogs, show their state with colored overlays, with allowed actions showing up in the context menu.
You’d wish there were a way to do explorer integration with FTP/SFTP/SSL, and there is, with KnoWare‘s Internet Neighborhood Pro (which has ftpNetDrive’s drive mapping ability integrated now). It’s a great program, but $40. Still well worth it, relatively speaking. You’d think there be an open source equivalent, but well, this is the Windows world we’re talking about, I suppose.
I didn’t even notice that Yahoo put up their new redesign this week until I read another article on it today. Speaking of articles, there’s a neat article entitled Hi-fi:Back to the future which talks about all kinds of neat stereo equipment that I have absolutely no need for and shouldn’t be even thinking about buying.
I was hunting down a little hang I was getting (for a site I had done for work) when rsslib is grabbing the remote rdf file (anytime it has to refresh it’s cache). The hang seemed longer than it should be, but in any case, it only happens when it needs to remotely pull the file. My original approach to trying to get rid of this hang was to display the old file and then call the refreshing getrdf() function. Unfortunately, that was still hanging the end of the page, so I moved the function call to the end of the page. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way in PHP for a script to close the HTTP connection to the client but still continue processing. Without that option, I started working on calling the the refresh functions in a seperate file. I just wanted to do a simple touch. I started working with the CURL functions, but that ended up being too much of a pain, then tried fopen(), which gave the same execution blocking problem (since it had to wait for the refreshes to finish for the connection to complete, and then the socket functions – which weren’t working on the build of PHP I’m working on at work (Mark Liyanage’s OSX binary). I finally ended up trying out fsockopen(), which ended up working. The end solution of course totals to 3 lines of code (opening the socket, sending a GET string, and closing the socket). But it took me a damn long time to get such a simple thing working. Well, now I know I guess.
R.I.P. Audiogalaxy – this K5 submission gives an inside look and some post mortem on Audiogalaxy. They made some mistakes, and the spyware they installed turned me off on the service for a while, but it was unique, and of al the p2p services so far, I think it was the best at encouraging true music communities and exploration. Here’s hoping that there are second generation systems that can improve on Audiogalaxy’s strengths and learn from their mistakes.
SCSI can be extremely confusing, and the SCSI Trade Association’s explanation of connectors is not very helpful, but doing some searching today, I some great explanations at transintl.com, specifically their Understanding SCSI Specifications and SCA SCSI Adapters pages. I had bought a pair of 5GB Fujitsu drives on clearance that had these SCA connectors, and hadn’t known what they were until today. I ended up ordering the connectors from PC Pitstop, which had the best price that a quick pricewatch/google search turned up.