Whatever you do today, make sure that at some stage it involves watching the third trailer of the new Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy movie by going here. It truly does rock. I hope that the movie follows suit.
Ubuntu 5.04 preview on Stoeptegel-1
I needed a machine to install Oracle 10g on and although my 300MHz Celeron Ubuntu 4.10 server (with 192M of RAM) is just perfect as fileserver and mini linux playground, those specs just don’t cut it when a real man decides to slap Oracle around for a bit.
Well, stoeptegel-1, my previous 3.7kg weighing 2GHz P4 Northwood (768M RAM) laptop seemed just perfect for the job. I cleared out a 12G partition and installed the brand spanking new Ubuntu 5.04 Hoary Hedgehog preview release. Keep in mind this is only going to be released in April.
Hyperlinked AVIs and PowerPoint 2003
In my new life as PowerPoint 2003 flunky, I experience many and exciting adventures! My latest adventure involved hyperlinking AVI movies (encoded with the MS-MPEG4 codec) to images in a PowerPoint presentation. Clicking on the hyperlinks would result in a “Media Player” dialog box popping up with the helpful message “There is no driver installed on your system”. After clicking OK, the movie would play perfectly in spite of the awful implications of having no driver installed on my system.
Blagg and WordPress
My infamous weblog aggregator relies on Bloxsom Blagg to do the grunt work.
The WordPress blogs of some of my friends were generating feeds with a CDATA tag in the description field. Blagg let this tag get through into the aggregator post, resulting in these posts not showing any description body. Oh, the tragedy!
The small change needed to fix this can be found here. Astute readers will see, in the lines of this patch, that Perl really does suck.
The Commonly Confused Words Test
I saw this on MJ’s blog, so I had to take the test. Without consulting any external resources whatsoever, my results were:
“Advanced
You scored 100% Beginner, 93% Intermediate, 93% Advanced, and 72% Expert!”
What’s even more flattering, is the following:
“Compared to users who took the test and are and in your age group:
-
100% had lower Beginner scores.
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100% had lower Intermediate scores.
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100% had lower Advanced scores.
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100% had lower Expert scores.”
My GMAIL experiment comes to an end
Since August of last year, when I received a GMail invitation from Rudolph, I’ve been running all my mail through GMail. In other words, GMail was my primary interface to any and all email.
It went swimmingly! This is a fantastic product: to my mind, it’s not so much the 1G storage, as it is the fact that you can search for and find emails in the blink of an eye and, quite importantly, the idea of dumping all processed emails into a great big container, called “All Mail” by GMail. The only thing that is still missing, is the possibility (I would pay for this) to change one’s “from:” address to one’s business or other email address. Reply-to is not good enough. My emails should appear as if they’re originating from the networks of my employer, the TU Delft.
Ken Livingstone: Could someone explain this to me?
On the one hand we have Ken Livingstone, mayor of London, known for a life long of campaigning against racism and anti-semitism.
On the other hand we have Oliver Finegold, a reporter of the Evening Standard. The Evening Standard is a sister paper of the Daily Mail, the paper that supported Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the 30s. This context is important.
So Finegold approaches Livingstone after a party at City Hall. Livingstone does not like newspaper people. He asks Finegold whether he’s a “German war criminal”, referring to the Daily Mail issue mentioned above. Finegold obviously has to contribute that he’s Jewish. Livingstone replies: “You’re just like a concentration camp guard. You’re just doing it because you’re paid to, aren’t you?”
MoonEdit (and my new website)
I was just chatting to Jorik who was on about ME this and ME that. So I’m like, “what’s ME”. So Jorik’s like “ME is MoonEdit, a real-time collaborative text editor”. So I’m like, “Oh wow, that’s like SubEthaEdit, the application I’ve secretly been admiring but haven’t been able to run because of an acute lack of MacOS hardware”. So he’s like, “I don’t know what SubEthaEdit is.”
Well, it turns out MoonEdit is a collaborative text editor (see the movie on their website!), a little like SubEthaEdit, somewhat less slick, but available for Windows and Linux. Go play with it. Collaborative text editing is da bomb.
Solving the frikking BadPixmap Firefox/Thunderbird crash on Debian Woody
Okay, you’re running Debian Stable 3.0 (it’s also called woody, or Linux 1958). Because this distribution is older than yer grandpaw, you have the firefox and thunderbird backports from www.backports.org installed.
However, you’re not happy, because these otherwise fine packages crash more often than you can open a window (in fact, that’s what makes them crash, for example thunderbird’s login window or the find window in firefox). In fact, you’re downright homicidal. Even admiring your brand-new mullet in your hand-mirror is not cheering you up!