Adblock is great….when it works. However, I have recently been having problems with adblock blocking flash content on all platforms (OS X, Linux, Windows) regardless of filters! I’ve tried upgrading weekly to get the latest bug fixes, but nothing seems to fix it, which leads to regular enable/disable for single pages just to see the flash app…
In other news, it appears as though Greasemonkey scripts for gmail aren’t working either…
The dangers of selecting 350+ folders and accidentally double-clicking. It took it a couple of seconds, but OS X’s expose or whatever its called sorted them all!
After playing Halo 2 and seeing the “Go to Bungie.net” pseudo-ads I decided to go see what it was all about. After going to register a passport account with my updated email, I was able to associate my gamertag and see lots of info. It has records of ALL of the live sessions I’ve had – complete with who I played against, and basically all of the stats for each game! Quite impressive. I mean I know its just a line in a database – but how many millions of games happen in a week? That’s some serious storage! So in the next few days of vacation, I’m going to spend some time trying to get a little better at the game and see if I can improve my stats, which are, at the moment, abysmal.
I got the chance to go climbing with a buddy of mine this weekend and also very quickly realized just how out of shape I am. It’s been two days and my arms are still burning…though that could have been helped by the lifting of children to blow out candles yesterday. Anyway, it’s touch opening up heavy doors that have to pull open, at least for doors that push I can just lean into them.
Its a good hurt though – because I want to get back out and do it again. Chris (the aforementioned buddy) and I are going to try to go once a week after the holidays are over, so that will be good. He said he was out of shape too, but seeing as how he builds fences on his job and carries around lots of weight, I was having a hard time sympathizing with his out of shape thoughts of himself.
Maybe by the time its warmer, we’ll be able to plan a trip to the Gorge to do some climbing!
(on a side note…I forgot to bring in my good headphones to work….so I’m on my backup ones, which are really not all that good, and this saddens me)
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I don’t like them. I don’t like the way they are built, I don’t like they way they are executed, and in general I don’t like them. For those who don’t know, RPM’s are package files for installing software originally on Red Hat’s systems (the RPM stands for Redhat Package Manager). Maybe I’ve gotten used to the way Lunar & Gentoo do things – but I really don’t think its too much to ask to try to automatically resolve dependencies and install them if they are, say, in the same directory. Or at least tell me where to go to get them if you won’t go download them for me. But no, RPMs just tell you that an extra package is needed, and relies on you to go get it an install it. Sure, I could put all of the RPM’s on a single directory on a dvd and just rpm -Uvh *.rpm, but that’s a waste.
As to how they’re built – they need to have a file that lists all of the files the rpm is going to install – so they can remove them. Makes sense, but it doesn’t do this for you (at least not that I’ve seen). You have to do the installwatch stuff yourself! Lunar used installwatch, gentoo does some other magic (might be installwatch for all I know) and manages to do it all from source that its never looked at before! Why is it so complicated in rpms? And have you looked at the man page for rpm? It’s probably longer than mplayer’s, which does just about everything imaginable with video files except serve popcorn!
I don’t think everyone should build things from source – that’s far above some people, and far more than others care to bother with. But, if I do an rpm -Uvh httpd-devel, and it comes back saying it needs glibc-headers, then I find that and it needs glibc-kernheaders, and I find that and then it needs kernel-headers for my currently running kernel – I think that’s just pathetic!
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I was searching through google video for climbing things, and came across this “Russian Climbing” video. Though it is something apparently called Parkour (also on wikipedia). The quality isn’t the greatest, but it’s still awesome. Somehow I see Tim up and doing this one day….
Okay – real quick rant: If you’re developing an app, an extension to a language, or ANYTHING that would get installed on a user’s system, having an online install is nice and all – BUT GIVE ME A WAY TO INSTALL IT WITHOUT AN INTERNET CONNECTION! Maybe it’s just my situation, but I want to be able to throw everything I need onto a cd, go to an isolated environment and install. Adding channels, to an internet-based installer is out the window for me.
A guy got really creative with his ruby programming skills, and developed the Try Ruby website. You can go and walk through some tutorials which take all of ten minutes or so. And the interface is pretty cool too!
Unfortuantely, the project I wanted to do here at work with RoR is being pushed over to PHP, which I’m not too happy about. I think from an extensibility point RoR would be much more promising (and they just went 1.0 with RoR btw…). Maybe I’ll start looking into symfony, the PHP equivalent of the RoR framework…
I’m continually flabbergasted by statements that Howard Dean makes. Recently he made a comment on NPR’s morning edition during a story about Tim Kaine, the newly elected Governor of Virginia. Kaine is a democrat, and a catholic who openly discussed his religious beliefs with evangelical groups. He put ads on Christian radio stations, talked about his missionary work when he was younger, and it payed off.
I’m not talking about being able to get something that you want – to me MS Access is just the opposite. I may be biased towards real databases, but Access seems to make things more difficult to me. I think there was a day (maybe 10 years ago) where Access was a useful product for small businesses who didn’t have the time, money or experience to set up a real database server. Today however, the tides have shifted and setting up MySQL, or even SQL server is not that difficult. There are front ends for both which make creating and adding entries to the database easy.
More importantly though, I think people have a tendency to start a little pseudo-db in Access for their own personal use, then someone else says “Hey, can I use that?” and they get a link to it. One thing leads to another, and before long it’s like rabbits – everywhere you look, everyone is using the SAME Access pseudo-db to look things up. There is no transactional support, race conditions can come up, and data can get corrupted in a heartbeat. All-in-all, it’s a very bad thing.
So, even if it’s something simple that you think is just going to be used once, and only by you – rethink it. And don’t let the excuse “I know Access” convince you that it’s the best or even quickest solution. MySQL + phpMyAdmin is a rock-solid combination that will let you do most of what Access does (no, you can’t do form design in phpMyAdmin, but who would want to), will be faster getting the data, and can be expanded to support thousands of users making thousands of queries. Not to mention you might actually learn something about using a database in the process!
Remember the phrase: Access is the spawn of Satan….
