I once worked at a help desk. One call I remember is a man who, after my suggestion he should press "control alt del" went silent for a moment, then told me he only had one hand.
I had a similar support call back when I worked for Dell. The solution, for recent versions of Windows at least, is to go to the Accessibility control panel and turn on a feature called StickyKeys. This allows you to press key combinations that use Shift, Alt, or Ctrl one key at a time.
RSS is part of the WWW. Note that pretty much every RSS feed in existence is delivered via HTTP.
Of course, when you say 'WWW,' you mean (X)HTML web pages. Both web pages and RSS feeds have their place; the strong point of RSS is that it's especially suitable for aggregation and display in powerful clients that resemble newsreaders. This is one of the main uses for RSS that has driven its popularity. A good RSS aggregator makes it much easier to organize and absorb multiple sources of information than a typical web browser.
Did it ever occur to anyone that most Listservs are TWO-WAY systems, and RSS syndication is a ONE-WAY system?
Did it occur to you that the post is about replacing email newsletters with RSS? In other words, this is a form of mailing list that is already a one-way system. I appreciate your sentiments about two-way communication -- I certainly don't disagree -- but you're barking up the wrong tree.
I know the parent is a joke post, but you've definitely fallen for the 'OS as religion' nonsense if you think that a computer user's politics can be inferred from their OS. The vast majority of my friends and acquaintances uses Windows PCs, but I assure you that the vast majority of my friends and acquaintances does not tend to be conservative.
From what I understood, that seems technically correct but misleading in practice. My understanding was that artists typically (and naively) sign away their publishing rights and all of their copyrights to the label, because labels like to offer to "take care of" legal matters like copyright. But this might be a misunderstanding on my part due to lack of knowledge.
At any rate, I found a couple good links that are well worth reading. they might even clarify my confusion on the topic:
the problem with music, famous and invaluable rant against major labels by steve albini (ironically, courney love borrowed a great deal from that article without giving credit when she wrote her famous anti-major label rant)
When he prepared for the original "Matrix," the Wachowski brothers asked Reeves to read Jean Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation" and Kevin Kelly's "Out of Control" so he'd gain an understanding of issues surrounding artificial
intelligence. For the sequels, Reeves says, "the brothers told me if I wanted to look at what they were doing, I should read some Schopenhauer, some Hume and their old pal Nietzsche. I got a little bit into Schopenhauer, but you have to keep going backward -- you start at 'Will and Representation,' then you have to read 'The Four Fold Path,' and then, Schopenhauer hates Hegel and he's opposed to Kant, so you start reading Kant, and then you go, OK -- I've got to do some stretching and some kicking."
Heh. The famous Baudrillard book, of course, was featured prominently in the first movie. And I know exactly how he feels about Kant!
For example, one of its features is the ability to read headlines from news sources such as Slashdot. While its nice to see the headlines right on your desktop, how useful is it? If you want to read the whole story you have to fire up a browser anyways to read it. So whats the point?
The point is that, instead of reloading the Slashdot home page all day, you only have to fire up your browser when you see a headline that piques your interest.
I've never used Karamba, but I find RSS news aggregators (for example, Straw or Netnewswire) quite useful in this regard.
Exactly. To spell that out even more explicitly, any client detection logic that needs to correctly identify IE needs to look for the string "Opera" first, since Opera also includes the string "MSIE" in its user-agent string. The MSN developers probably wrongly assumed that the default stylesheet will display adequately in any browser that isn't Gecko-based or IE. I don't see any malice here, just lack of thorough client testing. And that in itself isn't too unusual since Opera 7 only recently came out of beta.
Obviously, this illustrates the dangers of user-agent sniffing, but unfortunately, it's a common and sometimes necessary practice in the realm of commercial web sites, depending on the particular site's capabilities and requirements. Believe me, customers that foot the bill for web sites do not care about web standards. Incidentally, they generally don't care about marginal browsers like Opera, either.
Ctrl+scroll wheel should size text a la IE. I know this was an open bug for a while. Has this been fixed? In my build of Mozilla (which is the original 1.0, I think) it hasn't... although I do appreciate the ability to resize text even when the web developer specifies a point size (something which IE can't currently do.)
I assume this is fixed in Mozilla. This certainly works in Phoenix (which, after all, is the topic of discussion). And, as you said, the CTRL+scrollwheel feature doesn't balk at fonts specified with pixels or points, making it genuinely useful.
Do give Phoenix a try. The difference in polish and overall feel is dramatic.
figures some clueless moderator would rate this as off-topic...
Re:I don't really get blogs...
on
Blogger Hacked
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· Score: 4, Insightful
LiveJournal blogs are the worst, IMHO. People go on and on about events and parties with people that 99.99999% of their readers have never met. Once I realize I've stumbled across something like that, I leave it as soon as I can.
The obvious response is that you're not their audience. Most bloggers write to keep up with their circles of friends, not to impress the general public with the minutiae of their daily lives.
Oh yeah, I agree completely. I can't for the life of me understand, for example, why those lazy Slashdot people waste their time with a content management system.
and if you're using windows, just backup your plugins directory before deleting the old binary and preferences directories. (i'm assuming that you're starting from scratch with each build to avoid pre-release problems)
Yes, you can find volumes of Perl help online. There's still something to be said for well written and well edited articles by credentialed authors. If you haven't read the Perl Journal before, have a look at the archives before you shrug and move on. You may find that the magazine is worth it after all.
Many open source Jabber clients are available, so maybe you can get your friends to use open source software with an open instant messaging protocol!
Personally, I use PSI when using Windows, but there are others out there that may be just as good. I do believe, though, that Psi is cross-platform, which may be a plus.
K-Meleon is a nice little Win32 web browser that uses the Gecko rendering engine from the Mozilla project. Though still just a bit rough around the edges, it is an impressive piece of work; it is quite fast, and very customizable. The latest beta versions include tabbed browsing, a feature I can't live without. If they add URL autocomplete, the browser will be very suitable for day-to-day use.
The development team appears to be rather small, and they release infrequently. I recommend grabbing the last beta release, and not the last public release, which is old.
I believe that K-Meleon is released under the GPL.
Aggie is an open source news aggregator. Basically, you give it the URL to your favorite RSS feeds, it downloads and parses them, and then builds a web page with the headlines. The really nice thing about it is that it supports RSS autodiscovery, so in many cases, you can simply provide the URL to the site itself, and it will find the RSS feed for you.
It does not use the GPL, but its license is considered open source by the OSI definition.
Another caveat is that it is written in C# and thus requires the.NET framework to run, so it isn't portable to other operating systems (not yet, at least). The upside is that the C# source code is fairly easy to follow, even for a dunce like me.
While the memory footprint still isn't insignificant, I would suggest that you give Phoenix a try. It's an implementation of the Mozilla browser written by a small core of developers, and roughly analogous to Galeon, K-Meleon, and Chimera -- that is, it's stripped down to a browser only and the focus is on improving the UI -- but it uses XUL. On the two systems where I run it, it is snappy and a pleasure to use, though I can't say that I'm fully out of "swap city," as you put it.
It is not complete yet, though, so you may find that certain features are missing -- for instance, the cookie manager isn't there yet. You may also miss certain items that they yanked to unclutter the interface -- for instance, the ability to right-click on an image and block future images from that server.
What is to prevent somebody from releasing some open source software that is a clone of AG?
Actually, the Open AGS project is working on an open source Audiogalaxy server. I believe that all they have right now is a design document, but I wish them luck, and look forward to their results.
Without layout tables, the long word would still make a horizontal scrollbar appear, but other comments would wrap at the edge of the screen as if there had been no scrollbar-forcing comment.
If anyone wants to see an example, here's an example. (If you use a huge browser window, you may have to resize it to see the effect.)
O'Reilly to publish 'best of' anthologies
on
RIP: The Perl Journal
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· Score: 5, Informative
In case you haven't heard, O'Reilly will be compiling and publishing three anthologies of the best articles from the Perl Journal:
If you've never read TPJ before (or even if you have), be sure to grab one of these books when they come out. TPJ set a high standard of quality, with articles that were intelligent, entertaining, and usually a bit quirky.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a similar support call back when I worked for Dell. The solution, for recent versions of Windows at least, is to go to the Accessibility control panel and turn on a feature called StickyKeys. This allows you to press key combinations that use Shift, Alt, or Ctrl one key at a time.
RSS is part of the WWW. Note that pretty much every RSS feed in existence is delivered via HTTP.
Of course, when you say 'WWW,' you mean (X)HTML web pages. Both web pages and RSS feeds have their place; the strong point of RSS is that it's especially suitable for aggregation and display in powerful clients that resemble newsreaders. This is one of the main uses for RSS that has driven its popularity. A good RSS aggregator makes it much easier to organize and absorb multiple sources of information than a typical web browser.
I think the point is that an iPod full of mp3s is worth thousands of dollars by the RIAA's reckoning...
Did it occur to you that the post is about replacing email newsletters with RSS? In other words, this is a form of mailing list that is already a one-way system. I appreciate your sentiments about two-way communication -- I certainly don't disagree -- but you're barking up the wrong tree.
not to quibble over semantics or anything, but spelling != semantics...
I know the parent is a joke post, but you've definitely fallen for the 'OS as religion' nonsense if you think that a computer user's politics can be inferred from their OS. The vast majority of my friends and acquaintances uses Windows PCs, but I assure you that the vast majority of my friends and acquaintances does not tend to be conservative.
From what I understood, that seems technically correct but misleading in practice. My understanding was that artists typically (and naively) sign away their publishing rights and all of their copyrights to the label, because labels like to offer to "take care of" legal matters like copyright. But this might be a misunderstanding on my part due to lack of knowledge.
At any rate, I found a couple good links that are well worth reading. they might even clarify my confusion on the topic:
From SFGate.com:
Heh. The famous Baudrillard book, of course, was featured prominently in the first movie. And I know exactly how he feels about Kant!
The point is that, instead of reloading the Slashdot home page all day, you only have to fire up your browser when you see a headline that piques your interest.
I've never used Karamba, but I find RSS news aggregators (for example, Straw or Netnewswire) quite useful in this regard.
Exactly. To spell that out even more explicitly, any client detection logic that needs to correctly identify IE needs to look for the string "Opera" first, since Opera also includes the string "MSIE" in its user-agent string. The MSN developers probably wrongly assumed that the default stylesheet will display adequately in any browser that isn't Gecko-based or IE. I don't see any malice here, just lack of thorough client testing. And that in itself isn't too unusual since Opera 7 only recently came out of beta.
Obviously, this illustrates the dangers of user-agent sniffing, but unfortunately, it's a common and sometimes necessary practice in the realm of commercial web sites, depending on the particular site's capabilities and requirements. Believe me, customers that foot the bill for web sites do not care about web standards. Incidentally, they generally don't care about marginal browsers like Opera, either.
Ctrl+scroll wheel should size text a la IE. I know this was an open bug for a while. Has this been fixed? In my build of Mozilla (which is the original 1.0, I think) it hasn't... although I do appreciate the ability to resize text even when the web developer specifies a point size (something which IE can't currently do.)
I assume this is fixed in Mozilla. This certainly works in Phoenix (which, after all, is the topic of discussion). And, as you said, the CTRL+scrollwheel feature doesn't balk at fonts specified with pixels or points, making it genuinely useful.
Do give Phoenix a try. The difference in polish and overall feel is dramatic.
figures some clueless moderator would rate this as off-topic...
LiveJournal blogs are the worst, IMHO. People go on and on about events and parties with people that 99.99999% of their readers have never met. Once I realize I've stumbled across something like that, I leave it as soon as I can.
The obvious response is that you're not their audience. Most bloggers write to keep up with their circles of friends, not to impress the general public with the minutiae of their daily lives.
Oh yeah, I agree completely. I can't for the life of me understand, for example, why those lazy Slashdot people waste their time with a content management system.
and if you're using windows, just backup your plugins directory before deleting the old binary and preferences directories. (i'm assuming that you're starting from scratch with each build to avoid pre-release problems)
Yes, you can find volumes of Perl help online. There's still something to be said for well written and well edited articles by credentialed authors. If you haven't read the Perl Journal before, have a look at the archives before you shrug and move on. You may find that the magazine is worth it after all.
I just downloaded and tried it out. Wow! Thanks for the recommendation.
Many open source Jabber clients are available, so maybe you can get your friends to use open source software with an open instant messaging protocol!
Personally, I use PSI when using Windows, but there are others out there that may be just as good. I do believe, though, that Psi is cross-platform, which may be a plus.
K-Meleon is a nice little Win32 web browser that uses the Gecko rendering engine from the Mozilla project. Though still just a bit rough around the edges, it is an impressive piece of work; it is quite fast, and very customizable. The latest beta versions include tabbed browsing, a feature I can't live without. If they add URL autocomplete, the browser will be very suitable for day-to-day use.
The development team appears to be rather small, and they release infrequently. I recommend grabbing the last beta release, and not the last public release, which is old.
I believe that K-Meleon is released under the GPL.
Aggie is an open source news aggregator. Basically, you give it the URL to your favorite RSS feeds, it downloads and parses them, and then builds a web page with the headlines. The really nice thing about it is that it supports RSS autodiscovery, so in many cases, you can simply provide the URL to the site itself, and it will find the RSS feed for you.
It does not use the GPL, but its license is considered open source by the OSI definition.
Another caveat is that it is written in C# and thus requires the .NET framework to run, so it isn't portable to other operating systems (not yet, at least). The upside is that the C# source code is fairly easy to follow, even for a dunce like me.
There will be no Mac version. The Chimera project fills that niche (with a Cocoa UI, to boot).
It is not complete yet, though, so you may find that certain features are missing -- for instance, the cookie manager isn't there yet. You may also miss certain items that they yanked to unclutter the interface -- for instance, the ability to right-click on an image and block future images from that server.
Nightly builds are here: http://komodo.mozilla.org/pub/phoenix/nightly/late st-trunk/
What is to prevent somebody from releasing some open source software that is a clone of AG?
Actually, the Open AGS project is working on an open source Audiogalaxy server. I believe that all they have right now is a design document, but I wish them luck, and look forward to their results.
In case you haven't heard, O'Reilly will be compiling and publishing three anthologies of the best articles from the Perl Journal:
Games, Diversions, and Perl Culture
Web, Graphics and Perl TK
Computer Science and Perl Programming
If you've never read TPJ before (or even if you have), be sure to grab one of these books when they come out. TPJ set a high standard of quality, with articles that were intelligent, entertaining, and usually a bit quirky.