njr 3.0

Cretin Tracker 1.0: Keeps track of people you dislike. Just what the world needs.

8:20 PM | Radio
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Spring early access release. I'm having trouble expressing exactly what's so neat about this software (which I contributed to), but check it out…

7:36 PM | Radio
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Tried to get my OPML coffee mug working through the new IM-based notification system. No luck. Back to work, meeting in the morning…

6:04 AM | Radio
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Last night I finally got around to setting up Plucker to replace AvantGo on my Palm Vx. (AvantGo has no OS X support and it looks like it is not forthcoming.) One of the best uses I've found for Plucker is reading my Radio News Aggregator page. I created a “lite” version of the news aggregator without the navigation bar in a few minutes—Radio's CMS rocks!—and pointed my Plucker home page at it. Setting the link depth appropriately means I can follow each link to the original source, and turning off images cuts out about 500K to produces a database of about 1.7 MB containing all the links in a self-contained format which I can read on the bus. Here's what it looks like…

One tweak I did was to exclude the links reachable via the “POST” button, by adding to my ~/.plucker/exclusionlist.txt file the line 0:-:http:\//127\.0\.0\.1:5335/\?idStory=.*.

Plucker's Palm OS client is extremely featureful and has excellent usability. The only bizarreness I noticed was that the auto-scrolling feature defaulted to scrolling up rather than down, but it was easily fixed. Especially given Plucker is a free software project, I'm very impressed.

Versus AvantGo, Plucker's design is more sensible. The ability to do Web page fetching separately from uploading is great, as are the multiple separate databases, and support for local Web pages and automatically segmenting long files. The only feature I miss in AvantGo is support for tables; the bus schedules turn to mush when viewed in Plucker.

4:38 PM | Radio
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Slava Karpenko, the brains behind most of Unsanity's great stuff, has a weblog. Slava did get me the APE SDK a few days ago, and I've taken a brief look, but I've been focusing on research and med school recently. I wish SvPablo didn't resist my every attempt to do anything useful with it…

4:09 PM | Radio
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Last week Cam pointed to an O'Reilly weblog entry on Open Source Tools and the Process of Programming. The author is William Crawford, who I worked with at Invantage. He's been blogging on the O'Reilly site for three months, and has a personal weblog (Blogger, sans RSS feed) as well.

4:21 AM | Radio
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Stage one of my migration away from a UserLand-hosted blog is finished: I've got http://web.sabi.net/log/ hosted on my ISP's Web server, instead of redirecting to radio.weblogs.com. Stage two is to replace all the internal links to radio.weblogs.com, stage three is to write an upstream driver that replaces each file on radio.weblogs.com with a redirect page pointing to the corresponding resource on web.sabi.net, and stage four is turning off upstreaming to UserLand.

At least this way I can be sure that my Weblog updates without fuss. Of the last 18 upstreaming attempts in my events log, 12 of them failed. That's unacceptable. I hope UserLand's able to fix this apparently Mac OS X-only problem eventually; for the first few months of my Radio usage, I never had any issues with this. Thankfully, Radio provides plentiful hooks and callbacks in addition to a complete static rendering.

9:36 PM | Radio
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A thread in the dealmac forums invites people to mention their favorite Jaguar features. Many of them I hadn't seen before. I especially appreciate the improvements to Classic: I never thought non-HFS/AFP filesystems would be supported, but now they are (even FTP!). Someone there mentions that Classic has mouse wheel support now, but my mouse wheel does nothing in Classic. Oh well.

8:24 PM | Radio
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UIC's registration system continues to impress me with its ease of use and implementation (not). At orientation last week, we were given a number of not-so-subtle hints that the grass is not exactly greener at the Chicago med school… i.e., we're lucky to be here. I've already documented one of the worst Web interface designs I've seen (it's still there), but this one is good too:

Programmer 1: We need to tell the students what their registration time is when they can't register yet; here's a time field we can use.
Programmer 2: Just display it, then.
Programmer 1: It's in 24 hour format. So we need to convert that into AM or PM. Here, I've got this code that takes the current time and displays AM or PM.
Programmer 2: No, don't bother, we're already behind on this project, people can figure it out and this will save us some time. Just use your existing code.
Programmer 1: But that'll give the wrong answer half the time!
Programmer 2: Just add a “P” to confuse people so they don't actually try to interpret the AM or PM but still realize it's a time.
Programmer 1: Uh, sure.

6:02 PM | Radio
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I took some photos at the uiuc.test cookout this afternoon/evening. Unlike last Friday, it only rained a little this time.

2:31 AM | Radio
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