njr 3.0

Comment spam really is annoying, though it’s getting a run for its money from random Unicode glyph-abusing Brazilians I don’t know asking me to be their friend on Orkut. But four requests in one day!?

It seems WP-Cache was causing the weird blank-page-until-reload issues with WordPress 1.5, which translated into no-page-at-all issues in WordPress 2. Since TextDrive finally seems to have a handle on the server-crashing and performance issues (this server has been up for over 31 days), the caching plugin isn’t as imperative as it used to be, though I do like to be nice about using shared server resources where I can.

Quick WordPress 2 review: AJAXification is good. I don’t like the new admin color scheme; looks too much like a bad ripoff of Slashdot. From time to time gigantic fonts appear, for no apparent reason; being on a 1024×768 display, this sucks. The new WYSIWYG editor isn’t perfect (it turned a paragraph break into a line break the first time I posted this message), but it’s a lot better than most I’ve seen. The dynamic resizability of this editing window is especially slick—alternately, you could say we should have had this kind of stuff on the Web 10 years ago :-)

Still, I think I’ll be going back to MarsEdit as soon as I can; hopefully it’ll get some attention in the form of WebKit content-editable support soon. I’m already very addicted to NetNewsWire 2.1’s syncing, even with the known problems, it works well 99% of the time. When RSS feeds get messed up on iTunes, I end up with tens of old podcasting episodes, which is a lot of data to needlessly download. It’d be cool if I could tell it “don’t accept any posts with dates earlier than the newest (or even oldest) preexisting item in the feed”.

If you notice any site flakiness, please let me know. I realize some of the old posts from the PyCS and (especially) Radio sites still have formatting issues; fixing this is on my to-do list, just rather far down it.

7:27 AM | Administrivia, Computing, Web
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With gdb 6.3, I can’t run Simics more than twice, or it “loses track” of the program, at which point it will only die when I exit gdb, thereby losing all my configuration.

With gdb 6.4 I just compiled, I can run Simics as much as I want, but it won’t stop at any of the breakpoints I want to set.

Am I dreaming, or did debuggers used to work better than this?

7:27 PM | Computing
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Safari crashes in exactly one situation in my daily browsing habits: while rendering macworld.com. It’s totally reproducible and happens virtually every day.

Macworld is the most popular US Mac magazine. Safari is the most popular Mac Web browser. Does this seem completely bizarre to anyone else?

7:41 PM | Computing, macOS, Web
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Paper submitted, and now on to the 8000 things I’ve put off after it. Unfortunately fixing bugs such as the above (which happens when using ICeCoffEE with recent development WebKit versions) may come behind such things as getting my car serviced, and cleaning the apartment. But I’ll try to get to it “soon”.

Update: ICeCoffEE 1.4.3d1 (final release coming in a few weeks) fixes the ICeCoffEE/WebKit incompatibility.

11:15 PM | Administrivia
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I’m leaving for Austin today, and will be there until Wednesday for the HPCA conference. I’m presenting our work with probabilistic counter updates on Tuesday—which is also Valentine’s Day and my parents’ wedding anniversary, as if I needed any more pressure.

2:23 AM | Computing
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