Parazoid.net

I don’t care if that’s a word or not, it feels right to use it at the moment. I’ve discovered a couple of things in the last few weeks that should be shared.

Interesting item the first. Liferea has builtin support for scripts. While I probably knew that at one point, it didn’t really click in my head at the time. The main purpose for this was for filtering, but when you subscribe to sites like LinuxGames you start to see some use for this feature. For that example, I set Liferea to pull the html for the main page and feed it to a perl scripts, which generates an RSS feed. If you’ve ever subscribed to their feed, you would definitely appreciate the fact that this method actually puts information in each item, as well as catch some items that don’t make it to their RSS feed for some reason. Some scripts already exist at http://kiza.kcore.de/software/snownews/snowscripts/.

Second, Lars released (or at least is in the process or releasing) an extension for Firefox 1.5+ that allows a user to quickly add a feed to Liferea from Firefox. The extension modifies the feed button in the location bar, and that sends a dbus message to Liferea. Pretty neat, still haven’t played with it. Not even sure if i have dbus enabled at the moment, but there are plenty of people out there that would like this extension. It should be up on Mozilla servers soon, but until then, you can grab FeedBag here.

That’s all I got. If you haven’t tried it yet, grab Liferea. http://liferea.sf.net

Most people have seen it but in case you haven’t, Google is running Summer of Code again this year. There was a lot of good work that went into projects last year, and I’m quite happy with the list of mentoring organizations. Some real surprising names in there (like the Mars Space Flight Facility), but I’m real happy to see Gentoo and MoinMoin added this year. Check out http://code.google.com/soc for more information and full list of mentors.

Hopefully this year there will be better selections of projects. Some groups (like Gaim) had a lot of successful projects that went past the end of the competition, but some groups (*cough* Mozilla) chose projects that either did not complete the task, never went anywhere, or just lacked luster like translation projects. I’m real interested to see what happens with Gentoo, especially with the Gentoo/FreeBSD project.

Good luck to all students involved this year!

My laptop has been showing its age lately. Luckily the warranty is still good through most of July. So since I’ve reached a point where it won’t turn on because the fan won’t spin, it’s time to place a service call. Anyone at work that has had to send their laptop in for repairs will tell you how useless IBM (I guess Lenovo now?) is, generally having to send the laptop back more than once for a simple problem. The first time around when I had memory issues I lucked out, but it this time, go figure that the technician decided to just send the laptop back to me without doing anything about the problem.

Arg!! At least I have the work laptop now. I don’t know how I’ve lived this long without 1400×1024 resolution.

For the three people in the world that don’t know…I’m official. I signed my contract Tuesday stating that I am the new server admin as of Monday (hooray for time traveling pens?)

I guess that’s all I have to say. New computer at work, fresh mail database to corrupt with forwards, all that jazz. As if trying to focus on the last two months of the final semester of school isn’t hard enough, lets start a job on top of it.

While this problem doesn’t get in the way, I find it incredibly annoying. I’m sure I could just create a new profile and start all over again, but that solution to things is getting annoying.

The problem is definitely somewhere in my configuration. In Firefox 1.5 on my linux laptop, when I go to freshmeat everything works fine. With the exception of viewing screenshots on a project page. I can view these fine from my news reader and Mozilla, in Firefox it is a broken image. When I pull the url and view the image, I get the following

400 Bad Request

Your client has issued a malformed or illegal request.

Alright, so obviously it is just my firefox config. I’ve removed any extensions that I would think would be in the way (don’t tell me to remove sessionsaver, everyone knows I rely on that one) with no luck at avoiding the issue. Doing a google search hasn’t come up with much either (who would have thought that using the phrases ‘firefox’, ‘freshmeat’, ‘screenshot’, ‘bad request’ would lead to no answers). The only lead I found was on this unanswered Opera thread.

So, has anyone every had to deal with such an issue? Does anyone have any ideas on how I might be able to see the request that I send out? Using the Web Developer extension, I can see the headers of the response, but that does no good. Any ideas short of creating a new profile?