Parazoid.net

When you research something on Encyclopia Britannica‘s website, you expect them to say “No, we’re not going to give you this information unless you pay for it.” Turns out that when you pull up an article on their site, they will give you about a paragraph’s worth of information and then ask for you to login. Understandable, not angry at all. I’ve registered for a trial anyay, so no biggie. But I made a mistake and printed an article before loginning in. Somehow the printer knew the rest of the article….

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.