I found this email from my ISP, aka cable company, slightly amusing…

If you ever have trouble connecting to the Internet you might be able to fix it quickly.

1. Turn off the cable modem, if it has an on/off switch.
2. Unplug the modem from its power source
3. Turn off your computer completely. Do not immediately restart the computer. Keep everything off for at least one minute.
4. Plug the modem back into the power source. (If it has an on/off switch, turn it on)
5. Restart your computer and try to connect to the Internet.

I know, I’m enough of a techie to know what to do, but what if you have one of those little firewall/router boxes? Or use wifi? Or have some setup that does not involved a single computer plugged directly into a cable modem? I would think that situation is more common than ever before, with most households that have broadband having more than one computer using the connection…

(Of course the real fix is for my ISP to provide more reliable service…)

Years ago I tried out Webmin, and it seemed like a neat idea, a web-based app to configure a *nix server. I never got too far past the “neat idea” stage of using it though, until now…

Webmin really impresses! It’s got a lot of great modules, as well as third party modules, and things like Virtualmin for managing virtual hosting, and Usermin which is aimed towards system users. (There’s even a wishlist for future modules.)

Looks like I’ve got a lot of research to do. Luckily there are books available, as well as documentation.

I got a Gmail account last night, and while I’ve only played with it a for a few minutes so far, it looks like a decent enough webmail app, but it does not impress me like FastMail does. Ok, Gmail is still beta, and I’m sure they will add to it, and refine it, but from a feature standpoint, I think FastMail blows it away…

GMail’s strength is probably in it’s searching capabilities, and the fact that you get 1 gig of space. I’m tempted to backup important files, encrypt them with GUI and then email them to my Gmail account… Of course I’m sure with the processing power of the Google cluster, they could decrypt them before 2038. ;)

Anyway, if you want to see an extremely well done webmail application, take a look at FastMail, because it really is that good.

(Oh, I’m assuming Gmail will be free, or the sponsors/ads will pay for things and the users will get it for free. FastMail does have a free offering, but they also have a $14.95 one-time membership which seems like a great deal, and there are no ads…)

Recently there was much hullabaloo about “quoteblogs” which seem to be defined as a blog that just takes a whole post from another blog and reprints it. (See Quoteblogs vs. Linkblogs and Quoteblogs follow up for background…)

So in a comment to this post by Scoble about the quoteblog, I started to think about how I’d do it, using the data found in Atom feeds… I said:

Well, in Atom feeds, you can create a summary for each post (it’s an optional element.) This summary, which is typically a brief one or two line description of the full post, would be ideal to use in Robert’s situation. Actually, in my own RSS 2.0 feed I use the description element in this way, with the full post in a content:encoded element. I think Atom has an advantage here, because you could easily use the summary if it exists, and if not, create a summary from the content element if that exists… Of course if none of those exist, you can always use the title, which is required in Atom. In RSS I don’t think it’s quite as clear what the description will contain…

(Yes, I just quoted my comment, in full, from Robert’s blog… how’s that for adding to the confusion!)

Anyway, I’m tossing this out there… A mockup of an Experimental Atom Quote Blog.

I’ve grabbed a few Atom feeds I subscribe to, and pretty much did what I outlined above. the data for each post comes from the associated Atom feed. You can pretty easily map the element of each item to it’s corresponding piece in the feed. Granted, this is a small sampling, as I didn’t create working code (yet) I just did some copy/paste work here…

I did attempt to use blockquote and cite properly, and display the copyright if one existed… I think Atom lends itself well to such use. I honestly don’t know about RSS. I’m sure it could be done, but I didn’t feel like it was a worthwhile exercise for me, YMMV…

When last you joined us you learned about Mozilla’s history file, jwz and mork. Well, jwz was not content to just sit by and do nothing, not when Bugzilla is around… So jwz is launching some fireworks…

Bugzilla Bug 241438 - please make history.dat be machine-parsable (i.e., not Mork)

Obviously this bug needs more votes… so go vote! I mean, if you care about applications having a simple way to get data out of them instead of locking them behind some insane, difficult to parse format, then go vote…

I want more out of Mozilla. It’s got my bookmarks, and it keeps a history of URLs I’ve visited. I want that data! Here’s what I’ve hacked together thus far. bminer is an application that parses my Mozilla bookmarks.html file, grabbing the URL, title, and date added for each entry. It then shoves it all into MySQL. (If a URL already exists, we don’t bother to insert it again…) cron makes this run at regular intervals. So, we’ve in effect got a solid backup of the bookmarks that we can run queries against, and with a little CGI magic, access from elsewhere. Oh, we could (in theory) run this on all machines we have Mozilla on to get a comprehensive list of all of our bookmarks. So much for the bookmarks. Of course the code to do this is hacky perl code with regular expressions that parses an HTML file. Could there be a better solution? Probably, but it seems to work. I should probably clean up the code and release it.

Now, for the history file, it’s a bit more work. history.dat is in some insane format known as ‘mork db’ that McCusker came up with. Previously I was unable to find a good way to parse this beast. Luckily jwz solved this problem with mork.pl recently. So next on the list is some code to store the data from history.dat in MySQL as well, with the ultimate goal of tracking where we’ve been and when. This is a little more tricky than the bookmarks, because honestly my bookmarks file might only change a few times a day, and we have cron set to parse it more than would be needed, but for the history we need to determine how often to parse it, and we can’t just parse the real file, we need to first copy it, and convert the line endings from classic Mac line endings to unix line endings. (Sigh, please, please, please! This is Mac OS X, banish all classic Mac line endings!)

Anyway, when complete we should have what we’re after, better tracking of our browser history. Need to find all pages with ‘perl’ in the URL that you visited last week Tuesday? Need to find a bookmark you added months ago with ‘foo’ in the title? We got it…

Nobody ever said parsing, cleaning, storing, and retrieving data was easy…

(Sidenote: Keep an eye on MozWho from Surfmind’s MozWho Lab which looks very interesting…)

Ok, it’s being done by many… the whole Nearest Book, Page 23, 5th Sentence thing, so here’s the instructions if you missed them, and mine:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence on your blog along with these instructions.

The sentence in question, from The Perl Cookbook:

It removes the leading whitespace from the text of the here document.

Now this is tricky, because the nearest “book” would have probably been a PDF file on my Mac, as the keyboard and mouse are the closest things to me. Heck, even the hard drive is closer than a paper-based book. Of course by that notion, I suppose any electronic book could have been considered as close. Perhaps Lessig’s Free Culture should have been the book of choice, as it’s just a click away…

The whole exercise was also tricky because the book I chose contained a code sample, so I had to determine exactly what a “sentence” consisted of. I chose a string of words followed by a period, which when read seemed to make sense. This is somewhat fitting considering the book I chose. Of course it would have been more fitting if I had chosen the book under it, Mastering Regular Expressions which may have actually been nearer, but I didn’t measure, so who knows.

(Hmmm, I just realized, the nearest book is actually an old QuarkXPress manual that is under my monitor, which isn’t really very accessible. Since we’re all about accessibility, we won’t even think about using that book!)

Sheesh, do I make things complicated or what?

Ya know, people from the south, I mean the South, actually type things like "y'all" - that's right, they don't just say
"y'all" they actually type "y'all" in written communications.

I can't decide if this is quaint, cute, charming, or just plain goofy…

I tell ya, that Diver Mark cracks me up, what with his Hot RSS and what not:

I would like to applaud CNET for their courageous invention of a completely new and incompatible version of RSS. They call it dlhottitles, but I think it deserves to be named something sexy, like "Hot RSS".

(I don’t want to mention what I first read when I saw the element dlhottitles…)

When we last mentioned Word, we spoke of alternatives to Word. what we’ve come to realize at the time is that almost any of the alternatives listed are better than using Microsoft Word under Classic on Mac OS X. sure, I’ve still got Microsoft Office 98, which worked fine in Mac OS 9, and it still sometimes works… But more and more I’m finding that it tells me it can’t open certain Word files. After it tells me it can’t open certain Word files, I use one of the alternatives - most often using Antiword to first take a quick peek in the terminal, and if I have to, actually create a PostScript, then use ps2pdf to create a PDF file.

Damn you incompatible (with yourself) binary formats that just aren’t very open!

Since we’re on a roll talking about Microsoft, I should mention this: IKEA founder ‘richer than Gates’.

The interesting things to me is that this news came out the day after I went to IKEA. I like to think I had something to do with it… I like to think that because it amuses me.

The other interesting part is that I noticed IKEA uses neoware machines running Windows NT 4. Yes, NT4! Now, I could say that IKEA’s founder would not be richer than Gates if they had upgraded all of those machines to Windows 2000, because that would be funny… or I could say that IKEA’s founder would be even more richer than Gates (more richer?) if IKEA had been using Linux all along, because that would be political…

We all know you can’t be funny and political at the same time…

Besides, we also know that Windows is cheaper that Linux anyway… We know this because Microsoft tells us so.

I said recently that Windows Hates Me, and it must be true. I think Windows hates me because it knows I usually prefer non-Microsoft technologies. See, even when I use Windows, I end up using something like Perl. So when I said that Microsoft SQL doesn’t like to store a lot of text, what I should have said is that the non-Microsoft tools I used didn’t like to work with SQL to store/retrieve a lot of text. So I’ll give Microsoft SQL a point there. It stores lots of text, I just can’t easily do it with the tools I’m using. That damn Win32::ODBC module is partly to blame, as it has it’s limitations…

Of course if I was using some other RDBMS like MySQL and Perl’s DBI module, I’d have no problems. Microsoft SQL hates me too you see…. and if I was using MySQL and Perl, I’d try my hardest not to do it on Windows…

I won’t even get into the scheduler and how I need to bug an admin go in via VNC to add a scheduled job instead of just using crontab…

Windows, Microsoft SQL… Why do you hate me so?

The options for not using Word on Mac OS X continue…

• OpenOffice.org
• NeoOffice/J
• AbiWord
• Antiword

The AbiWord folks have a development release of AbiWord v2.1.1 (MacOSX, Jaguar/Panther), which I have yet to try out. I’ve pretty much quit using OpenOffice.org for now and tend to use NeoOffice/J for editing Word files, and for the simple conversions I use Antiword along with ps2pdf to turn Word documents into PDF files…

It’s still a pain to receive Word documents, but some people just refuse to send you anything else…

I think I’ve finally figured it out. It doesn’t matter that I hate Windows, because Windows hates me!

I’ve never actually wanted to use Windows, it always been a requirement for some form of employment I’ve had over the years. I’ve wanted to use the Mac OS, I’ve wanted to use Linux, but never was the time I wanted to use Windows. Always forced… Still I try…

Our latest episode goes like this: I needed to build a simple application. A perl script would request an XML feed (no, not RSS or Atom) and process it, and store the results in a Microsoft SQL database. I ended up writing almost all of the working code on Mac OS X, except for the SQL part. I normally use MySQL, but when forced to use Microsoft SQL, I use the Win32::ODBC module, which is ok, it’s not DBI, but it more or less gets the job done. We are also using XML::DOM and HTML::Template.

Problem #1: XML::DOM doesn’t work on Windows. Try to install it. ppm says it’s installed. System tells me it can’t find it. I can’t find it either. Try again. Try again. Try to delete it. System tells me it deleted it. Try to install again. Get pissed. Reboot. Try it all again. Seems to work. During that time I also read docs, contemplated rewriting code to use XML::Simple or something else, and said expletives… In the end, it worked, but took much too long.

Problem #2: Microsoft SQL doesn’t like to store a lot of text. Well, the installation/configuration I’m using doesn’t. I want to store this XML document, but I can’t make the field big enough. Again, I’m thinking in MySQL mode, since last week I knocked out code to store huge amounts of poorly-formed HTML in MySQL and never had any problems. Still, I’m informed by people that know more than I do that with Microsoft’s SQL server there are these limits to the sizes of fields and columns and tables, that seem ridiculously small for what I’m trying to do. (I’m talking less that 10,000 characters, BTW.) I finally solve this by not storing the XML itself, but a hash of the XML, a compromise…

Problem #3: This is the next problem I face, making the Win32 scheduler work as it should, or should I say, as cron works…

None of this stuff is insanely complex, and I’m sure your average Windows developer could figure it all out, but coming from where I’m coming, and doing what I’m doing, I always have problems.

My final conclusion? Windows Hates Me.

I’ve been attempting to load Debian onto an old PowerBook, and success is a ladder with many steps, and by that I mean that I ’sort of’ got things working. I mean, I can log in, access the net, and all that stuff, I just can’t use a GUI. Yes, no X11 for me yet… So, I browsed the web for almost an hour last night using Lynx, and you know what? It worked pretty well. Most of the sites I read were weblog-type sites, so chances are they adhere to accessbility standards more than your average site, but I had no real problems reading what I wanted to read.

In fact, I probably got more reading done faster since I wasn’t distracted by images, or scroll bars, or browser chrome, or a mouse.

Hmmm, maybe I should think twice before installing X11…