Category: Uncategorized

We’ve kept RasterWeb! ad-free for quite some time. Sure, other jumped on the ad bandwagon, but we tried to stay of of the ad game… Well, no more! We will begin running ads soon. We do promise this though, they will be unobtrusive, and they will not be for anything we consider completely icky. We came to this conclusion after being approached for ad placement. Honestly it’s not a ton of money each month, but it’s worth thinking about. Now, to deal with the whole money thing, we came up with this. Each month part of the money will be put aside to support authors we like, people like Zeldman, for instance… and part of it will be donated to an open-source project. This allows us to continue learning, and support things we believe in. If neccessary in the future, any advertising revenue will be put towards hosting costs as well.

I value you feedback on this issue, and if you are interested in advertising, please contact me.

From Apple’s Download section comes the HumaneText.service, which claims to:

Convert text in the textile markup to HTML in-place. It becomes easy and intuitive to write full standards-compliant HTML.

Which means it’s a Mac OS X service for using Textile. Interesting…

Long ago I took a closer look at a hotList that UserLand provided, and the results can be found at hotList HEADs.

Well, times have changed, and now since we all share OPML, there’s a new list on the Share Your OPML! site showing the Top 100 Feeds. I thought it would be interesting to see what web servers the feeds were coming from and what mime-type the feeds were using.

The results can be found at Feed HEADs.

Since we’re on a roll with the whole "checking for errors" thing, we finally completed the official addition of Tidy to our home-grown CMS.

So now when we create an entry not only will it check the feeds for validity, but we also run a check on the well-formedness of the HTML that is created as well. You know, for those people that read this in a browser rather than an aggregator.

The big picture of all of this is that these additions are fairly easy, and I’m just some Random J. Hacker, not a developer and vendor of CMS-type software. Beyond that, we can see the value in open-source, and standards, but we’ll expand on that more in the future…

Last night I had a project to work on. I sat staring at my Sony 17″ Trinitron monitor while transferring files and all of a sudden there was a bright flash and the monitor went dead. Since I didn’t kick out the power cord, and there was no UPS beeping, I determined that my monitor finally died. The smell of something burning was also a tip off…

I’ve had various syncing problems with this monitor before, so I did some tests. Reboot, no good. Connect to PowerMac 8500, no good. Connect to Motorola StarMax, no good. So I smashed it into tiny bits. (Ok, in reality I just took it off the desk and put it on the floor.) Next I tried to put an old Apple 15″ monitor onto my G4. Well, after digging through boxes to find a VGA adapter. That didn’t work. Syncing issue I was guessing… I rebooted, zapping the PRAM with the hopes it would set the system to 640×480. Again, no good…

Luckily I was able to actually use my Mac, sort of. I ssh’d in via the iMac. Upon doing so I discovered that it had booted off of my backup drive. I found that interesting. Obviously resetting the PRAM changed where the system looked for a startup drive/folder. This just would not do, as I at least wanted my system up and running, doing it’s (cron) job and so on, even if I couldn’t see it. What to do?

bless. That’s what to do…

From our old pal, the knowledgeable Mike Bombich comes Some Useful and Interesting Terminal Commands for Lab Managers:

You can use the bless command to bless a System folder. This is particularly useful if you want to install system software by imaging rather than a standard installer. bless can also be used to bless a Mac OS 9 system folder, which is handy if you need to bootup Classic, but the system folder is not blessed. Finally, bless can be used to set the startup disk from the command line!

That last bit bless can be used to set the startup disk from the command line was what I was looking for. A few attempts to get the syntax right and my G4 was running off of the correct drive. All is well with the world again. Except the monitor, which will be replaced tonight…

bless you Mike Bombich!