RasterWeb!

I got a new Mac at work. Ok, not brand spanking new, but a newer than I was using. It’s got 867 mhz of power, and 60 gigs of disk space. there’s even more RAM. These are all good things. The bad things include the fact that certain applications keep quitting on me. It’s always nice to reminisce about the pre-Mac OS X days, but I really don’t miss the crashes and freezes of System/Mac OS 7, 8, and 9. So far I’ve had two kernel panics, which is more that I’ve had in the last 9 months, and the quitting apps is getting annoying. I suppose part of that is using alpha and nightly build quality software, but come on!

(Sheesh! My editor even quit while I was typing this entry… Stability, where are ye?)

The other day I had to take a detour going home from work. Seems the police and fire department had the road blocked off, though I could see no reason why. Later on the news I learned that they had discovered a drug lab in the old unused building that has had a “For Sale” sign on it forever. Guess what’s right next to that building? A law enforcement supply store…

Mr. Safe talks with the Coma Guy about RSS:

Mr. Safe: So, what version of RSS do you think we should use?

Coma Guy: RS-what?

Mr. Safe: You know, what syndication format should we use for our web site?

Coma Guy: What is a “web site”?

Mr. Safe: Our web site, on the World Wide Web!

Coma Guy: Is that one of Reagan’s new defense programs?

Mr. Safe: Here… have a Pepsi…

Coma Guy: Hey thanks! I guess that Orwell guy was wrong…

Aaron has put out something called Aaron’s Censorware, which is a simplistic approach to the problem of libraries providing a way to filter content.

From what I understand, most librarians are against the filtering software, but risk not receiving federal funding if they don’t install filtering software. Last week while listing to a radio program on the subject, some of the problems mentioned were the fact that the big software filtering companies are closed, and aren’t exactly sharing their list of ‘unapproved’ sites, which are of coursed based on their biases. Librarians are often free-speech supporters, and just handng over the decision of what is and is not appropriate to a privately held company that would reveal much isn’t very appealing. (Not to mention the fact that libraries would have to fork over money to one of these companies to get the filtering software.) The perfect solution would appear to be a collaborative project, an open-source filtering package for libraries. The libraries could contribute to a master list sites they feel should be filtered, and each library would be free to pick and choose from the list. In addition concerned citizens with expertise in open-source, and a keen interest in freedom and libraries could work with librarians to install and configure the software.

So really, how crazy does this idea sound?

Ready for some Necho fun?

You can patch nntp//rss with a jar from <isolani /> and have an aggregator that reads echo feeds. I found as many samples as I could from Sam’s Necho 0.1 entry, and created this Necho subscription file, exported from nntp//rss.

And yes, I did create my own Necho feed, fully alpha and quite experimental right now, but it seems to work… and once someone creates a Necho validator, we’ll attempt to validate it. (Yes, we’re well aware the format could drastically change in the next 5 minutes, but if anything, the people working on this stuff are showing that it is not impossible to move forward, and it’s fully possible to move forward without lots of useless wheel spinning and hand wringing…)