I got to thinking today about stuff I need and might request for Christmas. The first thing that came to mind is a new computer chair. I'm here, typing up this entry, sitting in a shitty, metal folding-chair, which is about as comfortable as having your festering flesh eaten by maggots. So a nice, new, leather office chair would be nice.
I just ordered my new laptop through my employer today. w00t! I finally settled on an IBM Thinkpad G40 instead of the Thinkpad R40 SMB I had been thinking about. The new rig should ship sometime tomorrow.
I have to give it up to my employer here, this is a pretty sweet program. It amounts to a 2 year, 0% interest loan for computer hardware. If my employment ends, it all comes up due (deducted out of the final paycheck).
Count these Rock's, biatch!
Last night I picked up my tickets for Chris Rock's upcoming show at the Beau Rivage Casino. I guess casino's are good for something. I'll be up in Section 206, Row T, Seat 1 with my girlfriend this Friday, which happens to be Halloween.
If you've been keeping up with Blogzilla, you might know that Newsmonster 1.2.2 Pro was recently released for free. It is a "news aggregator" in the form of extensions to your web browser. It pulls RSS feeds from the sites you are interested and collects them all together for your perusal, making it easier to keep up with content.
For an application that is supposed to make your life easier, it is a pain to get working under Debian Woody 3.0 (stable). However, with a few quick, custom updates, you too can live in Newsmonster nirvana. These instructions assume you are using Mozilla.
I'm not 100% sure if this is required, but it helped get rid of some errors I saw when trying to run under the decrepit version of the First Lizard that comes with Debian Woody. Using 1.0.x just doesn't cut it these days—a quick upgrade to 1.5 solved my initial problems. You can find a deb source at apt-get.org. I used the repository at http://debian.relativ.org/. To do this, add the following line to your apt sources file.
deb http://debian.relativ.org/ .Then, after killing your browser, run an apt-get update
&& apt-get upgrade to bask in the glory of the 1.5 Lizard.
Getting Java 1.4 was the biggest hurdle to getting Newsmonster working in Woody. I had 1.3 installed from some deb source but that doesn't work. Newsmonster requires 1.4 but nobody packages 1.4 for Woody currently. But you can manually install it. Blackdown Java seems to be the best choice.
First, remove any installation of Blackdown java you have on your box, deb or otherwise. Then go to one of the Blackdown mirrors and find the appropriate j2sdk and j2re 1.4.x packages for your system, for me, I found them at ftp://ftp.tux.org/pub/java/JDK-1.4.1/i386/01/. Down load the .bin files for GCC 2.9.5 to somewhere to install, like /usr/local, change the permissions to 700, and run them. Then create a symbolic link from /usr/local/j2sdk1.4.1/jre/plugin/i386/mozilla/javaplugin_oji.so to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/javaplugin_oji.so (assuming you installed in /usr/local).
Read good instructions for getting the java plugin working under your browser if you have trouble.
Then, start up your browser. Check about:plugins to make sure that you have the java plugin installed. Make sure that java, javascript, and software installation are enabled in Mozilla. Then, as root, go and download Newsmonster by just clicking on the button. If software installation is enabled, you should be prompted to install, answer yes. Then kill your browser.
That's it. As your user account, start Mozilla and begin the setup process for Newsmonster. I'm still learning how to use it at this point, as the documentation isn't so great. But all in all, it is a nice bit of work.
One nice feature of Newsmonster is that you can add a feed to your subscription list right from your browser. Right click on the page of a blog you read (like LAB-Y), and select "Add to Newsmonster". Follow the instructions and blam-o, you've got a new subscription. This autodiscovery does work here at LAB-Y.
The only problem I've noticed so far with Newsmonster is that it doesn't work with Prefbar, my favorite Mozilla extension. Anybody have luck getting these two XPI apps working together?
Anyway, happy blogging!
I think when I pinged my blog at blo.gs, I gave myself a very unhelpful name. How does one change this?
Update your rss file, then re-ping yourself with a different name parameter in the URL. Works like a charm. You can find the feed for LAB-Y at blo.gs by searching for "Lab y".
Any press, the news, I don't watch the two
As of today, LAB-Y as an RSS 1.0 news feed and a fabulous new blogroll (see sidebar). I've been meaning to get this working for a while now and it is finally done. You can catch LAB-Y updates at http://blo.gs. w00t!
My employer offers a program to purchase computer hardware interest-free through paycheck deduction. They specify a few places I could order from, and one of them pcmall.com has the exact laptop I want, the IBM Thinkpad R40—pretty fucking nice. It would go great with a wireless internet connection.
I just found out that I'm not eligible for this program until a bit later this month, on the day that I have been with my current employer one full year. Kind of a disappointment but at least I'm motivated to shop a bit more.
Radiation from the cell will erase the mind
I had a few minutes to play with that Sanyo data cable I got a while back. Now I'm posting this from my cell. With just a bit of kernel-tweaking and these fantastic instructions, I'm ballin' with a wireless connection via my Sanyo-4900. Who can stop me now?
Reading over some posts at Caveat Lector, a snippet about "technogeekery" struck a chord with me.
One asked me yesterday during break in reference class how I learned what I know. "Being dropped in the deep end," I told him honestly. There's this weird sense that technogeekery is a higher calling, a priesthood. Nah. It's what ordinary people do to keep from throwing very expensive pieces of equipment out top-story windows.
Well fucking stated.
There haven't been many updates here at LAB-Y for a while. My life has been sucked down the black-hole of panic mode at work. It has gone from bad, all of the way through worse (without a bathroom break), to positively apeshit in just a month or two.
I had been working on getting RSS integrated into LAB-Y code but thanks to my job, it has slowed down quite a bit. I'm going for the path of least resistance and work, rather than trying to choose the best version for me based upon any set of features. This is yielding a solution that is shaping up to use Perl and XML::RSS to generate my feed, a crontab script to get other peoples feeds, and a PHP script with XML_RSS to parse those feeds. My feed is probably going to be RSS 1.0, as that's the best version XML::RSS supports currently.
Fixed a bad link.