brentashley

Where linkfests are concerned, Shane McChesney is the freakin man. L’uomo del freakin. L’homme qui freak. El hombre del freakin. Der freakinmann. O homem do freakin.

Oh yeah, and thanks again for all the fish, Douglas.

John Otway is a great musician and character I’ve watched usually from afar for many years. Lots of fun and always a regular guy. I love the survey on his site.

Eric Costello of glish.com has written an article for Apple on Remote Scripting with an IFRAME.

While the west coast is having unseasonably cold and wintry weather, this has been the BEST winter I can ever remember in Toronto. No snow, mild temperatures. I’m not a skier, can you tell?

It was so warm this past weekend that I actually took down the christmas lights! That’s gotta be the first year I’ve ever had them down before June.

I hear Mandrake 8.2 is in beta. One new feature I look forward to is the Minimum Installation option – a bare-bones Linux installation in 65 Mb.

I would have liked that option when I recently installed my machine. Install it with next to nothing, then build up the functionality you need. That way I’d be more confident that I wasn’t biting off more than I could chew.

Wow! a 25 inch monitor for only $31.75!!

News.com reports on how AOL/Netscape is suing Microsoft, saying:

In some ways, the Netscape lawsuit is trying to achieve what the government failed to do so at trial

Highly publicized trial lets Netscape killer get away scot-free. Victim’s family sues in court for damages.

I guess the next step is Microsoft moving to Florida, playing lots of golf, selling macabre autographs and beating up on motorists.

Introducing Tara Cleveland, talented web designer and now blogger extraordinaire.

I’m getting up to speed with Radio Userland, setting up subscriptions for the news aggregator. In order to do that, you have to find the RSS file for each site you want to put in your subscription list.

When you go to a Manila site like this one, you’ll probably find that the template they use has the orange XML button (look to the left there) that takes you to the RSS file. It’s obvious, simple.

Quite a few people seem to have a template that doesn’t have the button. If you can guess that they’re using Manila, you can find the file by looking where you expect it to be (xml/scriptingNews2.xml). If not, you have to search all over their site to find some sort of RSS link. No RSS link, no automatic news aggregation, gotta go in the manual browse list.

I’m surprised at how many sites I visit regularly make me have to search for this. On many of them it’s not to be found at all or at least escapes me completely:
Joel, Eric, Chris, Aaron are a few.

I guess Radio’s the first bigtime app to make this stuff an everyday thing, but most blogging environments support RSS, so it’s probably just a matter of throwing up a link in a recognizably standard way.

Christoph Burkhardt points me to this article about bugs in the Linux 1.4 kernel. He’s right, for some reason it’s not likely to get much press.

That reminds me that I’ve been taken to task in a few places about being too hyperbolic in my “Move Everything To Linux” rant. True enough, I would not recommend that businesses commit to move their mission-critical enterprise systems to Linux at great expense and risk. MySQL, for instance, is absolutely not up to the tasks that MSSQL can handle. Certainly, though, file and print, domain controllers, firewalls, web services, smtp, dns – all those things that Linux does well – can be introduced without significant upheaval. It doesn’t even have to be Linux to serve my primary goal of letting Microsoft know that people are actively using alternatives and are not locked in.

Revised rant theme: “Move as much as you feel you can out of Microsoft reliance in order to do your part to help them wake up and take notice. Seriously consider starting new projects with alternate products where it makes sense.”

First time, just do it.

Second time, remark to yourself that you’ve done this once before.

Third time, write a routine to do it.

Fourth, fifth, sixth…. zillionth time, get on with something else while the computer does it for you.