brentashley

I finally went out ant got myself an 802.11b card and access point. I got the SMC2632W card and installed it under Windows with the drivers on the disk.

I was dreading the uphill battle of getting it running with Linux, but I fired up Mandrake, pulled the ethernet card out and slapped in the wireless card and PRESTO! Worked right away, no config, no searching for drivers, no nothing.

Fan-freakin-tastic.

[ NOTE: 28 Jan 2003 – I’ve changed my tune about PHPWebhosting. They’ve really turned the corner and provide value for money. This particular rant is a slice in time when things weren’t going so well with them.]

I’m not particularly happy with my hosting provider this week.

Blogchat.com was completely down for 12 hours or so last week. Then it was brought back to a readable state where people could use it again, however 72 hours later, we’ve still yet to get back the ability to access the files in any meaningful way to change them, including updating the blog, shelling in for maintenance, changing any files, you name it.

PHPWebhosting.com provides support only through their control-panel interface. There is no email address, no phone number. We accept this because it is a remarkably inexpensive yet full-featured service.

However, despite repeated service requests with specific instruction to make some sort of acknowledgement to us that they are receiving our requests and doing something about it, we remain with our problem unsolved and with no attempt at contact with us.

We have transferred our beta operations to CubeSoft and I’ve temporarily moved my blog to my ashleyit.com site. Luckily I use ZoneEdit for my DNS needs and redirection was simple so archives are not broken. Had we had our DNS with them, we’d be outta luck for another 48 hours while we changed Internic info.

Tim and I have 3 accounts altogether on PHPWebhosting which we may now have to move elsewhere. Lost revenue for them, hassles for us.

All they had to do was acknowledge our existence and tell us they were working on it. I don’t expect miracles from an inexpensive hosting provider – I understand their razor-thin margins – but I do expect common courtesy.

I’ve been having a look at Amphetadesk today.

In conjunction with Les Orchard’s collapsable-channels-and-items skin, I like it quite a bit.

I originally loaded it on Win2000 and browsed to it on the same machine as intended, but decided I wanted to set it up more like my usual configuration.

My current modus operandi for news aggregation is to have Radio always running on my home machine and then I connect to it from wherever I happen to be to get the news page. I can get it from the kitchen, from the office, from someone else’s desk, anywhere.

So, I loaded Amphetadesk up on my Linux box and ran it nohup (that is to say as a constant background service).

I imported the same 39 RSS feeds I use in Radio by simply taking the gems/mySubscriptions.opml file from the Radio directory and overwriting data/myChannels.opml in the Amphetadesk directory and restarting Amphetadesk.

Everything loaded up nicely – 39 feeds, each with multiple items, all nicely collapsed or expanded at my behest.

Worked fine from my Win box at home too – took a while to load the page, but not too bad.

I told Tim via IM to come take a look, and it took him AGES to load. I looked, and of course, since every RSS feed was being not only loaded but also rendered to verbose HTML, the page was over 1.1 Megabytes.

Even after dropping down to only 6 feeds, the page still loaded up at 100k. You can see this won’t scale well at this rate – if I were to load up Jenny’s feeds, I’d be clocking 2Meg of dload per page view. Ouch.

Another issue for me is that feeds are listed by latest downloaded. From what I can see, they’re downloaded every time there’s a scan though, so every feed always seems to have been downloaded at the last scan. I’d rather have their RSS content compared upon download to the existing content and then have the list sorted by last changed rather than last scanned – this would make the recent data percolate to the top, which it currently doesn’t do.

Then one could highlight the recently changed channels, populate them with content, and only load or view the content of unchanged channels on drilldown, either to another page or dynamically filling a div via xml-rpc or remote scripting. This would help the page to not be so big until needed.

Overall, it’s a great hunk o’ code – really nicely written and documented. In an interview , Amphetadesk’s creator says:

It’s not 1.0 yet because I don’t think it’s great enough for a 1.0 release

I have to agree that there are some yet-to-be-added features (e.g. last-changed-time, summary-with-detail-on-demand vs giant-monolithic-page) that I wouldn’t want to be missing in a 1.0 release, but the quality is great, so I expect it once feature-filled to be solid.

Scott mustn’t use his own IMSaver tool.

Today he quotes me with an opinion on www.webskylines.com:

My buddy Craig Bosko, the guy behind www.webskylines.com, has his new site up. His previous site was very, very flash centric, so much so that Brent, when he saw it, commented to me that he didn’t think Craig could do HTML at all. That is just SO not true that I passed it on.

He attributes that quote to me from this conversation from May 1st (verbatim including typos):

thatbrentguy (09:15:12 PM): I like the look of IMsaver – very slick. that’s
something I’m not good at. at least yet
fuzzygroup (09:15:24 PM): www.webskylines.com
fuzzygroup (09:15:49 PM): Good guy. Great designer. Good friend. Tell him I sent you if you ever need anything. He’ll give you a break.
thatbrentguy (09:16:22 PM): good to know he can do good html design. the flash would have sent me running the other way.
fuzzygroup (09:16:54 PM): Yup. I’m going to copy that comment to him so he knows about that.
thatbrentguy (09:17:15 PM): heh heh. I’ll sltand behind it. the latest
macromedia push gives me the shivers.

It reads a little differently in context. I don’t mind at all being quoted, but when I’m quoted as saying disparaging things about others in their absense, it helps to be precise about what was said.

Everybody focus your healing Karma towards Silicon Valley. John Robb reports that Dave Winer is in hospital till next weekend. No more detail than that, but he says Dave will supply detail himself when he is able.

Dorothea really speaks my language about Wanker Management.

Dorothea has a very complete and useful explanation of the HTML Entity in RSS rendering problem thing.

I’ll remember that for when I do the RSS translator, which will be on hold until I find a freely available machine-translation service that won’t mind my scripts bombarding it.

I’ve been reading John Robb’s discussions of The New Economy with interest.

Companies in the new economy will attract investment and be successful if they can convince the public that they truly embrace a holistic view of corporate health that includes profitablity but not at the expense of ethics and social conscience.

No longer can investors tolerate a decision by a huge conglomerate to ruin the entire local economy of a small city by shutting down a plant that’s making them $100 million a year because they can make $120 million taking the plant elsewhere. That’s NOT a plant that’s losing $20M, it’s a plant that’s making $100M.

No longer will the public willingly give their custom to companies who have been shown to compensate their executives with obscene forgivable loans.

Respect has been absent from corporate culture, as has commitment to long-term viability. Customer and employee loyalty has been ignored.

Employee loyalty has been decimated by the trend to move learning and apprenticeship out of companies and into schools and training centres – getting the employee and the government to supply the education that companies once did. Where once you would join a company and learn the ropes internally, they now require that you come equipped with a particular accreditation in your field, be it insurance, welding, travel agency, real estate.

Customer loyalty has been destroyed by a complete lack of attention to the needs of the consumer in pursuit of “operational efficiencies”.

Companies have to jump on the Cluetrain and start conversing with (as opposed to “at”) their customers.