Posted by Trejkaz
Mon, 14 Jul 2008 04:30:00 GMT
Delicious Library 2’s “iPhone export” is quite awful. My complaints with its output include, but are not limited to the following.
- It only shows 12 books per page (can be fixed with a new template.)
- It shows JPEG image thumbnails for each book, which wastes bandwidth and screen space (can be fixed with a new template.)
- It is by default about 1cm too narrow for the iPhone screen, and this wasted space could be used to display more data or increase the font size.
- When you click an item, it goes straight to Amazon, not an iPhone-friendly summary page for the item on your own server.
- It shows the items in some arbitrary order (or at very least is not ordered by purchase, nor ordered by author, title, series title or genre.)
- It has no means to search through the list.
In particular, because of #5 and #6, finding all items in a single series is practically impossible, and thus it is also impossible to determine the next volume in a series which you are missing from your collection. These last two issues also exist with the normal browser HTML views.
It turns out DL2 puts a “DeliciousLibrary2Dump.deliciousShare” file in the same directory which contains the entire library in compressed XML (actually XML plist) format. I’m going to propose making some basic webapp which can read this file when it updates and refresh a database, which will make it possible to do things like sorting and searches, thus turning the DL2 export into a viable feature.
Maybe this will give me something to do while listening through my music collection (I found some dud files so now I have to check the whole thing.)
Tags deliciouslibrary, iphone | no comments
Posted by Trejkaz
Fri, 11 Apr 2008 01:43:00 GMT
Someone just removed me from their IM client’s roster.
Normally this would be “meh”, but Psi has this feature where you will be told, “Your authorization has been removed!” It’s quite the kick in the balls. It’s just like the old “You are so off my friends list” line which was over-parodied a while back, you start to wonder, did the other person know it would feel like that when they simply deleted you from a list?
I wonder if there is some kind of etiquette guide for how IM clients should inform you when things happen.
At the very least, it would be nice to have a “retaliate” button to click to remove them from yours as well. Otherwise you end up with a roster full of contacts whose presence you can’t see, and they can possibly still see you (depends on how they removed you, and whether your client supports authorization removal without deleting the contact from the roster.)
Tags im, psi, social | no comments
Posted by Trejkaz
Fri, 26 Oct 2007 12:05:00 GMT
Tags anime | no comments
Posted by Trejkaz
Mon, 20 Aug 2007 00:02:00 GMT
I was experiencing quite a bit of chaos with my email accounts. The two domains I hosted myself were experiencing huge problems with spam which SpamAssassin was no longer able to solve – I would teach it some email and then an identical one would come through the next day. Then I had a couple of other ones hosted on Gmail already, but with different logins, and Gmail has that annoying feature that you can’t log into two different accounts at the same time on the same browser.
Google Apps is free for your own domain, which seemed to be a good idea, so I set it up.
Warning: Disable the Chat service instantly if you already have an XMPP server hosted elsewhere. If you leave it on, then even if you don’t update your DNS records, you will lose the ability to chat with anyone on gmail.com and other hosted domains due to a “server optimisation.” I will move my own server to Gmail only if their server starts supporting offline messages properly, instead of faking it via email.
I picked one of my existing Gmail accounts to be the master and set up every other account to forward-and-delete. Additionally I set the other accounts up with POP and used that to transfer all older emails to the main one so that I can search them.
Gmail’s POP is ridiculously slow though; it takes around half a minute per message for some reason. So it took the better part of a day to wait for all the mails to converge on the one account.
Now I’m at the point where I have to start training the spam filter, and setting up filters and labels to keep everything organised.
There are already a few annoying limitations with Gmail, such as the inability to manually order the labels on the left hand side (obvious hack is to put something like @ at the front of the labels you want to sort to the top.) And I’d really like to be able to declare some labels as special in various ways, e.g. for the unread count to be the total count for some labels.
Anyway the good thing is that this will give me a clear idea of how close Gmail comes to my own needs for a mail client. It might be that I end up bashing something together myself, and finding somewhere to host it (that’s the real issue… if only Google would start doing real hosting.)
Tags email, gmail | no comments
Posted by Trejkaz
Thu, 07 Jun 2007 11:54:00 GMT
I just switched ISPs (Internode now suck, $200/month is just unacceptable for only 90GB/month downloads.)
That would have gone smoothly, but FreeDNS have added this annoying feature where they require confirmation by email in order to detect inactive accounts. And where do they send this email? Guess where… the domain managed by their DNS server. So that mail is currently going into the void until they let me login.
The really funny thing is that by the time anyone reads this, the problem must have already been fixed. :-)
Tags meta | 1 comment
Posted by Trejkaz
Mon, 21 May 2007 07:12:00 GMT
Turns out we don’t have to move house which is good, but I’m still going to go ahead with getting rid of excess furniture and whitegoods, just to make the place seem a little more tidy again.
The thought of putting it all on eBay seems like too much trouble so I figured I might as well put something up here in case anyone wants to steal some of it before it goes to a second hand store and/or the dump.
Obviously it will have to be pickup so anyone not living in the Sydney area can disregard this message. :-)
Read more...
Tags furniture, house, life, meta | no comments
Posted by Trejkaz
Mon, 14 May 2007 00:13:00 GMT
Monday morning came with a request to change the company web site to American “English”.
My first thought was that we’re not a US company, so we shouldn’t need to conform to US spelling. The reasoning I got back was that US companies got scared off by British spelling.
This reasoning sounds pretty ludicrous to me, and besides, if we switch to American spelling, won’t that “scare off” the entire rest of the English speaking world?
So I thought, OK… maybe we can do this and yet not do this.
#!/usr/bin/ruby
#
# Breaks proper English spelling for the benefit of yanks.
# Word list is incomplete, but covers enough to be useful for now.
ARGF.each_line do |line|
line.sub!(/\b(amort|apolog|author|capital|critic|emphas|general|harmon|initial|maxim|minim|optim|real|recogn|visual)is(e|ed|es|er|or|ation)\b/, '\1iz\2')
line.sub!(/\b(anal|catal|paral)ys(e|ed|es|er|or)\b/, '\1yz\2')
line.sub!(/\b(arm|behavi|col|flav|harb|hon|hum|neighb|sav|savi)our(s?)\b/, '\1or\2')
line.sub!(/\b(defen|licen|offen|preten)ce(s?)\b/, '\1se\2')
line.sub!(/\b(calib|cent|fib|kilomet|lit|meag|met|theat)re(s?)\b/, '\1er\2')
line.sub!(/\bpractis(e|ed|ing)\b/, 'practic\1')
puts line;
end
My only concern is that it might match an ID somewhere in the HTML which will mess the CSS up, but otherwise, it’s looking like a damn good idea.
Tags english, monday, programming, ruby, spelling | no comments
Posted by Trejkaz
Fri, 20 Apr 2007 00:27:00 GMT
Over the past week or so I’ve started to pull together ideas for a new web application to write. There are a number of things I’ve fussed over and so I thought I would do a bit of a mind dump here so that people can comment on my ideas.
I started wanting a tumblelog, the reason being that I frequently decide not to post something because there isn’t enough content to post with it. So I investigated a couple of options for that, one hosted and one I could run myself.
But very quickly, a tumblelog becomes inadequate for what I want to do…
Read more...
no comments
Posted by Trejkaz
Fri, 23 Mar 2007 09:04:00 GMT
Today’s new version of Action Messenger makes things slightly easier to read when sending messages:
def prod(user)
recipient user.jid
subject 'Prod'
body 'You told me to give you a prod when I updated...'
end
You can send to multiple recipients too, just add them like this:
def spam
recipients User.find_all.map { |u| u.jid }
subject 'Buy chunky bacon'
body 'Do I have a deal for you!'
end
These changes have been in trunk for some time, however someone recently made me aware that the documentation doesn’t describe basic things like where the config file should be. This has been properly documented now, and hence the new version being pushed out.
Tags actionmessenger, jabber, rails, ruby, software | no comments
Posted by Trejkaz
Wed, 21 Mar 2007 05:45:00 GMT
I guess I haven’t posted since the Wii post back in December. That’s because the Wii is so good that I’ve been too busy playing games on it to make any weblog posts.
…
…
That was a lie.
What really happened was a certain kind of earth-shattering event after which I wasn’t in the mood to post anything on any sites for a month or so. I swore to myself I wouldn’t post anything about it (as I really dislike drama) and it felt wrong to post anything else in that time.
Anyway after one month straight, non-posting became a kind of anti-habit.
In a way it’s a shame to break that streak with such a content-less post as this, but I really have nothing else to say except that I might be posting again when I can think of something coherent.
Tags meta | no comments
