So I’m still obsessing on RSS aggregators, I am completely hooked on them. sourceforge started to provide software project feeds recently and they alone are worth the price of entry. Just today I found portabase, a free superhandy flat file database that runs on windows, linux and my new PDA (pics to come soon).

Anyway I promised I would say more on the subject. I can’t stress enough how handy these aggregators are. To try and help you folks get started, I found a great list of most all of the available software, most of them free. Check it out. If you’re on windows, Newsdesk is a good first choice to check it out with. On a mac, netnewswire absolutely rocks. Oh, and don’t forget that you can subscribe to daves-place too, using this url (plug it into your RSS client):

http://daves-place.dyndns.org/weblog/index.xml

Check out the aggregators – I promise you, if you give them a try you will change the way you use the web.

Just a warning – it’s possible daves-place will again go down for a period of time, possibly starting this weekend. Redhat pushed an update down to me that broke significant parts of the KDE gui that I use, so I get all kinds of application crashing going on in the gui. This sucks. It’s not a huge deal and basically has no performance impact on the server side of daves-place, which is its primary purpose, but I do use KDE occasionally and I need to get it running again. One of three things is going to happen: either I am going to bump immediately to kde 3.11 (just released), I am going to jump to redhat 8.0 (I’m currently running a heavily patched 7.3) or I am going to wait till Redhat 9 is in stable form in a month or so. It all depends on how impatient I get with my crippled GUI combined with how much time I can get out of the Topcat for assistance (he owes me some sysadmin time, we use the bartering system).

I’ll prolly post a warning right before I break everything, but just wanted to give the heads up.

Sorry for the outage. I pulled a boneheaded move and then compounded it by trying to do some networking stuff that had unintended consequences. This left daves-place down for two days, doh!

For the technically inclined, it’s actually pretty amusing. I was trying to get a second NIC going in the box remotely, played around with the networking scripts, set them as I thought was appropriate, and rebooted the box. Guess what CD I had left sitting in the machine? The Redhat 8 install CD, so the machine booted up to the installer. doh!. So I get home, discover this, pull the cd and reboot. Meanwhile though, it turns out that there is some issue prolly related to system interrupts that is causing the two NICs in the box to conflict with each other, from the OS’s perspective it thinks it is talking to one NIC when in fact the other is responding. The result of this was everything looked fine to me on my LAN, but actually the box was not responding to the outside world. Translation – no daves-place.

Anyway long story short last night I got home and shut down the second NIC so it stops grabbing an IP and the problem is temporarily solved. Now I need to dig into either routing tables or IRQ settings, not sure which yet, to solve the problem in the long run.

or whatever that thing was called (Cue Cat)? This was the device that was being given away free by everyone and his uncle, notably wired magazine and Radioshack, several years ago. It plugged into your USB port or your PS2 port, depending on which model you had, looked vaguely like a mouse laid flat out (the furry kind, not the computer kind), and let you scan bar codes into your computer. The idea behind it was everyone would start printing bar codes on everything, in ads, on your jeans, on the beans in your soup, whatever, and you could scan them with your cue cat and get useful information. Of course, of the number of problems with this concept, the chief one was, no one wanted even more marketing messages bombarding them, which was the agenda behind the device. The company died a well-deserved death, yay!

But…it turns out these cue cats can be useful on other contexts. Small mom and pop retailers, used to spending money on bar code readers, discovered that with the appropriate software, quickly kicked out by hackers, they could use them as free barcode readers, which had all kinds of uses for businesses. So a device that was for a brief period of time as common as an AOL disk disappeared. You can still buy them on ebay, but they’re a little pricey for a device that was free (about $8-9 before shipping).

Here’s where you come in. Do you have one? I have need of about 4-5 of them. It turns out they can also be turned into a recharge/source of power device for PDA’s, with a connector from Radio Shack and a little soldering. I am especially wanting USB models since I have tracked down a PS2 model already and the USB models can be used on my mac. So. If you send me your cue cat, I will paypal you $5 plus the shipping. Pretty simple deal, I save $5 or so, and you get a little lucre for that pos mouse thingy wired magazine sent you a few years ago. Or if you’re generous, you could just give it to me. Either way, I covet them. First 5 cue cat holders to apply get the cash. Speak up!

It turns out that Body Mass Index is a great general indicator of physical health and likely lifespan. Do you know what your BMI is? If not, check out a BMI calculator. You’re looking to have a number below 25 and if you really want to live to be an old foggie you want a 22 or lower. I’m at 22.7 so I have a little way to go yet 😉

Actually I’ve been gaining weight lately, moving from 160 to 165 or so, which is sort of bumming me out. More exercise to come as a result. Thankfully the warm weather just rolled in with the dawn this morning, I’m hopping on my bike when I get home and going for a long ride.

Now this is cool. I’ve been reading Manage for at least 8-9 years now, but only on a casual basis. This is partly because it’s somewhat inaccesible – you can only reliably get the translated editions as trade paperbacks which are released years after the original editions are published in Japan, and I’ve had trouble identifying series that I enjoy. For every Adolf: A Tale of the Twentieth Century I pick up, it seems like I buy 5 Battle Angel Alitas, which has for the most part kept me from buying a lot of it. I’ve also found that I don’t enjoy the manga “canon” as much as the critics would expect me to: Things like Akira really didn’t do all that much for me.

Anyway I’m rambling. My point today is that a new magazine is out, Shonen Jump, which collects manga and runs them as series. It’s sort of like an asian flavored Vertigo Presents, or a PG-rated ‘Heavy Metal.” The comics seem to be skewed towards the younger reader, but still I am loving it, finally I can get my hands on large volumes of manga inexpensively and scope it out, rather than dropping $20 on a trade paperback that may or may not completely suck. It’s well worth checking out, a 300+ page issue sells for about $5 and will keep you in bathroom reading for at least a week. I plan to subscribe, plus I am trying to track down the initial issues on ebay (there have only been 4 issues so far).

I think I’ve mentioned my sister’s website here before. Recently she added the pootycam, which is a perfectly pointless way to waste a few minutes of your day. Ever dreamed of watching a slacker dalmation while away her day snoozing and licking her various orifices? Now’s your chance, click the link!

I really need to work on getting the davecavecam going, I actually bought the camera for it ages ago but never got around to getting it up and running. The topcat owes me some system install work so maybe I will hassle him into getting the webcam going for me this month.

Scientists take first steps towards extending the brain with silicon. This is seriously cool shit, and I am not exagerating – assuming this approach works, actual immortality is ours within our lifetime. I’ve been reading about this since the early 80’s, it’s completely awesome to see it take its first steps towards practical reality.

Of course it’s not really immortality in the way we might think of it, but if you were able to communicate with a perfect copy of me every day, even though I was 6 feet under, would you still think I was alive? I might not, but you definitely would. It reminds me of ancestor worship in asian cultures in a way; instead of revering the dead, you can actually sidle up to the family shrine and ask their advice.

Count on me backing up my head the moment this tech becomes commercially available. In fact you can start the bidding now on your own personal copy of me! 😉

Well, in about 10 minutes my workgroup at the college is sitting down with the college’s President to discuss our future here at the college. Wish me luck, hopefully my status will be settled at the conclusion of the meeting, one way or another, and I can stop worrying about what’s going to happen.

Most of you know I have been increasingly disatisfied macs the last couple of years, so much so that I was about to sell off my last mac. It’s not OS X so much, in fact there are aspects of it I love, it’s mostly an issue of them being so goddamned slow, I mean ridiculously slow compared to pc’s. Mac bigots seem to just turn a blind eye on this subject, but I run both platforms and macs just suck speedwise, especially web browsing which is like 94% of my waking life (and yes, safari helps loads but it’s still no contest). Anyway I was about to ditch the laptop and enter a pc only world, but Kevin and I struck a deal and I’m getting his old mac desktop. Pretty much the only reason I decided to do this is because of Net Newswire. This program is changing how I surf the web radically and greatly increasing the amount of info I can absorb in the same amount of time. I absolutely love it. It’s a class of application known as an RSS aggregator, it allows you to pull together article headings from tons of websites (including this one) into an outline view that’s extremely easy to parse through.

There are RSS aggregators for the PC as well, but none nearly as elegant as Net Newswire. I’ll do a writeup of some alternatives this weekend, but if you’re on a mac box, by all means go grab it and take it for a spin, it’s superb.

(oh and the new mac will also be running snipsnap and another webserver at home, I want a playground for python and some other tools, so I guess net newswire wasn’t the only reason I wanted the mac desktop, it was just the main reason).