Leaving Advogato - or not -
chalst: Thanks for the kind words... and no worries...
I'm far too tied to Advogato to completely leave it. As I said in my
last message, way too many people know that can find me here.
Now, what I may do is post some of my non-technical ramblings
over at LiveJournal... maybe some poetry... then again, maybe not.
I don't honestly know. Still thinking about it... we'll see.
Best and worst of Messaging and
Collaboration in 2003 - On Dave Sifry's (formerly
sifry, now
here) weblog, I found a link
to this
interesting essay on the author's pick of the best and worst
items in 2003 in the areas of messaging and collaboration. Interesting
picks.
Annoying uses of Flash on a website -
My January 2004 pick for most annoying use of Macromedia Flash on a website
has to be
this site
for Ottawa Winterlude, mostly because the bear just keeps on
throwing the snowball... it should do it once, maybe twice... but not
infinitely... and then it seems you can't use the "back" button
to get away from the page. Very annoying.
Microsoft ClearType -
I am extremely rarely blown away by technology. Undoubtedly that
comes from 25+ years working with computers and having worked with all
sorts of different technologies. I'm generally cynical and jaded when
it comes to new things... I'm always looking for new and exciting things,
but generally ready to be disappointed and extremely cynical that they will
live up to their hype.
Today, however, I am indeed impressed. When reading an online newsletter
I receive, there was this text written by
Mark Minasi:
If you're using Windows XP on an LCD display, you've probably
already discovered one of the best reasons to have an LCD instead of a
CRT--Microsoft's ClearType display technology. (And if you're one of
the many who haven't enabled ClearType, right-click your Desktop,
choose Properties, click the Appearance tab, then click the Effects
button. In the resulting dialog box, choose ClearType under the "Use
the following method..." label. Using ClearType technology is like
discovering a focus knob for your display.)
I enabled it... and was almost immediately blown away by the instant
change in clarity. VERY impressive! I've been using XP for probably
close to a year now, but never knew this feature was in it. (Some of
my tech friends reacted with "Duh! That was one of the big things about
XP." Okay, so I never really read the XP marketing hype...)
Being someone who worked with and taught electronic publishing for
many years (specifically FrameMaker and later DocBook), fonts have always
been an area of interest... it's very cool to see what MS has done.
In an e-mail exchange with Mark today, he pointed me to
Steve Gibson's page on
ClearType where I found
this page an especially
useful introduction. (Thanks, Mark!)
GnuPG for spam -
forrest: I, too, have wondered about the use of GPG
for controlling spam. However, there are some basic issues about the
lack of good GPG clients for mainstream e-mail clients. At work we
use Lotus Notes, at home I use
IMP, my wife uses Apple's MacOS
10.2 "Mail" program... and most of my relatives are on AOL. Now, yes
there are ways to use GPG keys with all of those, but they are not
necessarily easy. For instance, I use WinPT
to allow me to GPG-sign text on the clipboard before pasting into a Notes
compose window... not exactly something that I'm going to expect my mother
or father to be able to do.
For GPG-signing to work, it needs to be simple for the end-user to
use... ideally even transparent so that everything just gets signed on
the way out. Yes, mutt and many other Linux and open source mail programs
can do that today... but until such capabilities are available for mainstream
e-mail clients, I don't see anything really working.
LiveJournal and posting via PGP/GPG -
Was interested to see that among the
features listed
at LiveJournal for their paid
accounts was the ability to post entries via PGP-signed e-mail. Given that
I'm always interested in new uses for PGP, I just found this cool to see.
gpg --refresh-keys - Oops.. I guess
I haven't refreshed my keyring for a while. Across my keyring of 204 keys, a
--refresh-keys added 1284 new signatures.
LPI Milestones -
LPI has some pretty amazing news to
announce about the number of people LPI-certified... but I won't steal
their thunder... except to say "Stay Tuned" for news out of LPI. It
will come soon.
Pretty darn amazing for a Linux community project that started out
from nothing...
linux.conf.au -
mrd: The conference
definitely looks to be a great one... congrats to you and all the team
there for lining up what looks to be such a great event!
Psi 0.9.1 -
LenZ helpfully pointed out to me that
Psi 0.9.1 is now available for download.
It actually came out back in early December.
I guess we WILL go on that diet! -
Woke up Sunday morning to find water on our kitchen floor, draining out from
the freezer compartment of the refridgerator... looks like it is the compressor
(and our fridge is only 3 years old!), which is still under warranty... but
can then only be fixed by Sears... who didn't have any technicians on call on
Sunday (their "24x7" support turns out to only be for phone support!)...
and so we have to wait until today...
But much of our food had gone bad in the meantime, and so we wound up
cleaning out the whole fridge... we had been talking about changing around
the foods we were eating to be a bit more healthy... looks like we now have
no excuse.
[Update: Post-technician-visit - it appears we are one of the very few people who lose their compressor each year. Of course, since we brought our refridgerator from the U.S., they have to order a compressor from there... and so it looks like maybe by Friday we may actually have a working fridge!]
Babylon 5 DVDs - Finally broke down
and ordered
Season Three
and pre-ordered
Season Four (it is released tomorrow!) on DVD. The series is just
way too good NOT to buy them.... the extras are nice, but mostly I just enjoy
being able to watch all the episodes in sequential order, and without
commercial breaks. Looking forward to it...