Jeremy Zawodny's blog

Netflix Night

While hacking on some code tonight, I decided to use a couple of movies as background noise. It just so happens that I had Slackers and Can't Hardly Wait sitting here.

I hadn't seen either one before. And you know what? I now know why I pass on 'em when they were in the theater. They aren't worth more than a few bucks or the time to watch them. But if you happen to be doing something else at the same time, they're decent filler material.

Well, at least one of them has some JLH. There's nothing wrong with that.

After reading the user reviews, I can't wait to see American Wedding.

Coding Again

I spent more than 50% of today coding to get the next release of mytop ready. Integrating patches, fixing bugs, updating docs, etc.

You know what?

It was good. It's been too long since I had more than 20 minutes of time to actually deal with code rather than e-mail, meetings, or writing various documents (or thinking about what to write in them).

The new mytop will be out in a few days. I've asked some folks to try it out first.

O'Reilly Blog RSS Suckage

Anyone know who runs the RSS feeds for the O'Reilly blogs?

They're all broken in a very important way. Take for example, Tim O'Reilly's weblog. The RSS URL is a gnarly one: http://www.oreillynet.com/meerkat/index.php?s=/Tim+O'Reilly/&sw=dc_creator&_fl=rss10&t=1ALL.

No big deal, right? I only need to put it in my aggregator once. The trouble is that no matter which of the O'Reilly weblog feeds you subscribe to, they all have the exact same title in the XML:

...
  <channel rdf:about="http://meerkat.oreillynet.com/">
    <title>Meerkat: An Open Wire Service</title>
    <link>http://meerkat.oreillynet.com/</link>
...

Yup. Every one of them says "Meerkat: An Open Wire Service" in my aggregator. That makes it really hard to subscribe to more than one O'Reilly weblogger's feed.

I guess I can't compalin too much. After all, they finally added the orange XML buttons to each author's blog. But still. This really seems like a no-brainer. Does nobody at O'Reilly subscribe to their co-{author,worker}'s blogs?

How to spend a Wednesday

You could practice landing a glider in a field, like I did (pictures).

Or you could sit at your desk and stare at that computer screen, just like you do every day.

I'll let you in on a secret. Flying into fields is more fun--especially when there's an instructor in the back seat to make sure you don't do anything stupid.

It's even more fun when it opens up a new door in your flying--one that means better summer soaring conditions and more interesting soaring sites.

But don't take my word for it. Find your local SSA affiliated soaring club and see for yourself.

When did "creative" become a noun?

Someone says, "Hey, have a look at the new creative for our site!" and I can't help but to think how stupid that sounds. Creative what?

Do we really need yet another word to describe a creation? Aren't words like logo, advertisement, design, layout, or presentation sufficient and less vague at the same time?

As if the word "creative" hasn't already been abused to the point of being totally meaningless: "Hey, look what Bob did. That's very creative!"

Yo, moron. Odds are good that you mean "original" there. Any time someone creates something, it is by definition a creative exercise. So you're stating the obvious. As for it being "very creative", how do you judge that exactly?

Damned language. It keeps "evolving" in stupid ways.

(No. I have no idea why this bothers me. But it does, in a "my Internet is down" sort of way.)

Ahhh. It feels good to have that out of my system.

Flame away if you're bored. :-)

Bill Maher Uses MovableType?

Have a look at his blog and decide for yourself. It looks like MT, smells like MT, and sorta tastes like MT.

Thanks to Brandt for pointing out the site.

Tim Blames Perl

But it's his own lack of any comments that confused his co-worker. If the code isn't intuitive, document it.

Come on Tim, don't you know better? Don't blame the language. You can write obscure code and leave it undocumented in any language.

It Rained Today

It's July. In the Bay Area. And it rained.

This is rather unusual. But I like it.

(Today is short sentence day. I think.)

How NOT to get my help

Find one of my blog posts. Notice that what I wrote about is no longer true (like a service that no longer works). Ignore the fact that there were other posts indicating that it no longer worked. Post 4 comments asking for help. Mail my personal e-mail address asking for help. Twice. With two different subject lines. Then mail my work account with another one.

Arun Ram Kumaran (arun.kumaran@umit.at), welcome to kill file.

UPDATE: Oh, you can also make it worse by posting here with a lame excuse.

Custom RSS Feeds

It seems that Adrian Holovaty is offering custom RSS feeds. Very interesting idea. I might add something like this to my MT setup when I get some spare time.

Anyone else doing this?

Thinkpad is Back

Woohoo! IBM fixed up my Thinkpad by swapping in a new motherboard (as expected).

I'm syncing my mail, blog stuff, and book data. Now I can get back to normal.

Yeay IBM!

That's just gay!

I guess that this high school really is (or will be) gay.

A school in New York's Greenwich Village will reopen in September as America's first publicly run high school for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students, officials said on Monday.

Although The Harvey Milk School has been operating with two classrooms for 20 years, $3.2 million is being spent by the City to expand it to take 100 students. Named after a gay San Francisco politician assassinated in 1978, the school will be funded jointly by the city education department and a gay rights youth advocacy group.

(This really isn't funny if you weren't in high school in the last 15 years and remember when "That's gay!" was one of the most common ways to put down something.)

When to start a fire

If you're like Milton in Office Space and want to set the building on fire, it's best to do on a day like today. Why? Here's a paraphrased version of what we got via e-mail at work today...

We will be conducting fire testing for all buildings today. There will be some alarm bells ringing periodically. Please DO NOT be alarmed, we are only testing!! Do Not Evacuate.

Then again, it might be better to just do the damned TPS reports.