So, I bit the bullet and migrated my weblog from Wordpress 1.2.2 to Wordpress 1.5 Alpha (the nightly build from January 9, 2005). Woah. That sounds scary! Not really… The nightly alphas are surprisingly stable, and I tested stuff out on my laptop before making the jump on the server.
The main plugins I use work fine, so there should be no issues there. The only thing that should be visibly different is the lack of the second line of the cheesy subtitle in the header of the site. Wordpress 1.5 appears to not like html tags there, so the
tag was being displayed as source… Oh, well. Probably for the better anyway…
I just upgraded my OmniOutliner license to OmniOutliner Pro 3.0 - what an awesome upgrade. I just did a quick outline file to use as a “project dashboard” for the APOLLO project. This is something I had done in hand-rolled HTML on other projects, but here, I get a beautiful, dynamic, standards-compliant outline that I can edit as part of my regular workflow, so I’m much more likely to keep it up to date…
I just installed iPodLinux on my iPod, hoping to play around with it for recording podcasts. I was going to just use Audacity on my laptop, but the fan wouldn’t turn off, so it was waaay too noisy to record in my office.
So, a quick run of an installer, and a quick search to figure out how to reboot into linux (reboot the iPod by holding down the “menu” and “play/pause” button until something happens, then hold down the “rewind” button until you see a penguin). It’s pretty darned freaky to see a linux boot on an iPod.
Thanks to a link from BoingBoing, I saw Kiddie Records Weekly. That’s just awesome! They’re taking a bunch of old vinyl albums of kid’s shows from the 1940s and 50s and releasing 1 each week for the entire year 2005 - free for download.
I’d found Gerald McBoingBoing a while back from another source, and it’s one of Evan’s favorite tracks on my iPod (after D-O-G Spells Dog, by Mel Blanc - I even get to perform that one sometimes). Really looking forward to getting all of these classic shows!
Brian’s XServe is acting up, and we’re trying to figure out wtf went wrong, and trying to work with his IT folks that are managing the box for him.
In our quest for answers, I came across these resources (which have been dutifully bookmarked, delicioused, and added to my DevonThinkPE cache). I’m adding them here as well…
Haven’t tested it out, but the latest NetNewsWire beta now supports downloading enclosures (even automagically into iTunes). It didn’t trigger on all of the old enclosures in my 300-odd feeds (I shudder to think about all of the bandwidth sucked up if I have to download all enclosures in all feeds…), and there haven’t been any new ones today to test, but this looks promising!
There are a whole buncha updates in the latest beta, too. Feels much snappier (but that might be an optical delusion), and the UI has been cleaned up a bit (including a CSS Zen Garden-ish style sheet selector widget).
I’ve heard from my brother, who is building a house in Phuket. He’s fine, and his house is still there. Can’t say the same for the waterfront, or the tourists that were going for a pleasant morning swim.
An old friend of mine is from Sri Lanka, and his wife is from India. I wasn’t sure which parts of the countries their families are in, but was hoping for the best. I heard from him last night, and all of their family members are OK, in unaffected regions.
Now, if only it would get the auto-find-on-keystroke interface (like Launchbar or Quicksilver, but just for the content in the app) done like NotationalVelocity has… That would be the perfect personal content management system…
In a world where tomorrow is different from yesterday, controlled vocabularies (are) not only inefficient, they’re dangerous. In a controlled vocabulary, not only can you not classify ‘podcasting’, you cannot even register its impact. Some librarians are getting this message. Others are not. Oh, and judging the effectiveness of a non-taxonomy based search by what Google can (only) do today? Mistake.
I’ve tried a bunch of iPodder aggregator programs. None have turned my crank. They’ve been quirky, unreliable, misbehaving beasts. All I want is a simple, faceless app that reliably sucks down the enclosures from a set of feeds.
Bashpodder is perfect! It’s a BASH script, with a grand total of 44 lines of code (many of them are comments). You feed it a list of RSS feeds, and it sucks down the enclosures. It works fine via Crontab, so it can run invisibly in the background.
