Since Syndirella has been pissing me off so much (I went looking to see what's going with Dmitry, and his site is down), I went looking to see if there were any aggregators that didn't suck. So, at Brilliant Corners I came across an aggregator named Awasu.
It kind of sucks too (it keeps popping up balloons in my task bar, even though I told it not to by default, but its OPML importer used all the default default settings), it doesn't do RSS auto-discovery, it doesn't support categories and there's no way for me to reorganize my feeds, and it doesn't allow me to mark all items as "read". However, it does have a neat plugin architecture that lets you define your own data sources in Java.
So, now the question is... which sucks less? Sigh.
Update: Well, Awasu sucks, so I kept looking. I came across this page listing a bunch of aggregators, and came across Beaver, which also sucks! Though, in its defense, it's only version 0.4.3, so hopefully it'll get better.
I also came across this RSS to e-mail gateway script, which I think is a great idea. There's an aggregator that works through NNTP, but I tried that and didn't like it.
I would really like to read my feeds through my e-mail program, but to do that effectively I'd have to be able to filter my feed items into separate folders based on the feed. Of course I could do that with a similar gateway script and setting up a filter for every single feed, but there's no way I'm doing that. If only my e-mail program had some kind of scriptable interface, but noooo.
Why does everything suck? That's it, I want a Mac, they have better software.
Dan Sugalski is continuing his series of articles on the Parrot VM. Recently he's written two articles on continuations.
I'm going to have to read through them a few times. I've always heard that a continuation represents "the rest of the program", but I never understood how the heck they're supposed to be used, nor how they actually represent an entire particular program state.
After skimming the articles, they reminded me of this bit on using continuations to speed up OS kernels. I wonder if any of the issues brought up in that paper (which I haven't read, mind you) could be applied to the Parrot VM?
Here's a Struts FAQ I have to look through. Via Raible Designs.
Via Mozillazine, there's a new roadmap for Mozilla development for versions 1.4 and beyond.
In one of a string of changes, mozilla.org today announced a new plan that would have future Mozilla development work will be focussed around the soon-to-be-renamed stand-alone Phoenix browser and the Thunderbird mail and newsgroups client (also known as Minotaur). Mozilla 1.4 would be the last milestone release of the traditional Mozilla browser suite and the 1.4 milestone would replace 1.0 as the stable development path.
According to the plan, aggressive and ambitious changes will take place during the 1.5 and 1.6 milestones to accommodate the switch to Phoenix and Thunderbird. Mac OS X versions of Phoenix will become available but the new Roadmap stresses that Camino, a project to create a Mozilla-based OS X browser with a native Aqua user interface, will continue to be fully supported.
The Phoenix project started life in 2002 as redesign of the Mozilla browser component known as mozilla/browser. Phoenix is designed to be a browser for average users with the features that most people want. Thunderbird is a project to create a stand-alone mail client that uses the Phoenix toolkit and follows its aims of simplicity and usability. Thunderbird now incorporates the work of Minotaur, an effort to create a stand-alone version of Mozilla's Mail & Newsgroups component. It is anticipated that Thunderbird will be available as both a completely separate application and a Phoenix add-on that will integrate more closely with the browser.
For an example of one of the things that needs to change, check out this file with over 14,000 lines of code in it. Sheesh.
Also see Matt Croydon, Mozilla Cuts the Bloat.
Someone finally had the patience to give Dave Winer the fisking he deserves. When I first read Dave's post I thought, What the heck? When did Dave jump off the deep end? A week ago he supported the war, then he flipped and all of a sudden he thinks it's going to be worse than Vietnam? That it would take "miracle" to win the war militarily? Weird.
DeadAIM sucks. Crashes a lot, seems to not always notify me when I have a new IM. Thumbs down.
Update: Since I upgraded from Windows 98 I haven't had any problems with DeadAIM. Thumbs back up.
Wednesday, April 2, 2003
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