Archive: April 11, 2003
No Exegesis after the last Apocalypse, but there's a detailed Synopsis by Damian Conway and Allison Randal.
Also see last week's Perl 6 summary.
You know that commercial where the guy sitting at his computer orders all kinds of stuff from around the world, getting multiple bids for stuff from different manufacturers, and a pretty co-worker shows up and asks if they have a lightbulb, but they "Can't do one" lightbulb?
And the commercial says ".NET keeps you connected. .NET for the agile business." or some such crap. All of this has nothing to do with .NET technology (maybe you can argue that this involves "web services", but that isn't unique to .NET anyway). So I'm pissed at Microsoft for pandering to me.
Ok, I didn't want to say anything publicly, because David seems like a nice guy and I didn't want to hurt his feelings. But this program was yet another case where the problems aren't really obvious until you've used the program for a while.
NewsDesk is almost unusable for me now -- I don't even want to check my feeds anymore -- and I'm eagerly awaiting when Luke fixes SharpReader to work on Windows 98. I'm even considering expediting upgrading to Windows XP so that I can have a usable RSS reader again.
Before I give my list of things that don't work in NewsDesk, I just want to make clear that it's possible that these problems don't exist on Windows XP. Like SharpReader, it's possible that it suffers from bugs particular to Windows 98. With that said:
Problems with NewsDesk:
- For a large portion of my feeds, NewsDesk completely forgets what's been read, and just markes the entire contents of the feed new every time. So, that's really annoying. It kind of defeats the purpose of monitoring the feeds for changes.
- For whatever reason, on a large portion of my feeds, when I click to view the feed, NewsDesk throws an exception. I have no clue why, I haven't noticed any pattern. So, having an exception pop up in your face every few seconds when you're working your way through your feeds doesn't make you want to use the program much.
- NewsDesk doesn't do a good job of ignoring problems in feeds. I have a bunch of feeds with a red folder icon, meaning that NewsDesk couldn't read the feed.
- Worst of all, however, is that if NewsDesk has a problem updating a feed, for instance, if updating the feed times out, it gets stuck. So none of your feeds past that get updated. You can't even right click on a feed and click "Get New Headlines" because it still considers itself in the middle of an update process. And the "cancel" button doesn't do anything. It claims it's cancelling the feed update, but that gets stuck too. Right now, my NewsDesk status bar says "Canceling update...", and it has for a long time. So you have to restart the program to get it to start over, and if it gets stuck again (maybe the site is down), you're screwed. This makes the program almost useless, because it seems to happen frequently.
So Luke, help me out here.
Cox & Forkum have a great political cartoon and excerpt some great articles on civilian casualties.
I'll quote one of them, because it's especially good. Peter Schwartz writes in Stop Apologizing for Civilian Casualties:
"Our moral right, and responsibility, is to do everything possible to safeguard American lives, however many civilian casualties that goal may require. We may lament the loss of innocent Iraqis during the war, just as we lament the loss of innocent Americans. But we should not apologize, since the blame, in both cases, rests entirely with the enemy, who made it necessary for us to wage war to defend ourselves against his threat."
I'll also quote Steven Den Beste on this topic, because he's right on:
It's going to be interesting to see what kind of political fallout emerges as more and more stories emerge from Iraq about how much improved things will be for Iraq's citizens, especially since the war was fought while inflicting such a low level of casualties, apparently on everyone involved. As they begin to weigh the evidence of the evil oppression that the Iraqi people have been freed from against the light human cost of the war on Iraq, it's going to be increasingly difficult to look at it in retrospect and condemn it, unless your condemnation is due to blind hatred of America.
Hey, Charles is moving Little Green Footballs to Hosting Matters. Now, along with InstaPundit and The Command Post, HM hosts some of the largest conservative political sites on the Internet  There're probably others I don't know about too. It's pretty impressive, really.
Via Simon, via Column Two, Pixelcharmer: Cool URI's. I even went through my archives and she has every link I've ever had on URL design and more. So, I hope she won't mind, but I'm just going to quote her whole list:
* The User Interface of URLs (Paul E. Hoffman, 1995)
* Cool URI's Don't Change (Tim Berners-Lee 1998)
* URL's as UI (Jakob Nielsen, 1999)
* URL's URL's URL's (Bill Humphries. 2000)
* How to Succeed with URL's (Till Quack, 2001)
* Making URLs accessible (Peter Seebach, 2001)
* User-Centered URL Design (Jesse James Garrett, 2002)
* Designing URIs (2003)
Thanks Tanya.
Hey, my friend Ken was hanging with Ben Folds sometime recently. Check out the picture of him with Folds.
Well, I'm taking today (we'll see how long my resolve lasts) to start working on my wiki. You can see current progress at:
Well, I'll give the link later when there's something there... no point in you getting PHP errors and stuff.
|
Generated in about 0.058s. (Used 7 db queries) |
Friday, April 11, 2003
Permalink
I hate ASP.NET
I hate ASP... I was doing wonderswith PHP, then suddenly one of myclients...
Johnies: Mar 17, 6:14am