Monthly Archives: November 2005

Back to Bloglines

For all of Robert Scoble’s complaints about Bloglines, it fits my needs quite well.  I have been using it for some time now, but I took a break and tried running Gregarius on my server.

It has some nice features, but after several weeks I have given up on its current manifestation. It has a lot of potential, but for now it’s not ready for my needs. The clincher is that I can’t read my feeds on my Treo 600 using Gregarius. It’s way too slow — there’s no WAP/low-bandwidth mode.  Bloglines works quite well in that respect.

So long Gregarius, it’s been fun. Maybe I’ll try it again in six months or so.

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Flocking again

Last time I tried the Flock blog editor, I was sorely disappointed.  It was difficult to use, and I couldn’t figure out how to get at the raw HTML. After reading some more about the editor, I had another look and noticed a bar along the bottom of the editor window. I dragged it up, and there’s the HTML. Excellent. With the most recent release, they’ve also added support for WordPress categories. Excellent.

Here’s a photo from Flickr just for testing purposes:

Indonique on Magazine

City-Owned WiFi System To Be Announced Today

Hurricane-ravaged New Orleans will deploy the nation’s first municipally owned wireless Internet system that will be free for all users, part of an effort to jump-start recovery by making living and doing business in the city as attractive as possible.

New Orleans’s New Connection

I find this pretty exciting, though I know that it’s going to piss some people (read: Cox and Bellsouth) off.  You know what? That’s just too bad. They would never have done this on their own, and now they’re going to bitch and moan about the unfair government competition for service they were never going to offer in the first place.

I think this will be an enormous boon for New Orleans, and frankly, the city needs any help it can get right now.

New items and the evening update

A few points of interest:

I was more productive today than yesterday. I was still not as productive as I should be. I partially blame the delays in transferring files from our cluster to my machine. It’s a little 5-10 minute window of waiting where I don’t want to work on a different project, so I’m tempted to read things on the Internets. I continue to go back and forth with my simulations, as I find little details that cause problems. I’m trying to match conduction velocity with some experimental data, so it’s tweak, tweak, tweak, check fiber directions, tweak, etc.

Sleep Water Exercise Coffee Green Tea Alcohol
8 h 2.4 L 18.22 min 2 cup(s) 3 cup(s) 3 drink(s)

My mother bought some Abita Restoration Ale at the grocery store. That’s some damned tasty beer. I had three. My run today was faster than last time, but I had some soreness in my lower legs. I’m using my cheap running shoes from the Target in Duluth, MN, and they’re not so good for me. I left my good running shoes in St.Louis, but I should have brought them to Mandeville. At least the streets in the neighborhood are blacktop and not concrete. I’m doing alright on the coffee and tea. I shouldn’t have had the second cup of coffee, or even a whole first one, but like the kit-kat bars in the pantry, it’s just there, and the temptation is pretty strong. This is why I keep limited amounts (read: none) of snacky-type foods in my apartment. It’s easier to avoid a temptation if it’s not right there in front of you. Also, I was going to take my car in to get the tire patched this morning, but by the time I was able to get a call through they were quite busy. I’ll try first thing tomorrow. First thing is 07:00 in this case, so I’m off to Bedfordshire. Good night.

A blur of a day

I awoke once more at around 05:00, without an alarm, but was a bit slow to get moving. I felt heavy, like I wasn’t meant to be up. No matter, I caught up on my RSS feeds, did my morning pushups and crunches, and remembered that I have today off from running because it’s the weekend. In reality, I should have run anyway since I skipped a few days this week, but I just wasn’t feeling up to it.

I’ve been setting up and running simulations all day. This takes a bit of time, because I’m running the simulations remotely on our cluster. I have to log in, set up the simulation, submit it, wait for it to finish, zip up the data files (they’re quite big but compress very well), copy them over, load them, play the sequence in the data viewer, and then discover yet again that something’s not quite right with the timing. I’m trying to initiate a spiral wave, and I fear that perhaps the model I’m using is too small. My excitable gap is too narrow. The problem is, this mesh must be relatively fine. Therefore, if I make it larger, my required computational power will increase quite a bit, slowing me down further. I’ve got another try running right now, and I think I’m getting close to the right timing. I’ll check it in the morning and find out.

In the gaps of time between simulation stuff I’ve been playing some Prince of Persia / Sands of Time, reading blogs, pruning my RSS feed list, making some phone calls, eating breakfast, brunch, lunch (with a margarita!), and dinner. Oh yes, skipping exercise and eating more. This is doing me a world of good.

The blog associated with HubMed was full of Mac-friendly goodness today, including links to a bunch of free games for Mac OS X. Most of them are available under the GNU General Public License (a.k.a GPL, free as in speech) and are originally Linux games. One of my favorites, which I played on Linux first, is Frozen Bubble. I have problems copying it to my applications folder for some reason, and have to play it off of the disk image. I was also reminded by the presence of Goban on that list that I should try picking up Go again. But not tonight. Maybe I’ll order a Go book from Amazon once their gift certificiate payment scheme is back up and running. By the way, I hope none of you have sustained any injuries during the post-Thanksgiving commercial feeding frenzy…

I know by this time you must be dying to see the stats for the day. Agonize no longer:

Sleep Water Exercise Coffee Green Tea Alcohol
8 h 2.5 L 0 min 2 cup(s) 4 cup(s) 1 drink(s)

If I’m going to get eight hours of sleep again, I should get on with my pre-sleep reading, and then crash. Ta ta for now.