NewsMonster is Here!  NewsMonster is Here!

Looking for an aggregator which adds directly into your Mozilla?  Then take a peek at NewsMonster.  And yes it has Feedster support!

• Home Page
• Press Release
• Details on Feedster Support

Key question -- does it support FireBird as well as Mozilla?  Not yet but I have it on good authority that this is coming shortly.  Very cool stuff.

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Gnome Terminal: Is It Just Me???

I just had some serious swapping going on on my Linux desktop and when I checked the Gnome system monitor I found Gnome Terminal taking up 40+ megabytes of RAM.  Each Bash session was only 300K or so but the ten sessions I had going somehow translated into 40 megs.  So the obvious questions are:

1. Is this me or a known issue?
2. Is there a better terminal I should be running?  God knows there are probably thousands but what's good?  I am fairly addicted to tabbed terminal windows and the SHIFT+CTRL+V paste / copy metaphor.
3. Any reason why Gnome Terminal didn't reclaim memory as I closed Windows?
4. Recommendations to improve performance on a RedHat 9 box?  I've heard people talk about replacing Metacity but I haven't heard definitive "junk the big fat puppie" comments yet.

Thanks in advance.

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Feedster Updates

Ok.  There have been a bunch of fixes including:

• RSS 2 feeds now include source rss feed urls and even validate!  Go figure. 
• OPML feeds of the blogs found in a query actually work (thanks to www.stevenwood.org for the help on that)
• We added query profiling to our query logs so we know what's taking time to execute.  That feeds into the next item.
• We implemented a bunch of performance improvements and there are more to come later this week.  Several more including what is hopefully one huge one.  Right now a lot of people are using aggregators for queries and they tend to be fairly poorly behaved network clients or "what's that?  You can't respond quickly enough?  Here's the damn query again!" and then there is the issue of "hey here's ten queries to the same source -- let's FIRE THEM SIMULTANEOUSLY!!!".  ***Unprintable comment deleted***.

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Opinion Requested : Should Feedster Make Permalinks Emailable ?

So here's something I want to do, I have the code and isn't hard at all.  I want to change a Feedster result set to look like this

http://feedster.com/go/?1778628 | http://radio.weblogs.com/0117503/2003/06/24.html#a1377

Why?  Because these damn ass long urls end up breaking in emails and I'm tired of explaining to my non-geek friends what to do.  Comments?  Is this a general enough problem that I should add it to the Feedster result page?

I did run it by Andy at www.uzilla.net a real live, honest to goodness usability guru and he approved.  But I'd like to hear from others.

11:56:02 AM  | Permalink:   | comment []  |  IM Me About This   

Damn You Scott Johnson!

I'm really peeved at you.  You wrote some really good content for your last PHP-CON presentations and then you posted so it only could be read in Internet Explorer.  I'm on a Linux box and that's really inconvenient for me.  Particularly since I needed to look up what you said about static and the new PHP search engine by Google frankly blows.

Oh wait.  That's right.  I am Scott Johnson.  This is actually inconveniencing myself so point taken.  Next time I will use Rasmus' slide stuff which works wonderfully and is fully cross platform and just plain brilliant.

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Don't Like the Current Administration ?  Buy These CDs

If you're not in favor of the current the administration then run, don't walk and buy these CDs from the Capitol Steps.  I bought a three disc set back in December and then ripped them and lost the originals in my move so I just found them last night and its bloody well hilarious.  Recommended.

Examples of their work: Jayson Blair Looks for Work / Bush and Chirac

And even if you like the administration, they're still funny.

8:01:38 AM  | Permalink:   | comment []  |  IM Me About This   

Evolution Take 3

Heh.  Even though I took a lot of bashing for saying that the Emperor has no Clothes, Jeremy got it. 

From some of the feedback that resulted from my Evolution articles, I saw that Evolution has been updated to 1.4 -- and that wasn't the version I was running.  So I figured "I have to upgrade".  It isn't fair to Evolution / Ximian to not do it.  So what was the result?  Mixed.

• My concerns about Export aren't addressed at all.  Or if they are, I'm completely missing them.
• Evolution did fix a bunch of bugs which is outstanding.  They even fixed the "Color All Messages from This Sender" rule feature which is wonderful.
• Evolution can't be upgraded by apt-get.  That just plain ***blows***.  It sucks slimy green toads.  It ... The words fail me (actually they don't but they veer into things we don't put on a family friendly blog like the FuzzyBlog).  Nothing like fighting RPM for years and then Sterling finally convincing me to get apt-get for RPM working and then to find out that Ximian ignores it.  Aaarrggh!
• The Calendar view is **interesting**.  For me Evolution can't show the calendar at all -- but it does a great job of substituting the Task view in its place.  Don't believe me?  Picture.
• After upgrading Evolution, I had to tell it all my mail passwords again.  @#@*($*# !  Sigh.  Sure that makes sense.  Right.  Try deploying Evolution in a large corporate environment and then having peoples desktops upgraded and watch the IT help desk calls spike the morning after the upgrade.
• Getting Back my tasks is actually better -- I can copy and paste them.  I mean even my Mom could do this.  Of course Mom will need to write some Perl scripts to transform them from the vCalendar objects they paste in as to plain ASCII but that makes sense, right?  I mean Moms* all over the globe code Perl.  So do co-workers, bosses, etc?

Don't get me wrong -- Evolution is a great product.  I'm just hugely frustrated by it being so close and yet so far.

*No disrespect intended to the technical, coding Moms out there.

7:33:26 AM  | Permalink:   | comment []  |  IM Me About This