/dev/zero

About to update the blog to WP 2.5. It should be smooth but if things break, who knows how long I’ll be offline.
Not that I’ve been posting much lately…

<edit>Update mostly successful. The LJ crosspost plugin won’t reactivate, saying it caused a fatal error. Not very informative. I’ll have to figure that one out I guess.</edit>

Just a personal note so I can find how to install Debian on a DomU again

Last night I’m on my DoD clan’s Ventrillo server just before a scrimmage and yakking with teammates waiting for the game to begin.
I apologized for getting home and logging on only minutes before the game is due to start as I had to work late and only just got home.
One of them asks what I do for a living, I explain that I work for CI Host, one of the larger Internet server hosting companies and he asks if that means I know about networking. I explain that I’m more of a Unix guy than a Network guy, but that does come with having to know a little about networking. He mentions that since the clan switched servers, he and his wife (who also plays) have noticed quite an increase in his ping time. He did a trace to the server and saw the route go from Houston (where they live) out to California, bounce around a while, then back to Dallas (where the server is located).
I tell him to send me a copy of his traceroute and I’ll take a look.
I logged onto the clam forum site and see he sent me a private message.
Did he cut and paste the traceroute into the message?
Nope. He made a screenshot of the DOS window and attached the .bmp file.

Dunno what to say about a guy who knows how to do a traceroute, but not a cut’n'paste.

Not making the assumption that my gentle readers know what the hell I’m talking about…
Day of Defeat, a WWII simulation in the First Person Shooter genre.
A VoIP application popular amongst gamers, that creates something akin to a conference call.
A game that is more than a standard public “for fun” free for all but not as formal a league “match” that counts towards a team/clan’s standing in a game season.

This is the first I’ve heard of this, but this is the first trailer release of a new movie being produced entirely on Open Source software, under a Creative Commons license.

Big Buck Bunny - Official Trailer on Vimeo

Weird. Posts made with kblogger never show up in my blog. They’re “published”, they get a post ID, I can see them in the database and all fields are the same as posts that do show up (well, with the exception of things I expect to be different. Date. Title. GID, etc.) I even see my to “test” posts made it to twitter, but they don’t show up in the blog. Not even in the management interface where I should see ALL posts, published, draft or otherwise.

OK, WP is working. I can post just fine from the web interface.

I just received a message via MSN from “Colby” containing only the words “PARTY PARTY PARTY” and a URL.
They immediately closed the conversation window and when I tried to ask who the hell they were, was told that that user had signed off.
Out of curiosity, I visited the URL (since it didn’t contain any session / cgi ID stuff to uniquely identify the visitor)
The first thing it asks for is my MSN login and password.
No, not a prayer you’re getting me to put that in on your form.
Under that it gives the standard “by logging into this site you agree to the terms and conditions”. Pretty standard stuff, only it’s not in fine print and they print the terms and conditions themselves immediately below that, also not in fine print.
And the terms?
“By filling out this form, you authorize TST Management, Inc to spread the word
about this 100% real and upcomming Messenger Community Site.
You will receive your share of the credit in helping us spread the word. This is a harmless
Community site which is offering users a platform to meet each other for free.”

Yeah. I’ll sign up for your bullshit spamming service. Uh-huh.

OK, I think I have a clue to what is changing my theme on me.

After posting my last entry, due to the the problems with Drivel only allowing me to select a single category, and not having any way to enter “tags”, I loaded the blog in my browser to edit the post.
Having looked at my blog earlier today for something, I knew as of an hour ago it was showing the correct theme. After posting via drivel (via xmlrpc), the theme was reset to the default.

I’m posting this through Drivel. Let’s see if it resets again…

Well, so much for that theory. Post the entry, reload the main page, theme not reset. I’ll have to keep looking.
I don’t suppose Sadish will see this and offer some insight. Not that I think it’s in any way caused by his theme. I’m sure it’s a problem with /dev/null, but with all his experience with themes, maybe I’ll get lucky and he’ll have some clue.

Does Youtube simply not grasp RSS?

Viewing any RSS enabled web site in Firefox or Konquerer, I get a little button in my browser that allows me to add that RSS feed directly to my RSS agregator. In Firefox, this defaults to it’s own “Livemarks” system, in Konquerer the default is the Kontact/Akregator application, but both have a mechanism to define another reader.

Click on this little button when viewing any page on Youtube and you get… a broken RSS feed.
In Firefox it takes you to, not the RSS feed, but a page EXPLAINING HOW TO GET THE RSS FEED. If I need an explanation I would look for a link ON the page that says “about our RSS feeds” or something similar. If I click the “subscribe” button, which is generated by the “link rel=’alternate’ type=’application/rss+xml’”, I expect I’ll get an RSS feed, not human-readable page ABOUT rss feeds.

On top of this, they don’t offer a feed of something simple like, say, all of my “subscribed” channels. No, I can get a feed of MY vides (videos I’ve uploaded. Useless to me since I don’t upload videos. I’m a consumer, not a producor.), all new videos (The last thing I want is an RSS feed of every new video posted to Youtube), etc.
Even viewing the page for one of my subscriptions, there’s no link to subscribe to the RSS feed. Sure, the “about” page tells me what URL syntax to put in my RSS reader to GET that page, but why don’t they just put the simple header IN the html page so I can use the tools just about every browser provides to subscribe to the RSS?

Apparently for Youtube, Really Simple Syndication means “you do the work”.

I thought the problem with the theme randomly resetting to the wordpress default was solved with the installation of “I Love Music” 1.1, but I logged in today and it was again using the default theme.
I really wish it I could figure out what is causing this.

Any recomendations for a good blogging client for *nix?
Now that I’m getting back into blogging, and reading other’s blogs, I’m looking for a better blog poster app then the web form in my blog.
The best I’ve found of those available in Adept is BloGTK!, however it has a few issues such as not properly downloading my category list.

Correction: the best one I found was Drivel, which does download the categories, but does not provide a toolbar for bold/italics/underscore, linking, etc. BloGTK! provides these, but doesn’t get the categories, so I have to post, then edit in the web interface.

It’s been a while since I played with KDE. Every few years I decide to give it a try and find that it offers nothing that Gnome doesn’t do better. However after seeing someone’s recent KDE setup and thinking it looked pretty good, I thought I’d give it another chance, see what’s new with it.

I must say so far I like it, but there are a few things that are just annoying the crap out of me.

1. Despite having a fairly extensive color configuration panel, all it’s apps seem to feel free to ignore the color settings. But only the ones that ensure you can actually read anything. For example: select a fairly dark color scheme (say, “Dark Blue”, “Blue Slate” or any of the CDE schemes but Solaris). You will get white text on a dark background. But open Kate, the default text editor for KDE and you get… black text on a dark background. Because Kate IGNORES KDE’s settings for TEXT color and has it’s own configuration panel for text color. But it does NOT let you adjust the background color. Same with Kontact, the KDE PIM. Only it’s even better there: it likes to use alternating background colors when displaying lists of things (folders on an IMAP server, messages in a mail folder). The text color is the same for each item in the list (grey) but the background color alternates like greenbar paper between dark and darker, such that every other item in the list is completely unreadable.
I fired up Kopete, the KDE IM client and moments later received a message from one of my contacts. Light grey text on a light grey background. I had to mess with it’s internal color and display settings to see what my contact had just said to me.