A new toy //at 02:09 //by abe

I once decided not to have a blog, because I feared, the time I will spent blogging would vanishing from my Symlink time. But due to Symlink not being a real blog but rather a news and discussion website with a journalistic attitude and limited subjects, there are topics missing I would like to write about.

And due to not wanting to spam my beloved IRC channels with all those uninteresting subjects, a blog seemed to be the right place: Nobody needs to read it, but anyone can read it. And since Blosxom (which I first noticed at zobel’s and at alphascorpii’s blog) is fully the way I would design a blog (technically), I installed it today, tweaked a little bit the httpd.conf of our Apache and there it is: My never wanted but inescapably closer coming weblog named Blogging is futile.

And it will probably be mixed, German and English.

Blosxom Plugin Tagging Version 0.03: Featuring related stories //at 02:08 //by abe

Wim de Jonge, an (as he writes) happy user of my blosxom plugin “tagging” asked, if the tags used in the plugin couldn’t be used to find related stories by looking for stories which share a number of tags with the current story.

Version 0.03 of tagging is the result of his suggestion. You can see in my blog how it looks like.

He also found a division by zero bug in the plugin which happend if there were only a few posts in a blog and therefore all tags only occurred once. This bug should be fixed now, too.

Now playing: Toto — Africa

Update 14:50h: Released version 0.03.1 as a bugfix releases since there was a slash missing in the related story links and some minor issues. Thanks again Wim for pointing out the error.

Wikipedia at your fingertips //at 02:07 //by abe

Via nion’s blog I got notice of two other blog entries of two people of whom each wrote a shell script to display Wikipedia articles as plain text in a pager.

While the first one called wiki2 queries Google and fetches then the first Wikipedia hit there, the second one (funnily just called wiki) queries Wikipedia directly, supports different Wikipedia languages and has a lot of other nice features.

Since the idea and especially the second script definitely belongs to the group of programs you never thought about, but, when you found it, you knew, you missed it until now, I decided to use it as the first program, I want to package for the Debian project to be included in the next release which will be called Etch.

Because of “wiki” being a quite ambigous name, I plan to name the package wikipedia2text.

Wikipedia at your fingertips //at 02:07 //by abe

Via nion’s blog I got notice of two other blog entries of two people of whom each wrote a shell script to display Wikipedia articles as plain text in a pager.

While the first one called wiki2 queries Google and fetches then the first Wikipedia hit there, the second one (funnily just called wiki) queries Wikipedia directly, supports different Wikipedia languages and has a lot of other nice features.

Since the idea and especially the second script definitely belongs to the group of programs you never thought about, but, when you found it, you knew, you missed it until now, I decided to use it as the first program, I want to package for the Debian project to be included in the next release which will be called Etch.

Because of “wiki” being a quite ambigous name, I plan to name the package wikipedia2text.

Galeon, GNOME and all the rest //at 02:07 //by abe

I feel that I still owe a few answers on the recent Galeon discussion on Planet Debian and apparently also other planets, so here they are… (But I try to keep them short. :-)

First, Erich’s question Why are not-gnome users complaining about Gnome? — Because some people do not use GNOME but do use GNOME applications like Galeon. They don’t use them because GNOME is cool, useful, user-friendly or what else — they use them because these applications are cool, useful, user-friendly or so. They would also use them if they were plain GTK or maybe even KDE applications. For example, I also use Gnumeric or AbiWord, because I like them and not because I like GNOME. (Which — in general — I do btw.) I also use KDE applications although I don’t like KDE in general. (I don’t like KDE for much more emotional reasons compared to Galeon 1.3 btw., so I won’t rant about that. ;-) ark is a nice example for a KDE application I like. Unfortunately some distributions seem to have dropped it. At least I missed it recently on some box.

Then there was Gunnar Wolf’s question if it wasn’t Galeon 1.2 which went off the path. He maybe right, since I’ve never seen a Galeon version before 1.2 and the fact that the former Galeon lead developer dropped Galeon for the very spartanic Epiphany also suggests that. But since Galeon 1.2 took the right path in my eyes, Galeon 1.3 seemed at least to change (back) again to some wrong path from that point of view. We’ll see if Kazehakase really keeps following the “right” path.

JFTR: Interesting to read were also the discussion between Og, Erich and some more in Og’s journal as well as Wouter’s postings on the subject.

Oh, and in general: Thanks for the really nice discussion. Rants seem always to get more constructive responses than just asking for them. That’s one reason why I like to rant. ;-) Another reason is that it frees your mind if you know that people have read about what bothers or annoys you. So also thanks to all who followed the discussion (or still are following it if it hasn’t ended yet ;-).

Now playing: Roxette — The Look

Galeon is dead //at 02:07 //by abe

According to an announcement of the Galeon developers on their website and the Galeon announcement mailing list, Galeon is more or less dead. It has been superseeded by the more actively developed Epiphany and most of the Galeon (1.3 to be correctly) features which are not already in Epiphany (can’t be that many *harhar*) will be either implemented as Epiphany plugin or — if impossible as plugin, like e.g. middle click in menus or similar things — shall be ported to Epiphany. The Galeon developer team will focus their work on the Epiphany plugins, but still plans to once release Galeon 2.0. (Somehow I always thought, Galeon 1.3 is what meant to be Galeon 2.0.) Having read this, I’m even more convinced that Kazehakase will fill the gap Galeon 1.2 has left behind.

Oh, and btw Erich: plugins or extensions are the only thing I sometimes missed in Galeon, as well in 1.2 as in 1.3. :-) But having no turing-complete extension language is the drawback you have, if you want a fast and stable browser…

Breathetastic™ Premium Canned Air //at 02:06 //by abe

One thing I love the Kingdom of Loathing for are the countless allusions to movies and songtexts. Today I found something, which can’t be anything else than an allusion to one of my favourite movies:

When I only read the name of the item I was immediately reminded to a scene from Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs (IMDb entry, Wikipedia entry) when President Skroob drinks -eh- breaths a can of Perry Air. (Which itself is an allusion to “Perrier”. But I only found German written references to “Perry Air”, so it may be that the original version didn’t have this allusion, since the script directly refers to “Perrier Salt-Free Air”.)

BTW: Nice typo in the English Wikiquote article about Spaceballs: “Dark Helmut” instead of “Dark Helmet”. :-)

Now Playing: Alphaville — Forever Young