Schinckel.net

I’m currently searching for some timber for use as skirting boards and architraves, and went to YellowPages.com.au to look for some suppliers. I entered Timber Supplies into the category box, and followed one of the examples of the location box: Adelaide. It then opens up the next page with:

Click on the correct location to proceed Do you mean? * Greater Adelaide SA * Adelaide CBD SA

I mean, seriously, if you put an example into your web page, for god’s sake make sure it works!!!

Land Of… • St. Germain • Tourist ★★★½

I’ve had to use a text-only browser over the recent days, since Internet Sharing is being screwed up by my router. I could, I suppose plug my switch back into the network, and disconnect the router, but then I have to worry about IP addresses again, since the router is also the DHCP server. Anyway, it’s been an interesting exercise. Some sites are well designed, and using them in links is possible, easy even. This site, for instance, shows up very well in links, and is easy to navigate around in. Credit where it is due, this is mainly due to Patricia, and the Wordpress team. The backend for instance is similarly easy to navigate around. Gmail is satisfactory. It whinges about missing JavaScript, but still seems to work. Not sure if the emails I have been sending have been working, but we’ll find out. Actually, I’ll take that back. It doesn’t seem to send emails properly. Dammit. Whirlpool and WildIT do not work very well at all. Sure, you can view stuff, but you cannot log in properly, which prevents you from seeing the really important data, and adding your own comments. Yellow Pages seems to work okay, as long as you don’t mind only looking at the first page of results. Well, hopefully my ADSL churn will come through in the next couple of days, as I’m sick of it already.

The AFL Grand Final was on this weekend, and no Victorian teams were in it (or even got close). This is particularly galling for the Vics, as the AFL used to be the VFL, and until very recently, the Victorian teams were still the powerhouses. Oh well. It’s all fun and games, isn’t it…

Biscuit o Portishead o Dummy 22

John Gruber, over on Daring Fireball, has posted about the name change of Lightroom to Adobe Lightroom, in Brand New, and seems to have hit the nail on the head with the discussion about rebranding and brand integrity. He’s also spoken about cross-platform applications, and how Adobe are the only real software maker that builds true single-source based applications that run on multiple OSes. I would have agreed with him, except that he talks about how Lightroom is built using Lua as a scripting language. There is at least one other cross-platform application, also built with Lua, that is updated regularly, is the same on Mac and PC, and even “shares the same manual”. That application is, of course, World of Warcraft. Blizzard, along with (some) other game makers, have a long history of releasing Mac and PC versions of their software. I assume the source code for these two is largely the same, as they continue to update it on a monthly or so schedule, and a significant proportion of the update code is the same on both platforms. Granted, Blizzard are very different to most other game development houses, in that they do write Mac versions of their software. And they don’t have to write code that uses the GUI hooks, in that they have their own UI. But, it’s still (almost certainly) the same codebase, nonetheless. Well, I’m hung over, and I need a Chicken Yiros.

I Close My Eyes And Think Of You • Paul Kelly • …Nothing But A Dream ★★★★

I posted some time ago about Internet Sharing quitting on me, but this point was moot after I got ADSL. I now have a (wireless) router that looks after all of that sort of stuff. Or did, until my ISP went belly-up, and I am back on dialup. Now, I have a worse problem. I can’t seem to share my internet connection from the Mac to any other machines on my network at all. I know it has something to do with the router, as this is the only new bit of kit I’m using. Now, I used to have my NSLU2 as my DHCP server, which was great, as I could tweak the settings endlessly, and ensure that I’ve got it all go. But with the router, it will only allow itself to be the default gateway. Which is okay when my ADSL is on, but bad right now. And, I’ve tried playing with the network settings on each machine, even manually configuring them, but still no joy. So, the laptop I borrowed from work is only being used to ssh in to my Mac, and then run links. Hardly a nice way to browse the web circa 2006.

Walking Down The Hill/Some Sad Song • Travis • 12 Memories ★★★

I’m currently rewriting iTunesRating to allow for half-star ratings. This is a program that sits in the menubar, and displays the rating of the current song, and allows it to be changed. I’ve learned a lot about how to create a NSStatusItem already tonight, and I’m working on getting the AppleScript interface to properly with it. It builds a bit on iTunesRater, a program I wrote in AppleScript Studio, which allows for the same thing, although this will have a much smaller screen footprint. If only I could get hold of the original source code - I could fix it in a few seconds, I suspect. More updates later.

Arse Kickin’ Lady From The Northwest • Tim Rogers And The Twin Set • What Rhymes With Cars And Girls ★★★★½

I use a banking site, which thankfully, now supports Firefox. And, supposedly to assist security, there is something like a five minute timeout, which logs you out of the system if you don’t have any interaction with the server. This is bad enough: often I’m getting data out of my bank account, and check an email, or get an IM, and when I go back to the bank site, I’m logged out. But, what’s even worse is that when I get logged out, it resizes the browser window to the full size of the screen. I run in 1680x1050, and a significant section of my screen is set aside for status monitors of a sort. And, I’ve got my browser window exactly the size I want it to be. So, it annoys the hell out of me to have to resize it, just because some idiot coded in a crappy line into their javascript. I wonder if I could use a GreaseMonkey filter to stop it happening?

Summer • Buffalo Tom • Spring Floor ★½

From: xkcd forums.

This one made me laugh - see it and more over on xkcd.com…

Eleanor Rigby • Shirley Bassey • Sings The Movies ★

I’ve been getting errors when trying to upload images via ecto, an XMLRPC client.

Method “metaWeblog.newMediaObject” produced a server error: “server error. requested method metaWeblog.newMediaObject does not exist.”.

I’m not sure if this is due to a new version of ecto, or something that’s broken within ecto. I’m downloading some other editors to try it out, but over dialup…

Careless Whisper (w/ R. Wainwright) • Ben Folds • Wolf Trap 6-29-04 ★★★★