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.

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 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

If you’ve been following the saga with Veridas, you may have noticed that whilst the network was up briefly, it went down again. I’ve now connected with another ISP, and have a complimentary dialup account to use until my churn completes. And man, dialup sucks…

Well, I can’t get onto my less-than-one-month-old ADSL connection, since Veridas, the upstream ISP for Opti has apparently gone belly-up. The bad thing about this is that it also affects some files I was hosting there (and, worse, the files Jaq had set up for her web site). I can’t even set up a replacement web site, as the files are only on my home computer, and I have no access from home. Not even dialup.

Apparently, document.documentURI and document.location are not identical. Basically, document.location is not a string, so to treat it like one, you need to do: (document.location+"").split("/") Instead of: document.documentURI.split("/") Stupid IE.

I had an HTML file I wanted to look at the source of, so I right-clicked on it in Windows, and chose “Edit”. Tell me Mr Gates, why on earth would I want to edit it in Word? I’ve never ever opened or saved an HTML file from Word, I’m not about to start now. I expected it to load up in Notepad, which would have been bearable (a real text editor would have been better), but not Word.

Everyone probably knows this, as it’s on the iTunes Music Store already, but you can download partial episodes of Thank God You’re Here via podcast. Legally, apparently. Mind you, the first few lines Anh Do’s performance were okay, but it went downhill from there. Apparently this is the best they could come up with. I thought it were crap. And it still had the advertisements from Hungry Jacks in it… Unsubscribe

Bright Side of The Road • “The Best Of Van Morrison” • [Van Morrison][1]

And, I’ve got to fix my iTunes insert code so it puts the rating as a number of stars… I might use a script rather than the normal ecto button.

[1]: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Van Morrison%22

I’ve stopped downloading the Chaser podcasts, since the quality is too poor, and I want to keep those for posterity. However, as a bit of a whinge, it did make something clear to me. Apple thinks podcasts can’t be TV shows, or movies. If you try a Get Info on a video podcast, and wish to make it into a TV show, so you can organise it properly within your library, you can’t. This option is grayed out in the Video tab.

Pass In Time • “Central Reservation” • Beth Orton