January 25th, 2008
Songza’s quite nice, especially after us non-US users lost access to Pandora. Now I can finally listen to some boy band music when I feel like it (because I don’t have any in my library).
September 13th, 2007
An old post I wrote on a spoof MMORPG named “Outside” was Dugg not too long ago and I was quite pleased to find that my server and the blogging software (WordPress) that I use was handling the load extremely well. Quite obviously I was getting more hits in a day than entire months:
My setup is a Virtual Private Server (VPS) with 256MB RAM hosted at SliceHost and this blog is served off Nginx and PHP FastCGI processes to handle PHP scripts. The wonderful (because it just works and is really easy to setup) WP-Cache WordPress plugin keeps a cache of pages that’s swept at logical times (i.e. whenever there are any updates or comments).
I may be a Rails/merb fanboy, but this awesome piece of blog software that can stand up to the Digg Effect with ease is great. WordPress FTW!
August 17th, 2007
About a month ago, I logged in to Google Reader to see a shocking thing - all my subscriptions were gone and I was subscribed to some feeds that I’ve never heard of.
I would say I’m a pretty heavy Google Reader user, checking my several hundred subscriptions several times a day, so it was pretty distressing. I posted a thread at the Google Reader Google Group (the link doesn’t work now because they’ve moved the Google Group somewhere else for some reason) and several other people responded that they were seeing the same weirdness.
I had the same problem, and here’s the really weird part: I got YOUR feeds! If you look at the top of the page you can see the account you’re supposedly logged in with. Well, I saw your account there. And this was before I read this message. I also saw some other names every so often. Right now it says email censored.
Maybe it’s some weird mix up with the ISP. Do you use SingNet?
Some time later I started seeing other people’s accounts:
The problem affected only Singnet (a major local ISP) users in Singapore (about 7 other users in Singapore using Singnet responded with the same problems). No one really knew what the problem was and neither the Google Reader team nor Singnet (someone sent them an email) responded.
My guess was Singnet started caching Google Reader at a proxy and somehow managed to bypass all the credentials that was needed to modify any feed subscriptions. Sounds like a pretty nasty security bug to me.
The aftermath:
- Google Reader no longer has my feed subscriptions (I didn’t manage to recover them so it’s still in the sad state of having only 1 feed subscription to some UK property shite).
- I’ve manually rebuilt my OPML file (containing my feed subscriptions).
- I’m now using NewsFire. It’s not decentralized so I can’t sync it between machines, which really sucks since I have 2 primary machines, but I’m wary of using online feed readers right now.
- I regularly export my OPML file and check it into Subversion.
- I’m looking for a reliable decentralized feed reader once again (having used Bloglines and of course, Google Reader prior to the catastrophe).
Just a quick note of something I found out while reading Transcending CSS: all the themes (message styles, contact list styles, etc.) in Adium are crafted with our old friends XHTML, CSS and JS. I opened up a few AdiumXtras to see for myself and true enough, <div>s and CSS rules make up the style. Very smart decision by the Adium developers. (1)
June 13th, 2007
So there’s this big Leopard thing that’s the talk of Mac town (well, that and Safari) with all the new features being revealed (officially, at least, to the general public) at WWDC 2007.
Some of the features are pretty cool, most of them are mundane. For me, I am really looking forward to:
- the new Finder - Finder sucks so bad as a file system interface. I use Path Finder, which incidentally had an upgrade recently to 4.7. The new Finder looks pretty (Cover Flow for files, sexy!) but what I’m really hoping for is a Finder with which you can actually be productive.
- Ruby and Rails baked right into Mac OS X - while installing Rails and upgrading Ruby is a breeze on Mac OS X as it is right now, having these installed by default is pretty sweet. Even Capistrano will be included. Now, how one upgrades Ruby is another thing though…
- Time Machine - Even though I already own a licensed copy of SuperDuper!, I’m still eager to use Time Machine. I mean, who isn’t hooked on the time travel metaphor yet? It’s like System Restore done right (with the advantage of hindsight, of course).
What are you looking forward in Leopard?
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