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![[FSF Associate Member]](http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/images/fsf.png)
djotaku's twitter feed
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- http://www.gnu.org/fry/
- Clinton Supporters: Are you really such sore losers that you're prepared to screw us all over for four years just because you lost?
- More Christian Tech Goodness: http://tinyurl.com/6c8587
- When I was a kid, I played some corny Biblical video games. Now this comes out: http://tinyurl.com/5mxczl Will it sell?
- From now on all LPGA players must pass an oral english test. Who cares if you speak english if you can swing a stick at a small white ball?
- I thought my blog looked a little weird and then I remembered that I had ad blocker turned on and my google ad was therefore missing.
- Foobar2000 the strangely named audio player with the neat features
- I'm annoyed that my Civ 4 BTS hasn't been auto-updating. Just had to download over 300 MB of patches just to play Fall from Heaven 2.
- @ASPwizer: Nothing wrong with you, Honda Elements are the cars that winners drive. q;o)
- Also, sharing: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ericsbinaryworld/sets/72157606917571613/
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Feb
29
Viet Zodiac Makes Top 10 on Google!
Category: Site | 
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My Vietnamese Zodiac program is on the first page of Google when you search for the term! In fact, that about 24 people have come to my site looking for that from a search engine as of 29 February! That’s exciting because I know a lot of people don’t look past the first page of search results in Google.
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Feb
28
FreeBSD 7.0 is out!
Category: BSD | Leave a Comment
It’s been a little delayed and it’s long in coming, but FreeBSD 7.0 is out now! They’ve made a LOT of updates over the 6.0 series; most importantly they’ve done a lot of work on the SMP kernel. SMP is what you use if you have more than one processor in your computer or if you have a Dual or Quard Core Processor. So they’ve made a huge step to continue FreeBSD’s place in modern hardware. The release announcement contains a lot of info and the release notes contain even more!
I can’t wait to upgrade my systems (including, perhaps, this server), but it’ll probably have to wait until this weekend.
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Feb
27
I forgot to post this about 1 or so weeks ago when I finsihed up the script. So here’s how the output looks on my flickr views program:
Now my next step is to put it on the web. However, the Python API I’m using doesn’t do web-based program authentication. It also doesn’t handle multiple user authentication, which I’d eventually like to do. Right now I’m thinking of porting it to Perl or PHP. I’ll keep you posted.
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Feb
24
My excitement over Flock has faded a bit. It’s a bit bloated. I understand, because of the software involved in Flock’s features, why Flickr is so slow. However, Flickr is one of the sites I visit more often than any other, so I need it to go fast. Right now I have to load up Firefox whenever I want to do anything in Flickr for more than just a couple of minutes. And watching videos (such as on youtube or vimeo) is next to impossible on Flock. It keeps skipping and stuttering. Also, Facebook’s recent changes to the pokes page make Flock’s Facebook features less attractive to me. 111
Recently Opera has been in the technology news a lot. They’ve been one of the huge innovative forces on the net; although most people know that Internet Explorer was playing catch-up when they implemented tabs, what most don’t know is that Opera was the first to have tabs. What they want to do now for the Internet is really play up the need for Open Standards on the net. They [claim to] support more of the web standards than other browsers and they know that they need to make sure that Microsoft can’t make the web a M$ web again. For all these years when more and more websites were using extensions that worked only with Internet Explorer, Opera was left out in the cold. But now that Firefox’s popularity has broken that monopoly, Opera doesn’t want things to go back to the way they were. Or, in a another version of the same bad situation - have webpages work only for Firefox to the detriment of others.
As I mentioned in Part 1, I tried Opera back in the day, but it had a giant ad bar on the top and I found it to be annoying and went back to Netscape and Internet Explorer.
They say first impressions are important, so here are my first impressions from using it a bit this morning at 0530 while getting ready for work. I discovered web page preview image accidentally while hovering over tab. I don’t remember reading about this feature and it was delightfully surprising! Basically, let’s say you have a bunch of tabs open. How useful the tab text is depends on how descriptive the page’s title tag is (which can be notoriously bad) and how many tabs you have open, thus reducing you to seeing only a few letters. With the web page preview image you can just hover over a tab and see what the page looks like. Definitely an awesome feature that I haven’t seen anywhere else.
Speaking of tabs, I accidentally discovered Opera’s speed dial when I opened a new tab. At first, when I read about speed dial, I thought you had to load up another page on purpose and I saw it as kind of gimmicky. But now that I see that the page comes up when you open up a tab, I can see it as extremely useful. Whenever I open up a new tab, I want to go to a new page so if that page is on my speed dial and I don’t have to waste time typing and looking for it, I think it can only be a good thing. I plan to test this feature in the future.
Let me continue talking about tabs, after all, one of the features Opera is always touting as something they came up with first is tabs and they have completely revolutionized the way I surf the web. Now for a small dissapointment, I cannot cycle through tabs with control-page up/page down. This works on Flock, Firefox, Epiphany, Konqueror, and even other non-browser programs like Gnome-Terminal and Metacity. (I’ve since read that shortcut keys can be edited….we’ll see…..)
One final thing on tabs: one surprise area where Flock is extremely innovative is in the way they open tabs. I wish every browser was like this. Let’s say I have 3 tabs open and then I middle-click on a link in tab one, which would open a fourth tab. In every browser this would open as the last tab. Flock, however, opens it in tab position two, so you can keep tabs from related websites together. You cannot possibly realize how incredibly awesome this is until you experience it. After that, every other’s browsers’ tab implementations are crap. Unfortunately, Opera does not follow Flock’s lead here.
The GUI in Opera is extremely slick! I really like how it looks. There’s something I can’t quite put into words that is really slick about how the icons look. The tabs, tab colors and even the layout are great and I just feel that it’s a very beautiful browser. Something about that makes it pleasureable to use. Also the scroll bars are very beautiful with a gradient effect and the text is very crisply rendered. It’s a joy to read.
Strangely, it did not ask me to import bookmarks from other browsers upon startup. Most browsers do this for you.
Finally, Opera is VERY FAST! It’s faster than Firefox in a cold start and it seems to be faster to load up pages. This is surprising as Opera has an email client, IRC client, a bit torrent client, and various other programs built into it. This is supposedly what makes Seamonkey and other Internet Suites so slow and bloated. Yet Firefox has only one thing to do and it’s slower and fatter, memory-wise.
Mid-level impressions came to me while writing this blog post. I still haven’t done any “real” browsing or use with Opera, that will come in a separate review. Speed dial could really be awesome for pages I always visit - similar to what Flock is trying to do with “My World“, but seemingly better implemented At first I was slightly annoyed that opening the history opened over my current tab. However, it apperas that was a unique case because I haven’t been able to replicate it. Since it opens into its own tab, I think I like it a lot better than most browsers which open up a sidebar. Also, opening the “view source” of a page opens up a browswer tab. This is GREAT as one of my pet peeves about viewing the source is that most other browswers open up another program, cluttering up my taskbar. Quick search with ‘g search term’ seems to be very, very convenient. It’s even faster than typing into the search bar in the corner, which it has just like Firefox and every other browswer nowadays.
As I mentioned above, bookmarks are not automatically imported. This is bad because the bookmark import sucks - you have to find it on your hard drive. I tried looking around in my Program Files\Mozilla Firefox folders and couldn’t find it within 2 minutes and I gave up for now. Not good….
However, to end on two happy notes, when you open up Opera from scratch, if you had any tabs open before, they’re opened upon startup. This is based on the theory that you may want to continue where you left off. Brilliant! Also, before you start worrying that this could get annoying as it wastes your resources and Internet bandwidth downloading the tabs you had open before, the tabs are the last version in the cache - so it won’t drain your resources.
Finally, there’s a little trash icon in the corner. This is another well-thought-out feature that I think they’re the first to implement in such an intuitive way. Have you ever closed a tab only to think, “Shoot, I didn’t want to close that one - now I’ll have to dig through the history to figure out which one I closed!” Well, if you click on the trash can you can see your recently closed tabs.
One of the other browsers I use implements something similar. (I forget if it’s Firefox, Epiphany or Flock) In the history diolog there’s a section called “recently closed tabs”. But it’s nowhere near as intuitive as Opera.
So it looks like there are a lot of things I like about Opera and not too many things I don’t like about it. I’ll have to see if I like the Opera way of browsing the web (eg speed dial) or if I go back to Firefox. As of right now Opera seems really awesome and I can’t quite figure out why it’s not doing better than fifth place amongst browsers with only 1% of users using it. With all of the innovation in Opera I think that perhaps the only explanation as to why no one is using it is that it used to cost money and that put a lot of people off. Now it’s free as in beer, but it doesn’t have the Open Source chic of Firefox. So even though it has many revolutionary features over Firefox and is at least as secure, if not more secure than Firefox (both much more secure than Internet Explorer), it suffers from a lack of users. (Although what little users it has seem to be extremely loyal to it)
So I’ll spend some time browsing the web with Opera, particularly the video sites that caused me so much annoyance in Flock. I’ll check out the IRC client (I currently don’t use one on Windows and haven’t since MIRC back in High School) and the bit torrent client and see if I like it.
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Feb
22
My History with Browsers Part 1: A History Lesson of Sorts
Category: Geek Love, Internet, history | Leave a Comment
At first I used Internet Explorer because we had a free trial of MSN. Then we switched to MCI, who used Netscape (although you could also use IE) and I mostly used Netscape. I think this was around Netscape 4 or 5. I really liked Netscape A LOT and used it almost to the exclusivity of Internet Explorer. Of course, those were the exciting days when every few months Netscape and Internet Explorer would release a new version. As I’ve commented in previous posts, whether or not Firefox ever gains a dominant share (and the same with Linux vs Windows), its mere presence will necessitate innovation from Microsoft. You may have noticed that IE stayed at version 6 for a very long time until Firefox started getting really popular. But I digress. Netscape had all the best plugins and I thought it was the ultimate in the Web experiences. I coded all of my websites with Netscape in mind.
I heard about Opera and checked it out, but it was racked with annoying ads if you didn’t get the pay version. I couldn’t understand why anyone would buy a browser when MS and Netscape gave theirs away free. Sure, Netscape had a version you could pay for, but I never did understand what that gave you. Tech support? Who the heck needs tech support on a web browser? (I felt the same way about Realplayer) If Opera had tabs at the time, I didn’t notice. I uninstalled it pretty much the next day.
Then in High School I became a Microsoft Fanboy at some time. I remember getting mad that AOL kept locking MS Messenger out of its client. After all, in my experience, MS Messenger was the first client I could use to access both Buddy lists and I didn’t see a point in having two programs open at once - back in the days when we pined for 128 MB of RAM! So I started using Internet Explorer. So as Netscape fell to the wayside, I didn’t even notice that more and more websites were become discriminatory towards non-IE browsers.
I did temporarily go back to Netscape 7 (or 8? was there an 8?) when they integrated with AIM (must have been around the time that AOL bought the company). I thought it was pretty neat. However, by that time I had moved onto using Trillian and using Netscape for AIM while using Trillian for Yahoo and MSN seemed to be a step backwards and I only used Netscape for a month at max.
Then one day I went to the computer labs in the engineering library at Cornell. This must have been either Junior Year or Senior Year because prior to then I had never really used the school library resources. But Junior year I moved off campus so I had an incentive to use the labs in the library. At the time it was called Phoenix and was version 0.7 or 0.8 - something like that. But I immediately fell in love! (Or relatively immediately - after playing with it for a few consecutive days) Once I discovered tabs I could never go back to IE for this opening a new instance of the browser for every link was just too annoying. Not only that, but in those days Firefox was lightning fast! (Something I hope they return to in the near future)
I immediately started using Firefox and got my then-girlfriend (now wife) to start using it. I forget if she was sold on tabbed browsing or when I later found out that it was much more secure than IE. I tend to think it’s the latter because she’s always gone for practicality over glitz. Then we started to see the prejudices against non-IE browsers. For example, I couldn’t pay my Verizon bill online. I called up and complained and they said they were working on it. Same with a bank or two. It still continues to this day one some DRM (digital restrictions management) heavy sites such as Movielink and Netflix for movie downloads. Well, those websites simply stopped getting my patronage. (Well, I stopped renting from Movielink so they lost money on their policies. Netflix - I use for renting physical discs).
Recently, after having been with the Gospel of Firefox for about three to five years, I’ve started to branch out a bit and check out other browsers to see what they have to offer. On Linux I’ve switched to Epiphany for a few reasons.
1) It integrates better with Gnome
2) They implemented what Firefox will call places in Firefox 3 a long time ago, and
3) It has the same Gecko rendering engine, but uses up far fewer resources than Firefox. I’ve been using it for maybe 6 months now and I prefer it over Firefox on Linux
In KDE I’ve used Konqueror which uses the KHTML backend, which Apple took for Safari and has contributed back to the community as Webkit. It renders pages much more crisply than Gecko-based browsers and was the first or second backend to pass the Acid 2 test. I like it a lot although it seems to have taken the approach that they will not kludge up the codebase by supporting deprecated standards. I say that because it seems to render some pages incorrectly that I’ve coded with my old HTML books that date back to the early to mid 1990s.
All of that has caused me to also check out other browsers on Windows. For instance, as I mentioned a few months ago, I moved my primary browsing from Firefox over to Flock, which is also based on Firefox/Gecko. The flickr and Facebook integration as well as a few other things (auto-bookmark to delicious) have had me very happy using this browser. However, Flock isn’t perfect. For one thing, its performance makes Firefox look like it flies. (And everyone knows that Firefox has become a huge resource hog)
So I decided to continue the search for the perfect browser. Just as IE didn’t cut it and forced me to find web browsing bliss in Firefox, perhaps there’s more out there worth checking out. So recently I decided to check out Opera again. It’ll be interesting for me to look at since it’ll be the first time since I used Netscape Communicator/Navigator that I’ll have one program with Web browser, email, IRC, etc. I never did use most of those features with Netscape, my ISP always had its own email program. So will it be too slow or too much bloat? I hear some people still like Mozilla Suite/Seamonkey, but I suspect they’re in the minority. If it turns out that I do like Opera, it may cause a lot of people to switch. I can directly point to my switching to Firefox as responsible for at least six to eight people switching. Stay tuned for part 2!
Blogged with Flock
Tags: Flock, Netscape, Navigator, IE, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Phoenix, Mozilla, Opera
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Feb
19
I’ve had this rhetorical question in my mind for quite some time now. There was a time, not too long ago, when the Iraq War dominated the news. Not only that, but people were protesting. Remember Cindy Sheehan who was camped outside Bush’s house in Texas and leading all these anti-war rallies. About four months ago, it all disappeared. Coincidentally, this is more or less the same time when Britney Spears had her breakdown and the Presidential Primaries started getting interesting.
Of course, I’m not the only one who’s asking this question - on 14 February’s The Daily Show, Stewart had a segment called “Iraq?” where he asked, “Is this still going on?” He went on to mention that Iraq is still f-ing around in Iraq and that the Parliament had approved a new flag.
So what has caused everyone to suddenly stop talking about the war and what has caused the protesters to stop protesting? It would have been Richard Nixon’s dream come true with the Vietnam War. I wonder if it’s because things are finally doing well enough that people think it’s going to come to an end anyway, so there’s point in protesting. Or is it because, with a presidential race, perhaps the right president will win and get us out of there?
The information about the war and the protests against it ended so suddenly, I just wonder what happened. And I always find myself wondering….did the war end?
Blogged with Flock
Tags: Iraq, Iraq War, The Daily Show, Cindy Sheehan, war protest
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Feb
18
I’ve always been a bookworm and so around the age of 11 or 12 I asked all my male and female friends whether they would vote for a black man or a white woman for president. Everyone, male and female alike would always say black man. I was surprised that the ladies didn’t stick up for one of their own. I was so surprised, that I would ask my friends this question every couple of years. We moved a little and I also changed who I hung out with so I wasn’t always asking the same people. Yet, even though high school and college a majority would say they would rather go for a black man.
When I would ask the women what was wrong with having a woman president, they would think for a bit and answer something like, “I just can’t see a woman as president,” or “I wouldn’t trust a woman president.” It was rather a strange thing to hear.
Now, strangely, we find ourselves in the position that either one of those two will be selected as the Democratic nominee. Right now they’re roughly neck and neck. So I wonder if perhaps something about the people I always chose to hang around with biased them against liking a woman president or if it’s different just because now it’s real and not just a lunch-time hypothetical.
I think the final result tells us a lot about what’s stronger in our country - racism or sexism. After all, I’ve actually heard people call into NPR shows saying they won’t vote for Obama simply because he’s black. That’s the kind of stuff I thought we were way over from in this country. But no, we find ourselves still dealing with this as a nation. On other shows I’ve heard people express all kinds of feelings about having a woman president which we’re supposed to also be over as a country.
Then it’s off the the national elections, but there I see it as much less about the race or gender of the person than the party the voters prefer. I doubt more than a vocal minority will vote for the other party (or not vote, which is equivalent to voting for the other party) just because the Democrat is black or a woman. Most people who will vote for McCain will be doing it because they like Republicans, not as a rejection of a race or sex they don’t like.
Blogged with Flock
Tags: Obama, Hillary, President, Presidential Campaign, 2008, sexim, racism
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Feb
13
Hacking Flickr
Category: Geek Love, Internet, Photography, programming, python | 2 Comments
So, thanks to a problem I had with rigging up Nick in “Sugar“, I’ve temporarily lost interest in animation. This happens to me all the time, and I think I’ve mentioned it before in previous blog posts that I’m too lazy to look up before that I tend to gain and lose interest in my hobbies. For example, I haven’t touched the Wii since I beat Mario Galaxy during Christmas and until this recent problem with “Sugar” happened, I hadn’t done any programming in about a year. Even my interest in photography has ebbed so much that I let my subscription to Digital Camera Magazine lapse.
My latest hobby to pick up again is programming. I recently updated my Pydvdauthor software (since I had to make another DVD), worked on a Vietnamese Zodiac predictor, and now I’m hacking Flickr. It’s just the way my mind works that when I get into a certain hobby, my creativity takes me to places that I never even had the smallest thought about previously. Case in point, I knew that flickr had an API, but I never cared to mess with it. I saw the mashups people were producing and I didn’t think that I wanted to do any of those. However, those mashups are just the visible “web 2.0″ stuff you can do with the API. After a greasemonkey script (which I just started using) showed me that the API could detect whether or not my photos were in a certain group, a seed was planted.
Suddenly, out of left field today I get the idea to hack on the API so that I can tackle what I have considered one of my greatest annoyances in flickr - maintaining my participation in the Views: xx groups. These are groups where you add in photos that have xx number of views and keep them there until they reach the next threshold. It’s fun to watch and it gets more people to see your photos. But until now I’ve had to manually go into each Views: xx group and then click into each photo to see if my photos were ready to move on. This was excruciatingly slow! But now I’m working on a program that will automatically detect this for me and let me know.
It only took me a few hours today and most of that was figuring out how to use the Python interface that some groovy programmers have written to help smooth things out. I’m using Beej’s Python Flickr API and I find that it works extremely well. Of course, it also helps that flickr has designed a WONDERFUL API interface page. I’ve only done programming on two APIs so far - Google and flickr and I must say that flickr wins hands down!
Flickr’s services page has all the information you could possibly need to program on their API. Here’s a great example of how well their API pages are written. But even better than just having make-believe sample code is the API explorer they have on each of their APIs. This takes you to a page that allows you to put in the same parameters you’d put into your program and see ACTUAL output! Not only that, but they give you sample values on the right-hand side! This is an API documentation in a class of its own. If you look on this page you’ll see that easy programming is in no way constricted to Python. If there’s a programming language you like, there’s probably an API kit for you. They even have Lisp and REAL Basic!
So, here’s what my program does so far, after, as I said, a coupe to a few hours of hacking:
Status: ok Title: Clocktower Cornell 3 Views: 36 URL: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ericsbinaryworld/8848073/ Title: Clocktower Cornell 5 Views: 42 URL: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ericsbinaryworld/8848074/ Title: Kite Beach Day 1 Views: 39 URL: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ericsbinaryworld/8770150/ Title: Kite Beach Day 33 Views: 39 URL: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ericsbinaryworld/8770151/ Title: Kite Beach Day 49 Views: 38 URL: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ericsbinaryworld/8770711/ Title: The Raspberry from a kid who's not even 1! Views: 37 URL: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ericsbinaryworld/2165313220/ Title: seagull5 Views: 37 URL: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ericsbinaryworld/8823393/ Title: Kite Beach Day 52 Views: 44 URL: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ericsbinaryworld/8770714/ Title: Kite Beach Day 53 Views: 43 URL: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ericsbinaryworld/8770715/ Title: seagull2 Views: 31 URL: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ericsbinaryworld/8823392/
Now, this looks nicer on my computer than it will on this blog because the current blog theme I have only gives me 500 pixels for each post whereas on my screen I have a lot more space.
So, what are we seeing here? These are the first ten photos I have in the Views: 25 group and you can see that none of them are ready to move to Views: 50. I gave myself the URL so that if I needed to move it to the 50 group, I can.
So what’s next? Well, before I blogged this, I put everything into functions instead of one long series of commands so it should be quite trivial for me to add in all the rest of my Views groups. After that it’s a matter of whether I want to move them into the new groups manually via following the URL or if I want to do it automatically via the script. Yeah, the API is that powerful!
Current issues with my current methods are that I think I’m limited to 50 API queries per hour. No problem, I’d just have to split my views groups into different scripts or load them in a commandline parameters.
This has also sparked my interest as I’ve often found it annoying to load a bunch of pictures I’ve just uploaded into a bunch of groups. It takes a lot longer than it should - I’ve always wanted a checkbox so I can do all of the groups at once. Well, with the API, I just may be able to do this! Yippie!
Yay for hacking!
Blogged with Flock
Tags: python, flickr, hacking, flickr api, API, hacking flickr, Beej’s Python Flickr API,
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