gushue.net

Just adding a new entry for testing purposes… since I’ll probably just delete it when done.

Edit: Ok, I’m mostly happy with how I have trackbacks being displayed in individual archive pages, I just need to get it automatically rebuilding it when it gets pinged. I found a page that tells you what to do, but it doesn’t want to work. I’ll figure it out.

Edit 2: I figured out why the code I added to automatically rebuild the archive page on a trackback ping wasn’t working - since I use MT-Blacklist, it overrides the default Trackback.pm, so I had to edit MTBlPing.pm instead. But it seems to be working now. I might install SimpleComments later, but not right now.

So, it’s my birthday today. I’m now 28 years old. Doesn’t feel any different from the last 4 or 5 years :)

I have to work tonight, which sucks. But coming up for Easter, I’ll have 6 days off in a row. Lucky timing for my long weekend happening the same time as a regular holiday, plus a personal day in there as well. A week off will be nice.

Six Apart released some information on the upcoming Movable Type 3.0 - it sounds nice. I’ve been using MT-Blacklist for a while now, but it’s a pain in the ass to keep it up to date. Although it has blocked quite a bit of spam already. TypeKey seems to add a little bit of “community” to MT users, which is kinda neat.

Of course, Niv isn’t going to like that, the hardcore anti-MT person he is :) (he bugs me because I wrote bplog, but use MT for my own site).

My search for a good IRC client will never end, apparently. They all suck, to varying degrees and in different areas. It’s not limited to any particular OS either, they are all crap.

• mIRC - decent interface, horrible custom scripting language.
• XiRCON - abandonded, uses TCL for scripting. Of all the non-mIRC clients, this one probably was the most promising. Oh well.
• Klient - bloated, ugly interface, uses some Windows VB thing for scripting (although it can use other languages - a bonus).
• Bersirc - Buggy, I think it uses Pascal (or Delphi) for scripting. Supposedly plans for adding support for more languages, and it recently became free or opensource or something. I’ll wait until the next version is out before I bitch about this one more.
• HydraIRC - I’m sure I didn’t like this one for some reason, can’t remember what. Probably a UI issue.
• Pirch - I remember hating this one years ago. Can’t seem to find any official URL for it now.
• XChat - hate it in Linux, hate it in Windows. Stupid GTK+. This is probably among the better IRC clients, which doesn’t say much.

Makes me sad that we were working on our own Perl scripted IRC client for over a year, and it ended up not going anywhere. The script had most of the main bits, but the client never got good enough. Before it was abandoned as well. I don’t have any hopes of ever finding a good IRC client.

I think I might start posting more often to this weblog. Not all about personal stuff, like the majority of it has been in the last 11 months or so. But other things like software tips and links, or stuff about music, or nifty websites, or just simple photography (well, once winter goes away, it’s too cold to take pictures now). I’ll have to set up proper categories sometime. I may or may not have them visible on this page, but they will be there somewhere.

I definitely wouldn’t want to confine myself to topics or schedules, because I hate those. I’m bad for procrastinating or just ignoring my own guidelines. Heheh :)

And to finish off this little entry, here comes del.icio.us - neat domain name, but wtf is it, you might ask? It’s basically an online bookmark storage site. A shared one. With bookmarklets (without going into too much detail, they are basically Javascript bookmarks placed in the Bookmarks/Links toolbar of your web browser, made to do something more than a simple link) to store the page you are currently looking at. Just as easy as adding a bookmark in the browser itself. Mine can be found at del.icio.us/chrisg. It has an RSS feed, which I have syndicated on LiveJournal, because I’m lazy. When you have an account there, you can subscribe to bookmarks of other people, which is neat. There’s just something cool about being able to see what other people are saving links to in real time.

Speaking of RSS, all of the RSS reader software I’ve ever tried sucks. To varying degrees, but they all suck somehow.

I’ve decided to give foobar2000 another try. I wasn’t too impressed with it when I tried it last, but that was quite a while ago. There has been development since then, including lots of third party components. Now I have a real excuse to get a MS Multimedia Keyboard. Winamp supports that too, apparently, but with this OSD component for foobar2000, it just looks cool. I’ve usually had Winamp in windowshade mode sitting at the top of my screen, always-on-top. But sometimes it gets in the way of actual windows. And all I really needed was the song and artist information, and probably the time. Which is the default configuration for the OSD component. I’ll fiddle with it more later.

It sure does seem to respond better with 20k files loaded in the playlist. Winamp 5 started to get sluggish :/