Month: April 2008

50 Dollars have it all the life

In a dramatic turn of international fiscal events, it would appear that well-off Chinese men are gearing up to acquire American mail order brides. (Ladies, consider the socialized health insurance!) A hacked version of Skype and some brute-force language translation make this potentially viable.

uuskype.PNG

I was particularly intrigued by the “How to add the foreign woman?” link which, once automatically translated, reveals the touching story of “Qin Xiaomei and joes” wherein Qin Xiaomei and/or joes gushes “We like Jiubie reunion of lovers, the two sides across the ocean, the talk of Tongtongkuaikuai miss each other’s feelings.”

Poetry electric.

It’s enough to make me as well want to marry Qin Xiaomei and/or joes.

Posted on by nurikabe 0

Diggin’ Digsby

For the longest time I’ve been looking for a good universal messaging app so that I don’t have to run three instant messengers, plus Skype, plus deal with email.  And nothing has really fir the bill.

Years ago I originally used Psi, based on the Jabber protocol.  I quite liked Psi, and it worked well for awhile, but development started to wane and I really needed something that could keep in sync with ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo protocol changes.  (That said.. looking at the site it looks like there is a new development team.  Worth checking out.)

Since then I have tried Pidgin,  Miranda, and a host of other smaller open apps.  They all worked for the most part, but the interfaces tend to be clunky and, until recently, UTF-8/Japanese support has been spotty at best.   I finally settled on (and purchased) Cerulean Studio’s Trillian round about the time it was turning the corner from version two to version three.

Trillian was great for awhile.  Its got a large database of user-created skins and a variety of useful plugins.  The problem with Trillian is that version three came out over four years ago…  and has been in a time warp ever since.  Its once innovative sidebar interface can no longer compare to other available apps, and actually tends to get in the way.  And the next version, Trillian Astra, seems to perpetually be in a kind of secret alpha mode.

(If you comment on the above in the Trillian forums, angry users will flame you with comments along the lines of “great things take time”, etc.   WTF?  This is not wine.  Trillian’s release cycle is now longer than Microsoft’s.)

Recently, however, I stumbled up on Digsby.  Digsby reminds me of a streamlined version of Trillian with built-in email, mobile messaging, and social network messaging support (brilliant!).

What I really like about Digsby is its non-intrusive messaging popup.   Unlike other messengers (namely Skype), you don’t have to hunt through a host of windows every time you hear a message come in.  The popup allows you to reply right there leaving the state of your desktop undisturbed.  (This need to constantly shuffle through windows has become a major source of frustration during my workday.)

Finally, I don’t think I’ll have to wait years for updates from Digsby.  They seem to be pushing out updates on a weekly (daily?) basis, often in direct response to comments left in the Digsby blog.  Now that’s how software should be built.

Go Digsby.

Posted on by nurikabe 0

Prevent Emacs from whining about excess backup versions

This Emacs prompt gets old after awhile:

Delete excess backup versions of SomeCode.php (y or n)

Emacs is trying to preserve space and clean up after itself.  And, always willing to please, it wants to make sure you’re cool with that.  The prompt is nice, but a tad overprotective.

Adding (setq delete-old-versions t) to .emacs will instruct Emacs to silently delete the older backups. This makes toggle testing between the editor and app much more pleasant.  (Or, for that matter, much less painful.)

Oh, and speaking of overprotective.. Remember to always practice safe emacs.

Posted on by nurikabe 0

readonly versus disabled

I couldn’t seem to find a good breakdown on this anywhere and had to see what would happen trial and error.

  • readonly="1" will show a standard form element, however it will not be editable. Data will, however, be submitted.
  • disabled="1" will gray-out the form element. Data will not be submitted with the rest of the form.

At least, this is what Firefox does.

Posted on by nurikabe 0

Subversion Reversion

Or “Please Please Just Make the Crazy Things Go Away”

Reversion becomes essential when you start working with bargain software consultants abroad. Though a bit unintuitive, Subversion makes it pretty easy to do.

svn merge -r head:56 SomeClass.java

This will revert from the working revision HEAD to revision 56. Now simply:

svn commit -m "What the #%&* were you thinking?!"

to push the previous version back to HEAD.

Reversion in Subversion is actually a kind of merge. More details in the Subversion Book.

Posted on by nurikabe 2