Pelargir

I enjoy RSS feeds. Nay, I adore RSS feeds. So you can understand my consternation at having to maintain three sets of subscriptions on my work computer, home computer, and personal laptop. The lists never seem to be in synch. What a pain!

I discovered the solution to my problem last week. It came in the form of Google Reader, a beta version, but nonetheless still a (mostly) functional online news reader with a delicious user interface. Now all my RSS feeds are stored in one place and I can access them from any computer in the world without installing SharpReader or Attensa. (And Google knows just that much more about me.)

Now if Google would just get with it and add a calendar…

Yet another example of someone who has way too much time on his hands.

Another new Ruby e-zine is getting started. Joining Artima’s Ruby Code & Style is Red Letter: The Ruby Journal. They are currently searching for writing contributions of all types and sizes, and the most important part is that they’ll pay you for what you contribute. Column-length stories start at $350. Ruby, writing, and money? I’m all there.

This is a cute article I thought I’d pass along. It just goes to show that even the most disagreeable of companions can get along if they really try hard!

“Gohan and Aochan make strange bedfellows: one’s a 3.5-inch dwarf hamster; the other is a 120 centimeter-long rat snake. Zookeepers at Tokyo’s Mutsugoro Okoku zoo presented the hamster to Aochan as a tasty morsel in October. But instead of indulging, Aochan decided to make friends with the furry rodent, according to keeper Kazuya Yamamoto. The pair have shared a cage since.”

Read the full Associated Press story

Noticed this digg today and immediately thought of a software parallel. The saw constantly monitors its electrical state for changes and shuts down when one is detected. Isn’t this just like Continuous Integration?

A friend pointed me to Clearwire a couple of days ago. They currently offer wireless broadband for much of the West Coast and a few other areas of the United States, but what excited me was that they plan to start offering service in Greensboro sometime this year. I wonder when Raleigh might get coverage?

Clearwire uses cell towers to provide Internet service to devices throughout metropolitan areas. This sounds very similar to what Nextel tried a year or so ago. Does anyone else have news on other wireless service providers who may be setting up camp in North Carolina soon?

I saw an EDS ad in Forbes today which had what I thought was an interesting tagline:

You can talk about it.
You can think about it.
You can hope for it.
But if you actually want to cut a bolt, use a bolt cutter.

This is so true. Yet as a software developer, this is something I tend to forget. I can blog all day about how wonderful Ruby is, but if I really want to prove its worth I should be willing to do something with it. Likewise, if I haven’t actually created something in C#, I have no basis for commenting on the language, either negatively or positively. Experience breeds credibility and authority.

Don’t just talk about cutting a bolt. Get out that bolt cutter and use it!

If you’re like me, you’ve run into situation after situation in which you’d like to convert a Word document to a PDF. While Googling for a tool to do this, though, I inevitably end up drowning in page after page of supposedly “free” converters which cost $30+ to unlock. Come on, $30 to do a simple conversion? This is the era of open source. There has to be a better way.

Actually, there is. One way would be to install OpenOffice. It allows you to save a document directly to a PDF. This makes so much sense, doesn’t it? Which brings to mind another question… when will Microsoft add a similar feature to Word?

If you don’t want to wait around for them to do that (and don’t have the inclination to install OpenOffice), check out these instructions for converting to a PDF by printing to a file and using a couple of free tools. It was quick and easy for me, and now I have my PDF and my $30.

Read about a 69-year-old grandmother who has two passions: cooking and… gaming. Yes, gaming. There are 17 game consoles in her residence. Just goes to show you that no matter how old you get, you can always find a good creative way to waste extraordinary amounts of time!

This paper written by a quartet of guys from the CS department at Old Dominion is quite fascinating. They present a software solution for recovering and reconstructing web sites from various Internet archive sources and cached search engine data. The tool is called Warrick and, while I expect I’ll never have to use it, it’s nice to know it’s there if needed.

If nothing else, the paper gives a good overview of how web site caching actually works. And their description of the tool is quite intriguing. They must have spent a good deal of time on it.