Feedster seem to have improved their indexing times recently – they now find every new entry on this blog immediately when I publish it – the Feedster item (for my vanity search on “Adrian Sutton”) actually appears before the actual entry for this blog (I subscribe to my own feed to make sure it’s working correctly). Good stuff. I’ve probably managed to set up WordPress to ping something whenever I post (I seem to recall seeing something in that box) and Feedster has linked into that somehow (that or I’m pinging Feedster directly but I don’t think so).

As an early 24th birthday present (and late 21st birthday present since I never actually got around to taking up their offer for my 21st present – it’s only flaw was requiring a modicum of effort on my part) my parents gave me a new digital camera. It’s a Pentax Optio MX with 3.2 megapixels and a 10x optical zoom (also a 10x digital zoom but digital zoom is generally pretty worthless).

So David’s relicensing his blog content – good for him. One thing struck me: doesn’t allow any derivative works (I don’t really see the relevance of it in this context, but I’m happy to be persuaded). In the context of Australian law, with our whole not having fair use like the US, what implications does this have for quoting from your blog? What if I quote the whole entry and comment on each paragraph?

Dori Smith brought the case of Merkey vs Everyone to my attention and for some reason, despite the fact that I have 4 days worth of reading to catch up on I thought I’d read it. I don’t see this as a case that should be dismissed entirely without thought as Dori’s quotes from the complaint would make out. Certainly there’s a lot of rhetoric that should just be dismissed and the complaint is biased in favor of Merkey (isn’t a complaint supposed to be?

Ah Scoble, when are you going to learn? Everytime you mention Mac and anything Microsoft related in the same sentance, a whole bunch of Mac users are going to flame you something savage. In this case of course their completely right – Windows Media Player for Mac sucks and I don’t bother watching any Channel 9 videos because it sucks so much. I could probably use VLC which I use for anything else that Quicktime can’t play but it just seems like too much hassle just to listen to a bunch of people prattle on and on instead of just reading a quick text based blog entry.

So iTunes 4.9 is out and the podcasting support is pretty cool. It does pretty much what you’d expect – podcasts appear in a new “Podcasts” “special playlist” just under the “Library” icon. It does keep track of whether or not you’ve listen to a particular podcast or not so you can keep track of where you’re up to and has a bunch of configuration options for how to handle incoming feed entries and how long to keep stuff.

Ken Arnold talks about the complexities of generics and how he doesn’t feel they provide enough benefit for the complexity they add. I have to agree, most people probably only understand the basics of generics and not the full spec which is a recipe for great confusion and the number and type of bugs that generics prevents really doesn’t give much benefit. It’s odd that there’s such a push towards scripting languages with no compile time type checking at the same time the Java crowd are pushing for stricter compile time type checking.

The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn’t the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren’t specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress.

Recently Apple made WebKit development much more open which is great for people who develop products using WebKit as they get more control – it’s great for the KHTML developers as it’s easier for them to integrate Safari changes and for a bunch of people to test against. The downside however is that people who have no business playing with development builds of WebKit just can’t help being cool and running it anyway.

My saturday mornings are being consumed by catching up on reading that I put off during the week and it’s starting to get out of hand. I had the future in-laws, my mother and my little sister over for dinner last night so completely ignored the incoming feeds – this morning there were over 200 new items to flick through and another 20-30 had arrived before I got through them all.

Hand warmer for geeks – a USB powered device that blows warm air across your keyboard. The rest of me is quite warm, but I can’t wear gloves and type at the same time. If you know of one that exists, my birthday is in a couple of weeks so you could just send one now….

So I’ve been getting into Ruby on Rails and things started out well, had the basis of an application up pretty quickly and now I’m starting to get into the logic of the app rather than just pulling values out of the database and displaying them. Productivity is droping, very rapidly. The problems all seem to come down to the lack of a good IDE. Specifically: I have no idea where the definition of methods etc are.