Greenman's Blog

I’m (almost) done with the server cabinet! Yay! Piccy tomorrow after the finishing. The one thing I’m lacking is a couple of ethernet ends so I can run a proper (hidden) network line for the alarm system. It’s still connected by way of running a cable across the floor.  😛

I also put up some of the art that I just framed in my room. Maybe a piccy, maybe not.

BTW, this is now my favorite Sluggy Freelance cartoon of all time.

Sometimes it’s useful to do destructive testing. For example, I am building a (small) server cabinet out of a piece of Ikea furniture; specifically in this case adding ventilation to the top.

Low and behold, when drilling the vent, I discovered this:

Yes, that’s right. Cardboard on the inside. Looking at the plug I drilled out:

Sigh. Ikea really has gone downhill. 🙁

I just found out that a friend of mine passed away on July 30th. I am deeply saddened to see him go.

I met him when we were both at a mid sized company which shall remain nameless. He helped me keep my sanity during that job, the one with 90+ hour weeks and management doing everything they could do to ratchet up the stress. Yes, THAT job. The one by which I’ve measured every one since and said, “You know, this isn’t *that* bad.”

He was a very good person, and helped change my outlook on a number of things. One of the things that he helped me change was my attitude towards software — and I think this applies to just about everything computer related or not — software isn’t a thing. It’s a service. It’s nothing without someone behind it to help make sure that it meets the needs of the person using it.

After Lesa, his wife and long term partner told me of his passing, I found this in memoriam article while Googling. It explains far better than I can about some of the impact he has had on the world:
http://finchtalk.geospiza.com/2012/08/remembering-chris-abajian.html

He leaves behind a wife and a son, both of whom he loved dearly.

Here’s to you, Chris.

I made the jump yesterday, and discovered to my (unhappy) surprise about how Mountain Lion now handles RSS.

Or, more precisely, how it *doesn’t*. RSS is no longer supported in either Mail.app or in Safari.

After reading a bit, I decided to try out Reeder. Nice program, but it has an unfortunate (fatal) flaw: It doesn’t import RSS from Mail.app.

Since I happen to be good with the command line, I shortly came up with a method to extract the RSS feeds. This is a 90% in that the results that it prints have some encoding (such as & for an ampersand.) I’ll post later a 100% solution.

To extract your RSS feeds:

1. Run Terminal.app (or any other command line terminal). Terminal.app can be found under your dock at: Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal.app
2. Make sure a terminal window is open. In Terminal.app, the following menu option will open a new terminal window for you: Shell -> New Window -> Basic
3. Copy and past the following into a terminal window:

find ~/Library/Mail/V2/RSS -name *.plist -print0 | xargs -0 grep -hA 1 RSSFeedURLString | grep “” | sed -e ‘s/.//’ -e ‘s/<\/string>$//’

You’ll now have a list of RSS feeds. Enjoy!

-Ian

Steve sits down next to a man carrying two heavy suitcases on a train.

Steve glances over when the man is checking his fancy watch.

“Wow!” says Steve, “that is one fancy watch!”

The man says, “Oh, this is more than just a fancy looking watch. It has a cell phone, a camera, and a GPS built in.”

“That’s neat.”

“Plus it has a built in movie player with full surround sound.”

“I didn’t know that you could do that.”

“It’s also a full function laptop with voice recognition.”

Steve says, “That’s absolutely amazing — where can I get one?”

The man says, “I tell you what — I’ll sell you this for $1000.”

Steve hands over the money to the man, who gives Steve the watch, and then hands over the suitcases.

Steve says, “Why are you giving me these suitcases?”

The man says, “They’re the batteries for the watch.”