Richard Giles Blog

I’ve added a section to the Perth Blogs Wiki to encourage some offline (can you say that when it’s online) brainstorming about the Perth Blog Nite.

All suggestions welcome. If you do make a suggestion, I’d encourage you to attend the Perth Blog Meetup, but it’s not compulsory.

Let’s generalise. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols does in his article Solaris on Intel: Here We Go Again. Journalists get paid to sensationalise something, so people read the articles they write, so that the publication sells (or gets viewed), so the author stays employed.

That’s all I can assume that is going through Steven’s head when he wrote the article, because he manages to contradict himself in a matter of paragraphs.

Steven wants Sun to embrase Linux in a better fashion and believes that Solaris x86 is simply a business move to steal customers away from Linux. Even though, he himself points out that we ported Star Office to Linux more quickly than the x86 version. So he says we should support Linux more, but when we do we are undermining it. Good one. Loser.

Maybe the reason we released a Linux version first is because we know it is more worth while spending the money on developing because that is where the user base is. But why say that, it’s not sensationalist and doesn’t promote readership.

If you want one fantastic reason why we should nurture radio, and preferably encourage innovation, go see The Day After Tomorrow.

Bret from Not The West sums up our Perth Blog Nite plans from the Perth Weblogger Meetup.

I’ve given up on using the trial of PulpFiction. It runs like a three legged donkey in a greyhound race. I’d be comfortable if the speed issue related to retrieving feeds, but it’s all in the user interface, and much too annoying. I’ll wait for a future release and try it again.

Last night was the third Perth Weblogger Meetup. We changed the venue to the heart of the city, down a flight of steps and into a small pub with crispy carpet and a typical english feel.

Attendees were Bret, Mark, David (with photo), Ben, Roni, Liam and Anthony. A record number.

Amongst the beer, chips and wedges the flow of discussion wildly fluctuated from the time travel tail of John Titor, iPods, Duff & Rove (where is Duff now?), the Australian population, or lack thereof, and wickedly large black boots.

Reading everyone else’s blogs about the event seems to confirm that everyone enjoyed it. It’s a great bunch and each time we add to the fold with equally as easy going people. Any other Perth bloggers who haven’t been, the next one is only a month away. It’ll be great to add a few more (read as world domination).

I downloaded the 15 day trial of PulpFiction, the new RSS/Atom Feed Reader from Freshly Squeezed. I then spent a few hours using the in-built filters to sort the 71 feeds I currently subscribe to. Importing the feeds from NetNewsWire Lite was as simple as exporting and importing the OPML file. Filtering is just like the feature in Mail.app, and did take some time to organise. It’d be nice to see a drag and drop feature for filtering, but I guess the pain is at the start and sorting from now on will be much quicker.

First impressions :

Mail Like Interface. I love the look. Organising it like Mail.app is a winner for me, given that I’ve used it for over a year now it’s all nice and familiar.

Bugs. A few bugs still seem to exist. The messages window snaps back to the highlighted post when you scroll down the list. If you close its inbuilt browser window and it’s downloading something, like a large MPEG, it won’t close the connection, continuing the download in the background. That’s not good when you closed it in the hope it would stop downloading. It only seems to stop when you close the whole application.

Cascading Style Sheets. Using CSS to transform the way the posts are viewed is cool, it makes it much easier to digest each article, fun and personal.

Labels. I’m not sure if I’ll use Labels. I don’t use them anywhere in OS X, and given I filter feeds into folders I’m not sure how it’ll be handy. I’m keeping it in mind though.

Search. I haven’t needed to do a search yet, but I’ve no doubt this feature will come in handy.

Persistent Storage. I love the idea of storing old feeds. We’ll see the impact it has over the next few days. I’m hoping that it will remember all the feeds I’ve read and not duplicate articles like NetNewsWire does sometimes.

AppleScript. The AppleScripts made available will be worth keeping an eye on.

Speed. Most noticeable is the speed. At times it is very slow, even hanging occasionally. No doubt it is a bug because I can’t see how only 71 feeds is overloading it, and it happened before I started to use filtering which would be the main CPU hog. This could unfortunately ruin usability for me.

Everyone knows that 1.0 releases should often be avoided because of prevalent bugs. Especially when money is involved. Saying that, I’m in two minds whether I’ll buy a license just yet, or go back to NetNewsWire Lite. I love the new features, but if it continues to be as slow as I’ve noticed I’m not sure I’ll be able to bear with it. It might be worth waiting for a later version. I’ll give it a few days.

I remember when upgrading Movable Type was easy. That was before I forgot how I installed it in the first place and before I had 391 posts.

Today I upgraded to 3.0D, and managed to extend the process out to several hours. Fortunately it’s almost back to normal, though you might find some bugs here and there. Just like the comment system which isn’t working at the moment. That’s not a bad feature given the ratio of spam to actual comments I get.

All in all it looks good. The feel is nicer, and I like the way it archives using the post name rather than a number. The features included in the comment system are really appealing, when I get it working. However, overall I don’t think anyone will notice.

I’ve had to ditch a few features I used to include. Like the related Amazon links and some RSS feeds from news sources. Again, I don’t think anyone will notice.

All in all, an unnoticeable upgrade, but being a geek I enjoyed the process.

Wow, Google has a Blog and so far the two entries have been - well - adverts. One about the companies Blogger tool, and the second for job vacancies. I’m sure they understand that Blogs aren’t about direct advertising. There are plenty of web pages that they can use for that, what blogs are great at are communicating more personally with their communities. I’m looking forward to reading more about what makes the company tick rather than learn that I’m supremely under-qualified and under geographically talented for their new employment positions.

I’m sure they’ll get the hang of it soon. We hope.

I must have it.

Via engadget.