Apple Gets a Direct Cash Injection from Google
That's right, because the bastards found us and set up a store right
across the street
from our office. Bringing all those shiny things that look great but
aren't actually all that Steve made them out to be just that much closer.
It was pretty crazy how many people lined up, on a pretty chilly night,
to get the privilege of going into a store and dropping some cash. Apple
sure does know how to cult 'em up good. Especially when you consider that
there are 2 other perfectly good Apple Stores in NY.
Photos!
Last weekend I finally got off my lazy ass and migrated all my old PHP
gallery photos to PicasaWeb.
Yay! One less thing I have to maintain. I used a somewhat hacky Python
script which you can download should you
also be getting as lazy as I am about maintaining your web server.
On StinkPads
My CrapBook Pro decided to give out on me last week. The disk started
spewing I/O errors and it frequently would just lock up hard at the
most inconvenient times, like when I was giving a presentation.
So I got it replaced, with a StinkPad, aka ThinkPad. For all intents and
purposes the StinkPad is a far better laptop than the CrapBook Pro
was. Much longer battery life, wireless that actually works, due to not
having an antenna inside a metal box, and more reliable suspend/resume
in Linux. The only thing so far to really piss me off is the location of
the escape key. But with caps lock mapped to escape it shouldn't be a big
problem.
Of course it's uglier, but actually working and not forcing me to lug
around 2 batteries is worth it.
Yahoo! Pipes
I have to hand it to Yahoo!, Pipes is
pretty cool. Not perfect (as you suspected, I am going to detail some
gripes), but it is nevertheless a great idea.
I have for a long time been pissed off that the Slashdot RSS feed doesn't
have any of the links in it and has ads in it. Come on. Either strip
out the links so I have to click-through and see the ads on the website, or
put ads in the feed. But not both; that's just lame.
So I was wondering if I could make a Yahoo! Pipe that would download the
HTML version of Slashdot, and run a series of regexes on it to produce a
usable feed that had all the links intact. I tried a couple times and couldn't
get pipes to import the HTML version of Slashdot. But recently, they've added
a "fetch page" source, which can fetch any HTML page, allows you cut content
from a particular string to another string, and split using a delimeter.
This, combined with the regex module, was enough to make my wish possible.
See the result here.
The thing that's a pain in the ass is the lack of any kind
of DOM or XPath-style selection. If they had something like that it would be
super easy to pull out the exact things you want and assign them to the
relevent elements of the output feed. But since they don't have anything like
that, you're stuck doing a major regex hack-fest.
At least it's possible, though. Next step: my LJ friends page. Once that's
done in a pipe, I can use Google Reader for everything.
Tangent
On that note, why the fuck doesn't LJ make a feed of your friends page
available? I don't even mean a fancy authenticated feed so you can see private
entries, just a normal feed. I've looked time and again, and the only reference
I've ever found is to some experimental feature that paying users can try.
