July 2007

My websites are all hosted on a Dreamhost account, so I use their IMAP servers for my mails. However, I do keep a local copy of my Inbox in Thunderbird if I’m offline and wanna have access to my last recently received messages (mails are moved away from the inbox to an archive folder after 30 days).

I recently noticed that the inbox file got extremely big (80mb, too much for a few hundred messages, most of them without attachements) and discovered an interesting option the properties page of my Inbox: Rebuild Index. It basically seems to delete your inbox and fetch it again from your imap server. Result: 5mb inbox file, instead of 80mb.

I usually do fill out questionnaires and most of the time they are really well prepared. But sometimes they just suck - most of the time when it’s a Word document. It’s more work for me, more work for the one who analyzes the questionnaire and probably also more work for the one who created it - the format gets screwed up after some inserts, especially if you just do a table layout and it’s definitely easier to edit an online questionnaire if you find a typing error.

The questionnaire I received today was from a big Austrian IT company (sort of, they hired some master students). I actually thought that they could do better and would check the thing before mailing it - they asked about the corporate image, too. I wouldn’t work for them but a friend who will do his internship there in a few months (so I better be quiet now ;) ).

I got a Pownce account and still four invites to give away. Leave a comment if you wanna have one.

The last few days I had some time to create a lifestream, as you can find some here and there.

It was actually pretty simple thanks to Mark Pilgrim’s Universal Feed Parser. I simply stuffed all my personal feeds into a dict, including the source description for different styles, text,…; did the feed parsing, collected all entries, sorted them and wrote them to an html file (I was a bit shy about an online solution due to some speed, performance and privacy concerns - at least not everybody can see my virtual-personal actions for every second of my life).

All in all the hardest part was getting that damn thing running on Dreamhost via a cronjob (mainly because I’m using my own version of Python, own modules,…).

Since I deactivated Extended Live Archives for this blog (because nobody really used it and it adds code and style sheets to the page) I played around with some code from the web to generate a Wordpress archive page which would group together years and months of blog posts (yeah, I can really speak of “years” and “months”, Stopbeingcarbon.com is now over three years old).

One drawback I found by accident is the query number for this specific code. years*12+n (which results in about 600 queries for my blog). Not so good.

So I had a look at my mysql logs and found a reoccurring line which selects a single post via an id. Googling brought up some results with get_permalink() as the malefactor. The get_permalink() function takes an id of a blog post and returns the permalink. Which is nice, but I already had the post, I just needed the permalink.

By copying the function, removing one line (the post-loading-thing) and renaming the argument I had a new function which would give me the permalink from a post object. Outcome: query count is down to one tenth and I’m happy (as well as my db server).

Hello, Thanks for the tip. We greatly appreciate the time that you’ve taken to help us keep Flickr a community free of spam. We’ve scrubbed the Flickrverse of the spam and have terminated their account. Kind regards, Michelle

Flickr is really the only website I know which says “Thank you” for reporting spam.

flickr_likes += 1;

About a week ago I’ve installed Mozilla’s newest alpha version of Gran Paradiso, the next version of Firefox. Why did I “switch”? Because Firefox 2 took more and more memory (150mb+) over time (sometimes even after five minutes) and had some real problems with Flickr the last few weeks - it wouldn’t respond for a few seconds after loading a new image.

So what’s new in Gran Paradiso? The alpha looks exactly like Firefox 2 and doesn’t have any special features I’m aware of. However, some things have seemed to change under the hood: memory consumption is at about 90mb after running for a few hours, the history menu (which was awfully slow in Firefox 2) is now quite snappy and page rendering seems to have been improved too.

The most popular Add-Ons do not work yet with Gran Paradiso if you want to download them from the Mozilla website directly. But you can edit the install files (the .xpi file format is just a .zip file) and change the version numbers. I’m currently running WebDeveloper, Firebug, del.icio.us and Adblock Plus and just experiencing some minor problems with Firebug and WebDeveloper (Firebug seems to cancel the loading of some websites, but you can disable it for special domains, WebDeveloper doesn’t close some windows correctly).

One last word: Gecko 1.9 passes the ACID 2 test (which actually doesn’t say anything, it’s still nice to see a smiley).

So, the Vista problem is now fixed, the guy bought a new wlan access point and - voilá - the thing’s running just fine. Well, at least the Vista machine, had some problems on an older XP system with a Siemens PCMCIA card - the damn thing should support WPA but it doesn’t.

I shortly wanna tell you what I did the last semester. There were some boring subjects, some partially interesting ones and some which were really a challenge. Building an AIS Viewer with C#/.NET was indeed a challenge and it will be for another month - I’ll work for the company which provided the project in August. We had a pretty long way to go but finally the whole thing looks quite good and we are quite proud of it.

The next semester starts at the end of September but I’ll do some research during holidays (it’s the last but one) for my bachelour’s project - Parallel Processing.

I just had a problem with Windows Vista and an older Wireless LAN Router (Siemens). Several other people seem to have this problem too (the driver just disconnects), especially annoying if you’re traveling and you depend on the hotel’s wlan. Fortunately it was not my notebook but now I’m even more confident that I won’t buy another computer with an OS from Microsoft - Apple, I’m coming!