Month: June 2006

With my trip to Russia rapidly approaching and me going nuts planning the whole thing, I spend a lot of thinking power trying to figure out the biggest dilemma so far – should I take my laptop with me or not?

There are pros and cons to both answers and so far they are pretty equal. What I lack is a few really good reasons to have my laptop with me.

I won’t be doing much computer work during my vacation (my will power has already been tested before). I will have problems with Internet connectivity anyway. And I don’t have a good bag to carry both my digital camera and laptop. Having two bags with me (apart from that huge one with the rest of my non-digital stuff) absolutely sucks.

On the other hand, I’ll have plenty of free time (lots of several hour long plane trips). I could use my laptop to backup photos from the flash cards, and post-process them when I’d have time. Post-processing pictures from two weeks of travelling will require a lot of time and effort, and it would be good to split it in several sessions, rather than do it all at once when I come back.

Although this is still an unsolved dilemma, so far it looks like I won’t be taking my laptop with me, unless I find a good reason to do otherwise. Or until I find a good bag that’ll fit both my camera and laptop. (Hint: something along the lines of Lowepro Computrekker AW or its Plus edition)

I came across an excellent tip about mixing rm and find commands in Linux shell.

The only thing I’d add to it is a bit of safety. Before executing the mix of find and rm, run the find command with the same options, but without rm. It will print out the files that match your search. These files are about to be deleted, so it’s a good thing to review them first.

By the way, I do exactly the same thing when working with SQL. If I need to delete something, I first create a SELECT statement that matches everything I need gone. And only when I am sure about the results, I change the SELECT to DELETE.

It’s been ages since I deleted something that I didn’t intend…

Update: Obviously, I haven’t read the comments before posting. My suggestions has already been suggested.

Bloglines are asking for some freedback. If you are too lazy to click through and read their post, “freedback” is basically your regular feedback, but which can be found in blogs by Bloglines stuff. If you want to complain about something, just blog about it and use “bloglines” and “freedback” words in that post. They’ll catch it. Or so they say.

As much as I like the concept of coining a term for this type of feedback, I hate this implementation. “Freedback” doesn’t really mean anything to me, and thus hard to remember and long to type. Maybe that’s because English isn’t my native language. I don’t know.

Now for some real Bloglines freedback… Things that I think need improvement:

• User interface. I have a few problems of my own, but I’ve added a few things to the list after pushing one of those regular users (read: non-technical) to use Bloglines. I can elaborate on this if anyone wants to hear (let me know).
• Feed fetching intervals. I’ve blogged about it a few times already. Almost none of my feeds are updated once an hour. Only the most popular (like Slashdot, and del.icio.us/popular) are close to that mark. Everything else lags behind. Sometimes for days.
• Little things. There are a whole bunch of little things that aren’t worth the whole post, but which are annoying when confronted over long periods of time. Tags is one thing. It’s 21st century already, and I just can’t live without tags. I am dying. Better integration with other webservices. Like LiveJournal for example. Why can’t my friends list be automatically synchronized with my Bloglines account? Things like these…

But despite all the changes that I wish to see made to Bloglines, it’s still the best alternative out there. I’ve tried them all (and keep trying) and none other service or application provides this level of quality, integrity, and stability. Seriously, keep it up guys!