I have moved my blog to a new address. Please update your bookmarks to:
http://jlp.holodeck1.com/blog/

2004-12-31

 

PubSub

PubSub logoThere are more and more blogs and news sources appearing on the internet every day. It is becoming quite a challenge to filter out only the topics that interest you. RSS, Atom and similar feeds help a lot, but they are more site centric and not content centric. What I was searching for a few days ago was something like Google, where you enter a search string and then get the list of results. But I also wanted all these results to be delivered to me automatically, when they appear on the internet. And so I found PubSub.

PubSub is a free service that enables you to define some subscriptions (like searches in Google, but more advanced). PubSub then watches for all new content that gets created on sites in its database and if it finds a match for your subscription it immediately notifies you about that. Notification can be sent using e-mail, SMS and instant messaging protocol Jabber/XMPP for example. If you don't have a Jabber/XMPP client yet, they even offer a special sidebar extension for Mozilla Firefox that uses this standard IM protocol.

After using PubSub for a couple of days I can say it is working very well. If you need something like this I suggest you try it. It is free, so you have nothing to loose.


2004-12-29

 

Building a new computer

Unfortunately this computer is not for me :( Our family friend has just bought a new computer system and everything that belongs to it and so they asked me if I could set it up for them. of course I said yes as I like to help and I like to do things like this.

When I arrived at the scene we were all in for a little surprise. Even when I entered the soon-to-be-computer-room the number of boxes seamed a little high. When we started to pull out the computer chassis out of one box it was extremely light and it became clear that they (computer store EnaA) only sent computer components. So I had to go back home to fetch some tools and thermal paste to be able to build the new machine. All went well, well almost. I was again angry at the stupid connectors that connect front panel chassis things to motherboard. Why do they have all these little connectors? So frustrating! It would be so much easier if they just had some standard single and bigger connector instead of this mess.

Computer is now running and it is running very fast and quiet. Here is a list of components:

They got it for 1167€€. Windows XP and all drivers are already installed and now I only have to install some software like Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org.


2004-12-26

 

Thank you, Poland!

Brez programskih patentov v Evropi!A big BIG "Thank you!" goes to Poland. Why, you may wonder. Well, the Polish Minister of Science and Information Technology, Wlodzimierz Marcinski, made a special journey to Brussels to demand that the Software Patent directive be dropped from the agenda. I have already talked about how dangerous this directive is for opensource software developers, small and medium sized companies and all of us. It is totally unacceptable in its current form and could lead to the same awful patent situation USA is in now. Now we have more time to warn our friends and coworkers about it and maybe even contact our representatives in European Parliament. Oh and you can sign a special thank you letter for our hero, Wlodzimierz Marcinski.

I have another great news about software patents in EU. Slovenian software developers section KODA.SI is also officially against software patents. I hope proper officials in our country will listen to them and us and vote against the directive when time comes.


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