Tim Bray explains why XML doesn’t suck.

Earlier tonight I loaded DimDim on my home server and did a quick test. Looks pretty good.

I was able to connect to it from my desktop and stream a presentation (audio, slides, desktop sharing, etc.) to my laptop on the LAN as well as to Nate over the net. According to IPCop it was using about 70Kbps each way on average, bursting up to about 300Kbps each way at times.

After I do some more testing, I’ll try to post some instructions on how to get it set up. It wasn’t hard, but I did have to switch my Java VM from Blackdown to Sun’s Java VM.

More later…

Back in January I put together a new desktop, but for some reason I never got around to buying a new UPS to go with it. So today, while I was out picking up some other items, I used a $20 gift card I had kicking around and picked up an APC BE325R at Office Depot for $19.99. Not a bad price.

The BE325R is discontinued, and it will only give me a minute or two of backup power, but I think that’s all I need. I turn off my desktop when I’m not using it anyway, so I just need something to condition the incoming power and to give me enough time for an orderly shutdown if the power goes out.

Right now it’s doing it’s initial 16-hour charge…. we’ll see how it goes.

Did the IPCop 1.4.14 and 1.4.15 updates tonight and rebooted the box. Everything appears to be working and no problems were encountered… contrary to what others claimed.

IEC is a python library “designed to help you automate and control an Internet Explorer window.” Quoth the project page:

You can use this library to navigate to web pages, read the values of various HTML elements, set the values of checkboxes, text boxes, radio buttons etc., click on buttons and submit forms.

Sounds cool… if you use IE. Bleh.

The Snyppets page contains “a bunch of miscellaneous Python code snippets, recipes, mini-guides, links, examples, tutorials and ideas, ranging from very (very) basic things to advanced.”

Python for Fun has a collection of simple scripts that each demonstrate some basic tasks:

They are aimed at intermediate programmers; people who have studied Python and are fairly comfortable with basic recursion and object oriented techniques. Each program is very short, never more than a couple of pages and accompanied with a write-up.

A simple game, some GUI building, the classic Towers of Hanoi, and others are included.

Peter Norvig has an article up about how to write a spelling corrector that’s getting quite a bit of attention. The explanation of the code and theory behind it is really interesting stuff.

If you check the built-in help screens in Pine, it says that you can use the H key to view full headers for email. But if you try it, it says that command isn’t available. For some reason, you need to enable that command in the setup screens before it will work.

Press Main Menu, Setup, Config, and then scroll down to the following and select it (X):

[ Advanced Command Preferences ] ... [X] enable-full-header-cmd

Exit the setup screen (saving changes) and you should be set.

After emerging MythMusic on my brother’s (soon to be finished) MythTV rig, I got the following error at the end of the run:

* Regenerating GNU info directory index... * Processed 127 info files; 1 errors install-info: No such file or directory for /usr/share/info/bashref.info.gz

After a little hunting, I was able to find the solution on the Gentoo forums (thread). Basically, it’s just an old symbolic link that is not needed. The solution is to simply unlink it:

# unlink /usr/share/info/bashref.info.gz

Seems to have worked.