notes from Ken

Comment spam struck for the first time tonight. In retailiation, I’ve installed DNS-anti-spam and Wordpress Hashcash.
We’ll see how it goes.

Given how much help I’ve gotten from some people’s random pages talking about their experience with this library or that and often posting little examples, I’ve been thinking about trying to put more of my random crap experimentation on the web. I’ll do this because I’ve gotten so much help from similar […]

I wanted to store a few things for Watcher. It had to remember some preferences (the URL for the RSS feed, some timing options) as well as some state (etag, last modified, and the last seen entry from the RSS feed).
I figured a nice simple Windows Registry wrapper was just a google […]

I re-subscribed to World of Warcraft (before my previously paid for month ran out, so there was never actually a time when I wasn’t subscribed). They made substantial progress on the stability woes. It’s not perfect, but I’ve been able to play as much as I’ve felt like lately.

All of the GUI toolkits that I have used only allowed updates to GUI elements from the main thread. In order to affect the GUI from another thread, the toolkit provides a safe way to post a message or event from another thread which will be handled by the main thread.
The first […]

On the drive home today I had the idea that I could write a traffic simulator and fool around with various scenarios to see how all the stupid traffic got clogged up in front of me.
I fetched and installed VPython because I had used it before to play with visualization. Pretty quickly […]

Last night I read about Wil Wheaton’s experience with the Debian Sarge installer rc2. He said it’s easy to use and works. I’ve been a Debian user for years on my servers. Every few years I make a half-hearted attempt to see what Debian’s desktop environment is like, but […]

I’ve cancelled my World of Warcraft account. I advise anyone considering getting WoW to wait until they get it to work.
WoW apparently was more stable during the beta.
Because of they handle refunds (they don’t give them), I’m paid up through 2/4. If it works by then I may […]

A few months ago I started using Thunderbird’s built-in RSS aggreator. This is the first RSS aggregator that I’ve actually used past the initial playing-with-it phase. It’s okay, but it only lives on one machine. I regularly use at least three machines.
I could use one of the web-based aggregators, […]

Sonos Multi Zone Digital Music System -play digital music from PC in any room
This looks neat.

The friend I mentioned in the first post about Watcher has released Watchr, his take on this app.

Watcher 1.1 is now available from its home page.
New in 1.1:

Changed the default feed URL to everyone’s public photos tagged with flowers on flickr
Created an icon
Some window layout tweaks
Removed extra embedded installer for exe file; app is now
installed from the output of py2exe.
Changed default photo slide time from 2 seconds to 10
[…]

Lots of trying to find a good way to make an icon (including: exporting from Photoshop using a file export filter that knew how to write .ico, writing script to convert .gif to .ico, and browsing free icon sites for something I liked).
Finally settled on using LiquidIcon, a freeware icon editor to hand-roll a crappy […]

I forced myself to make a release of Watcher last night. I feared if I didn’t release it then it might languish on my disk like all of my other little gadgets. Forcing myself to release it meant I had to finish it at least enough to not be entirely embarrassed […]

Greasemonkey is a firefox extension that is to JavaScript as user stylesheets are to CSS.
I can’t decide if I’m fascinated or horrified.

Last night at around 1:00 a.m., A friend and I were discussing an application that watched a Flickr RSS feed and popped-up IM-alert style notifications when new photos were posted.
Over the course of the next 8 hours or so, Watcher was born.
It’s my first released application written in wxPython. It’s crude and […]

A few months ago I started using an RSS reader to help read a lot more blogs (and sites) than I had been regularly reading. Reading all these blogs has in some part exacerbated the itch I have to write things and post them to the Internet where, presumably, nobody will read them. […]

The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software is an interesting read.

I’ve been doing some reading today.
I finally picked up Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters and have been reading it. It’s interesting. Some of it is duplicated on the web site but a bunch is not and it’s nice to have it in nice bound form.
How to fix mom’s […]