Mon, 28 Feb 2005
mutt-ng
It looks like mutt development is starting to pickup again. For those not familiar with it, mutt is the best email client out there. Development has forked and there is a new mutt-ng project. Kyle Rankin has written up a little summary. So far, it's mostly just integration of many of the third-party patches that have been available for a while. Since the Debian package includes many of these patches already, including one of the most important, header caching, that's not too exciting.
Two of the new features included in mutt-ng are a sidebar and nntp support.
The sidebar is similar to those in most gui mail readers which shows the number
of messages in the folders in your mailboxes. With
pager_index_lines set, mutt basically looks like a text-mode
version of the common three-pane interface in most gui clients. I'll probably
unsubscribe from the exim-users mailing list once the newsreader works since I
can just read the gmane group. Right now,
trying to read a usenet message causes a segfault unfortunately.
mutt-ng seems a bit slower too. Returning from the pager to the index takes an extra second or so.
Debian packages for sid are here:
deb http://people.debian.org/~nobse/debian/ unstable/
tech » mail | Permanent Link
Show stdin in a Web Browser
This is brain-dead simple, but useful.
For example,
$ pandoc example.rst | stdin2www
Sun, 27 Feb 2005
In Bubble Wrap Champ
I'm an In Bubble Wrap champ! I love free books, and today I got my first free
book from In Bubble Wrap,
Creating Customer Evangelists
In Bubble Wrap is an advertising program run by 800ceoread in which you can win free business stuff, mostly books, every day. Thanks go to Seth for the head's up.
In other free book news, I have Paul to thank for a free copy of The Number.
I haven't finished reading it yet, but so far it's pretty good. The Number
Its discussion of retirement being a rather new concept is pretty interesting. One hundred years ago, most people worked until they died. Then, people started to live longer, get kicked out of their jobs, and die in poverty. Then came Social Security. Next up, long lives requiring savings somewhere north of -1.5% during the productive years.
ChangeThis Gets Lazy
ChangeThis, the publisher of cool little "manifestos", has gotten lazy with their latest batch. ChangeThis manifestos are digital pamphlets that focus on one specific topic. They usually short enough to read in one sitting, but packed with more information than you can fit on PowerPoint slides (not that I encourage the use of PowerPoint). The format is similar to slides, but they are designed to look good both on the screen and printed out. What makes them special is the thought that has gone into the design, making them difficult to avoid reading once you have opened one up. The content is generally a call to action or the author's insight into their particular area of expertise.
For example, they've taken a number of Joel Spolsky's essays (which are already compelling reading) and formatted them as manifestos.
This week, they've released two manifestos which, as they'd say on Sesame Street, are not like the others. The first, Shhh!, contains little cards that can be printed out and given to annoying strangers talking on cell phones. The design is clean, and the idea is cute, if somewhat tired. It doesn't follow ChangeThis philosophy, though. There's no individual behind it and it's not presenting much of an idea other than not to be rude on one's cell phone.
The second misfit is called Two Tomatoes, and actually
is some kind of manifesto telling consumers what kind of tomatoes to
buy, I guess. I'm not really sure what the content is because it's not
readable on my screen. Except for the cover page, it doesn't look like
anything else that ChangeThis has released.
Here's a typical page from a manifesto:
And here's the tomato one.
Sun, 20 Feb 2005
NyQuil > Robitussin
I've been sick with a head cold for almost a week. Following the sore throat, fever, and mucus flood, my cough set in a few days ago. Denisa bought me some Robitussin Honey Cough Syrup. It's supposed to work for 6-8 hours per dose, but I was lucky to get an hour of suppressed coughing out of it. Coughing all night does not make for a happy patient nor wife.
So last night I bought some NyQuil. Actually, I bought the Wal-Mart generic version. That stuff is fabulous. It stopped my cough, and I slept straight through the night.
If your stuck with the lesser cough medicine, you might want to chase it with a Tylenol, Sudafed, and a shot of whisky which should make up for the extra ingredients in NyQuil. (Note: I am not a doctor)
Fri, 18 Feb 2005
Where Google Sucks
I was trying to think of Suze Orman's name while composing an email today. I could picture her face, and I know she's a popular speaker and author on personal finance. So I tried searching for different combinations of "female", "financial advice", "speaker", "author", "personal finance", etc. That didn't get me anywhere, so I tried searching on Google Images and threw "blond" in there. No luck.
Eventually, I gave up and went to Amazon to look for personal finance books. None of her books were in the Most Popular list, but a picture of one of her books happened to show up in the Listmania! section on the right.
I'm sure all of those social network companies maintain the kind of metadata on individuals that would be necessary for this type of search to work, but it needs to be web-accessible, and I'm not sure who would maintain such data on third-parties who aren't part of the network.
As an aside, Google also needs to update their advanced search so that date searches can be more granular than the current past 3/6/12 months options. Remarkably, Bloglines doesn't even support date ranges. Luckily, Straw, my aggregator, does. That allowed me to quickly find a post I had read this morning about yet another new social networking company.
Sun, 06 Feb 2005
Excessive Gratitude or the Return of Written Correspondence?
Yesterday, I received a thank-you note from my friend, Mike. He hasn't recently gotten married, had a child, or had a birthday (at least, not that I know of). In fact, I hadn't bought Mike a gift for anything. He sent my wife and me a note thanking us for having him and his girlfriend, Lisa, over for dinner. It was a very nice note, but it seems completely unnecessary.
My mother always told me how important it is to send thank-you notes after receiving gifts, but I'd never heard of sending them after being invited to somebody's home. I would assume that Mike is just extremely polite, but his note was the second such note we've received in the past couple of months. After a little party we had, my friend, Meagan, sent us a similar note.
Did I miss a lesson by Miss Manners? Is American society becoming gracious? Or do people just want to take advantage of the fewer and fewer opportunities to actually use hand-written correspondence?
