Pretty Good Age Guesser

April 24th, 2006 • Asides

Nothing big, but I came across this age guesser, looks pretty good.

And yes, it guessed 23, a couple of months more, but what the hell.

Ditching Blogline

April 22nd, 2006 • General

With Bloglines, you never know when it’s going to hit you, you never know when you’ll meet the plumper, when will you get the recent updates, when will it display every item twice. Gotta love Bloglines, huh?

I’m finding myself moving more and more towards minimalism on my desktop, I want simple software to do complex stuff, not the the other way around.

The reason I first moved to Bloglines is that I only had a desktop computer, I couldn’t take my news anywhere, and everytime I travelled somewhere and came back, I had a huge list of updates waiting for me. It felt like a chore to read all these news.

So two years ago I imported my feeds to Bloglines (and thanks God they have an OPML export feature). Back then, Bloglines was the latest and greatest feed aggregator, not Google Reader, not Rojo.

But over time, those posts that I flagged because I found too long to read accumulated. I have a few feeds with more than 100 flagged posts. The problem is, once the feed is updated and you want to read it, Bloglines displays both flagged and new posts. Imagine having to load 101 items just to read the latest.

Plus, there’s no way to scan titles. Some feeds, like The Register aren’t always interesting, but they’re constantly updated. There was no way in Bloglines to just get the titles without the excerpts. I hated that, I’m a double-clicking scanner, I can’t stand this.

I’m not going to go to another web-based aggregator because honestly, all of them suck! They introduce a micro-delay that makes you wait a little more than you’re supposed when you want to read a feed. You click on a feed and instead of seeing all the recent updates, you have to wait for a second or two to get list.

Even with broadband, that’s a problem. I don’t mean to nitpick, but with 200 feeds and bad reading habbits these micro-delays accumulate and I end up spending double the time I’m supposed to spend on reading news. No thanks, I’d rather do something useful, like World of Craft.

I’m ditching Bloglines.

Liferea is the way to go.

Ruby in the Enterprise

April 10th, 2006 • General

Can Ruby be useful in the enterprise? Sure! Of course, that depends on what you’re considering it for, how you define Enterprise, and what day it is (the Ruby community is very active on many fronts, and support that was once lacking is rapidly growing in many areas).

I found this on just another software developer loving life in Austin’s website. It’s amazing how we’ve had the exact same discussion about PHP and the enterprise.

Get over it already.