WauloK’s BangRocks Blog

I may have finally found a decent RSS Reader. I’ve seen it advertised many times, but had not downloaded it to check it out. After testing dozens of different ones, I’m now giving RSS Bandit a go (yes, arse bandit). Seems to be better than others I’ve had. The last one I tried was Great News, but it kept annoying me. Every time it started up, it’d bring up a window with "Great News was not shut down properly last time, so it’s refreshing the feeds" or something and wait for me to click OK. The problem with this is GN was loaded on Windows startup, so every time I boot up it would come up with this. Next, it’d say it was refreshing channels or something and I’d have to click OK again. If a new version was released, I’d have to click YES or NO to download it or not. Too many popup boxes!

I did find a really nicely designed one called eRSS Reader, but they have a big banner at the top of the reader page.. about 100 pixels in height or so which could not be shrunk nor removed.. just to put their big logo up there. It also would not mark feeds or articles as READ when you clicked on them and there was no "Mark feed as read" option, so you could not tell when you had read all of an article or if it just downloaded another bunch of articles to read. It had a really pretty theme tho. I suppose that’s something

Others I’ve tried which I can remember, but didn’t like: Sharpreader, Abilon, Newsdesk, RssReader, Taskable, Feedreader, Amphetadesk, Awasu.. many more which I cannot think of. None lived up to what I was looking for. Wish me luck with this new one.

I got busy today and finally installed the baby seat I bought when Blake was about 3-4 years old!! I bought Sienna a helmet the other day. She cried when I put it on, but she’ll get used to it. Dunno how she’s gonna go when I strap her into the seat on the bike and go for an actual ride. Probably terrified .. oh well.

This was the other surprise I had for Bec.. not the seat.. I put that together today myself, but I took both our bikes in to a bike shop on Thursday to get fixed up properly and have a full safety check. We bought the bikes about 3 or more years ago when living in Sydney, but when we lived in Kirrawee we would have had to carry the bikes down two flights of stairs to get to the bottom level.. then there’s SFA places to ride. After that we moved to another place but this time DOWN 85 steps. I think I mentioned how much the removalists hated us.. and nowhere to ride there either. Now we are in this new place with NO STEPS and lots of places to ride around.. even off the road, so we should be having some great exercise soon. I have to find Bec’s helmet and mine. I can’t remember if I got her one. Although, up here you are not required to wear helmets, I figure it’s a good example to set for the kids. They both have helmets although since Blake hasn’t ridden his bike anywhere but the backyard I don’t think he’s worn his at all yet.

The only problem with this place is the SUPERSTEEP driveway, so we may have to push our bikes up that the first few times until we get uber-buff.. like in a couple of years or so

I came across an article on Engadget regarding their "Engadget Folding@home team" group for Folding@Home Distributed Computing. Since our server doesn’t really do much with it’s brain, I decided to put it to use working out protein folds.

If you want to join in as well, here’s their team details:

Team Engadget’s F@H team ID is: 39227

From Engadget: "First Team Engadget folder to get 10,000 F@H points gets a Tokyo Flash watch on us". Cool

Blake has just been picked up by his grandfather (nunu) to have a weekend of fun away up north. I’ve got to go pick up Bec from her break, soon.

I’ve been taking Sienna out the last couple of days. We checked out the new Westfield shopping centre in Helensvale a couple of times. Today, I set up three ‘insect bombs’ cans and took Sienna down to the Robina shopping centre to get a few things we were out of. I’ve also been keeping busy helping around the house.. vacuuming, washing, cooking. Something different from my norm. I even finally tidied up my closet and actually folded some clothes

We’ve had some storms and lots of thunder and lightning around lately. Last night was pretty wild with lots of flashy lights outside. You’d think there was an alien spaceship hovering over the house .. there was so much light.

Today, I picked up a CD from Coles which has 101 kid’s brainy games on it. I only just managed to get it installed on his PC and give him a quick go before he had to leave.

He seemed very pleased with it, I’m glad to say

He was very well behaved this afternoon when I picked him up so I thought a surprise might go a long way.

I also picked up a surprise DVD for Bec.. "Ladyhawke".. only $9.95 from Coles. Sweet!

http://www.biteycastle.com/taken.htm

hhehehe

Last Friday I flew down to Sydney. I was due to hop on the plane at 11:45am and got there at 10:30am but when the plane I was flying down in landed it was delayed… and delayed… and delayed… and finally… cancelled. Luckily for me, I didn’t end up flying on it as it had been struck by lightning. Unluckily, I was freezing as the air conditioning was turned on even though it was cold and rainy outside. Luckily, when we had to change flights and grab our bags off the conveyor belt so I managed to grab a jumper out of my bag. Unluckily, I had to wait four hours for the next flight. Luckily, it was the smoothest flight I have ever been on. No turbulance at all.

Friday night, I went with some friends to the Hellfire Club in Darlinghurst. It wasn’t as interesting as I had expected. I had more fun at the goth club "Ritual" when it was on. I even worked there for several months which was great as I got free entry and drinks I sat around but headed off after about one hour. I caught a taxi back home and took ages to get to sleep then kept waking up many many times. Scott had a great time as he picked up. Lucky boy

Saturday, we walked his ‘pickup girl’ back to her car at Darlinghurst and then walked down to Subway to have lunch. After that, we went to the Adyar Online Bookshop and both picked up some stuff there then went back to Scott’s place. We had dinner and he headed off to bed early to catch up on sleep since he had been out until after 4am that morning. I stayed up and watched an episode of Absolutely Fabulous. I had no idea they were still making episodes of that and it turns out they all get together every few years and make 5-6 episodes just for the fun of it. Edina and Patsy had gone out to a Marilyn Manson concert and were talking about Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Patsy had her hair shorter and straight-cut which made her look about 20 years younger. She didn’t have her hair up in a beehive until the short bit after the credits.

On Sunday, we did a bit of shopping at the Broadway shopping centre. We had lunch there. I had a chilli concarne which was very nice with some extra jalapenos and sour cream. I didn’t buy anything but checked out the Games Wizards computer shop and the Newsagency. We picked up a couple of free cds with demo levels of F.E.A.R and something else I’ve never heard of before. We didn’t do a heck of a lot for the rest of the afternoon.

On Monday, Scott and I watched some episodes of Firefly which Scott is really enjoying, then I caught the Light Rail into the city and watched Serenity again. I had seen it several months ago but had not watched Firefly so didn’t really know everything that was going on and whom everyone was. It was even better this time. I was reading an article which had an interview with Orson Scott Card saying he loves Serenity and if nobody can make Ender’s Game as good as Serenity is, he never wants it made and will instead just watch Serenity. Can’t get better praise than that!

I flew home last night and got caught in a huge thunderstorm. There was even too much turbulance to read a book so I just held on. I felt like Elvis Presley — All Shook Up! I couldn’t even listen to the onboard music as there was so much static from the lightning all around the plane. I did briefly hear the end of a song on the comedy channel. It was Monty Python’s "Brave Sir Robin" song. Very funny stuff. I don’t even think it was sung by any members of MP.

Bec and the kids met me at the airport and I think Sienna was the most excited out of everyone to see me. We had to wait about half an hour for our luggage. About a dozen bags came out and then nothing for half an hour and then the rest appeared. Great fun holding onto kids for half an hour waiting for luggage.. NOT!

We hopped in the car and it was really starting to rain. There was so much lightning and wind and rain I could hardly see the road while travelling home. It really was extremely wild. Some people lost power to their homes (I think about 700 of them). We drove through many mini rivers.. with one even over the motorway. I ran into Red Rooster and bought some chicken and chips. It was already after 8:30pm so we didn’t have time to cook dinner for everyone. The staff said people were still going out in the bad weather and buying Red Rooster to eat. Crazy people. I can understand if you are already out and on the way home, but not if you just go out to get RR to eat .. unless you really like driving in heavy rain and wind and hail.

I’ve recently been chatting with my friend Trejkaz about CMS’s mainly and the restrictiveness of them. It seems they and also the other above-mentioned packages are mostly single purpose or make it difficult to write new addons.

We’ve been talking about how people could program something which is a lot easier to work with. He quite likes Drupal as it’s less restrictive compared to the others, but we believe it could go even further.

You see, the problem is that these are programmed individually to their own tasks. Why not have a framework created which can be put to any use? Why limit text entry to go into the forum database or the wiki database and limited to only those areas?

All text typed into a text box should just be entered into a database and referenced. Then when it comes to outputting the text, the application just needs templates to display the text in different ways.

Say you want to reply to a post in a forum. You are just typing in text, the same as you do for a blog post or a wiki post right? All you need to do is add another field to link this new post to the last one. When it comes to displaying it, you just display it a different way with a template. All text should be entered in a standard generic way and reference previous text. Perhaps even a doubly-linked list so it points to what is is replying to (another post, a forum topic, a wiki article, a blog page, etc) and the next one replying to it.

The output is determined by behaviours as defined in templates. Blog posts, forum replies, wiki posts all just reference something else, so you just have a field saying "This post is a reply to a forum post" or "This post is another post to my blog" or "This post is a new Wiki article". Then it doesn’t matter what you or the other users type, it is always entered in the same way. This makes it extremely extensible. You can just define new template behaviours for displaying the text.

Why should a new blog entry or comment be any different to a forum reply or wiki addition? They are all just text being entered.

Now you don’t have the trouble of rewriting a ton of different plugins to display the text, you just write another template behaviour for displaying the text in a different way. Any text entered therefore could be a blog post, a blog comment, a forum post or reply, a wiki article or update to a wiki article, etc.

It’s all just different ways of discussing information. The real beauty should be the behaviour of displaying the text. This way if it’s a new blog entry, it just displays on top of the last blog entry. If it’s a forum post, it just displays after the last post. If it’s a comment, the template displays a link to the blog post and all comments underneath that.

In fact, using this method text entered could be members of many groups. That way, you could have a front page of a news website (eg like PDArcade.com) and you want the same text to appear as a new post in the forum, you just give the post the properties of "News article" and "Forum post" and so it will appear in both places simultaneously. Then, you can reply in the forum or in the comments of the blog and both are relevant and easier to work with. In fact, replies can appear in both areas. If you like, you could set up the "News article" behaviour template to ignore comments therefore making all replies (comments or otherwise) only appear in the forum.

Of course, all text entered would have to be easily moderated and managed, but all of that is done by a site-wide definition of your admin level as is already standard.

All text entered would, of course, be indexed so it may be found in a site search engine easily.

In fact, this could also apply to knowledge base software. You can always set up a behaviour that nobody can reply to the KB entry. Only admins can post text defined as "Knowledge Base".

The possibilities are endless.

I’ve decided my Motorola A1000 is not as crap as I decided it was.

After the firmware upgrade some stuff is fast. It still can reboot for no reason altho that could be the new application I use on it. I haven’t got it set up to use the internet again, but that could be a good thing as it will save me surfing while mobile and using up money. At least with the new application below I won’t really need it anyway.

I wondered if Avant Go was available for Symbian UIQ and it turns out they have a version so I installed it and reactivated my account.

I haven’t had a lot of use for it for ages. I used to synchronise news and other websites before going to work while I lived in Sydney and read the news on the train to work. Since I’ve been living on the Gold Coast, I’ve been driving to work as it’s only a 15 minute drive away. Now, work is sending me up to Brisbane a couple of days a week which is a one hour trip on the train each way. So now I have lots of time to spare. I read Bec’s old VB book and wanted something else so installed Avant Go.

It seems to be a lot better than the version I used a couple of years ago on the Palm so I’m glad of that. A lot easier to use too. I added some more sites to read and now I synchronise it every morning before heading off to work.