March, 11, 2001 archives

i had one of those distraction-free weekend days (not that my weekends are any different from a weekday) where i just got in a groove, this time working on news.php.net. time to fix dinner while the search indexer chews on the larger newsgroups.

of course, in the grand scheme of things, this probably wasn't the project i should have been spending time on. whatever.

a great interview with the author of the phantom tollbooth. what an awesome book.

something i don't understand is why gnu tar doesn't just autodetect tar files that have been compressed with gzip or bzip2 and handle that automatically, instead of making me have to remember the correct magic flag. let the computer do the work, i need to conserve brain cells.

whipped together a quick rss 0.92 (xml) version of this here weblog. it also includes a non-standard <datetime> component of each <item>, that is the date and time of when that entry was made (duh).

i hijacked the 'your personal start page' toolbar button in netscape to point to my my own personal news-aggregator thing. it sends a cookie that it uses to highlight new items (updated bookmarks and new stories). nothing terribly sophisticated, but i find it useful.