dwc

GNU Screen, Pork

When I first started using GNU Screen, it was to have a single instance of my email client available all the time. I spent a decent amount of time importing mail from old installations of Outlook, Pine, and other clients from long, long ago, and I wanted to be able to access that mail from anywhere.

Then, something clicked. I started using screen for emerge sessions. Or if I needed to work on my Web server.

I eventually switched to irssi and added it to my screen. This was a diffcult transition, because I really liked X-Chat. But in the end, I valued having a single, universally accessible IRC client over the gooey goodness.

A few months later I started to feel the itch again: I wanted a console-based AIM client. Until recently, I ran Gaim. Out of habit, I always used multiple screen names - one for home, one for work, and one for my laptop. I saw this as nothing more than a hack to get around the fact that AIM's presence support blows. (Which, by the way, Jabber gets right.)

Now, I had seen naim, but was turned off by its use of TOC. I wanted a client which talked OSCAR.

I had also tried BitlBee - which was nice because it let me use my IRC client, but sucked because it was too far behind on libgaim "releases".

Last night, I found pork. I'm finally using one screen name. Finally.

Pattern Recognition

I finished Pattern Recognition last night. I enjoyed it just as much the second time around.

It seems that I'm averaging about one book a month right now. I'd like to be reading more, but I'm usually pretty tired by the time I start reading.

Speaking Of Feeds

Movable Type's templates seem to be wrapping things that I've escaped in CDATA blocks. Blarg.

So much to do.

Minor Improvements

This evening, I quietly published a new version of the UF home page with two minor improvements:

1. Replace some instances of "..." with the HTML entity … (horizontal ellipsis). We're waiting on a few other changes to replace the other instances.
2. Add a document relationship to the University of Florida News feed. We've been using the feed internally for almost 3 years, but for a number of reasons never got around to promoting it publicly. The whole text/xml vs. application/xml vs. application/rss+xml debate was troubling, so I sampled Movable Type and WordPress blogs and decided on application/rss+xml. It's still an open debate, and I'm not convinced I made the right choice.

Sometimes the little victories are rewarding.

And this is only the beginning. I'm planning on converting the feed Real Soon Now to RSS 0.92 (oops, I forgot), and eventually creating RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom feeds. Taylor and Mark have been busy cleaning up the CSS and markup. Soon things will be beautiful.

The Problem With Being Webmaster…

…is that your email address is easy to guess. After our week-long vacation, I found 1500 emails that SpamBayes correctly identified as spam and 500 returned emails that were obviously spammers using our email address to send their crap.