genehack.org

Up early (for a Sunday) to head up to Gambrill State Park for a bit of hiking. We got to see a big chunk of Rolling Thunder headed south as we drove up north.

(That third photo contains a woodpecker that I just didn’t have enough glass to do justice to. If you click through to the Flickr version, there’s an annotation pointing out where it is. Hint: look near the bases of the trees.)

Lunch in Frederick after the hike, then home for naps all around. More grilling in the evening; beef this time.

Fairly ho-hum Saturday. Spot of running around in the morning, nap with TheChild in the afternoon, and then grilling up some nicely smoky tuna in the evening.

Rather amazingly crap Friday. At least it’s a three day weekend…

Shuffled TheChild off to school in the morning, then got myself to work. Plugged away for a number of hours, then fetched TheChild back from school. Got some dinner into her, and struggled her down to sleep. Not long after, TheWife arrived back home, and we caught up for a bit before staggering off to bed.

Winn Schwartau, heap-big information security guy, is switching
to Macintosh:

In the coming weeks I am going to keep a diary of an experiment that I began in my company at 6PM GMT-5, April 29, 2005.

An experiment predicated upon an hypothesis that the WinTel platform represents the greatest violation of the basic tenets of information security and has become, indeed, a national economic security risk. I do not say this lightly, and I have never been a Microsoft Basher, either. I do not and will not dis any one company without a fair bit of explanation, justification and supportive evidence or experience.

So bear with me as I attempt to document the results of my experiment and I will attempt be fair to myself, my company, our clients and the computing public at large.

Should be interesting to watch.

There’s no shortage of scary news on the avian flu pandemic front. Estimates of up to 7.5 million dead and 30 million needing hospitalization; current mortality rates are around 60%, and human-to-human transmission has possibly been observed.

Hectic day at work — lots of balls in the air. Managed to get most of them into place without dropping too many of them.

TheWife took off in the afternoon on another overnight business trip, so I picked TheChild up from school, and then we headed out to get something to eat before coming home for a bit of playtime. She was really resistant to going to bed, which was pretty frustrating for me.

Dreary, rainy Tuesday. Got quite a bit of catching up done at work, then came home and pushed another Feast On Feeds release out the door.

A partial list of changes:

• Atom support; better RSS parsing.
• Tons of visual tweaks. New “light” CSS file by default; old “dark” file also included.
• Change ‘mark all read’ command so that it leaves ticked items alone.
• Support for per-feed update intervals and item expiration times.
• Fixed a database locking bug (I think).
• Add an index to the feed table; speeds up the feed list display by 5-10 fold.
• Quite a few other minor things — see the CHANGELOG in the tarball.

Here’s some screenshots of the new release:

Here’s the FeastOnFeeds-002tarball. Share and enjoy; questions, patches, feedback — genehack@genehack.org.

The Rude Pundit gives us Hogan’s Heroes for our time.