Posts
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The trouble with telephony
I might as well have called this entry voice chat != IP telephony. I’ve been think about Voice over IP for a while now and reflecting that the IP telephony people are kind of wandering around in the giggly weeds because they keep taking about crazy things like sending DTMF tones over the internet, and needing special hardware and all kinds of crazy stuff that totally goes against the e2e (end-to-end) principles of the internet. I mean, why bother with all that when you can just set up an e2e connection between two computers and start talking? Finally I got the answer, which is that internet telephony people are not talking about voice chat, they are talking about telephones.
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New computer and Camino
Got myself a new computer now. The old one was getting pretty old (2 years old almost exactly) and sloooooowwww and not enough disk space. I was actually at the point where I had to build mozilla on the other computer because I didn’t have enough space. Now I’ve got 60 GB of space, and a nice new faster 1 GHz processor and some other nifty unexpected benefits like more pixels on the screen (although the size didn’t change) and some other stuff. I think the battery lasts longer.
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New feature, view the docbook source
So, I added a feature to view the docbook source for those documents that actually have it. So far it’s only activated in the ICT section but I’ll probably turn it on for the other parts as well. The idea is just that you can add ?show_source=YES to the end of the URL and get the DocBook (XML) source. If it’s not DocBook, nothing will happen because everything else is just XHTML anyway, you might as well just view the source in the browser.
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Wi-Fi signal strength vs. channel
I was having all kinds of trouble with my Airport base station, the signal just wasn’t cutting through the house and I would keep losing my signal and Mail would just complain and Camino would complain etc. So I switched the channel from 11 to 6, and now, no problem. I have four bars where I used to have nothing.
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No more .php
It’s all gone. It’s all AxKit now.
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DocBook: What's not to like???
Everytime I read about DocBook there’s one thing everyone says, it’s complicated. Well I don’t get it. DocBook is not complicated. I mean, sure it’s got a few hundred different elements, but you don’t actually need most of them. You basically need, book, article, section, title, para, ulink, table, and informallist. That’s it. All of those, except for section and title, map directly onto XHTML. Section and title, are actually better than HTML once you get used to how they work, and they make the magic that makes DocBook so much better than HTML because it’s structured, not just presentational. Then there’s the awesome XSLT stylesheets from Norman, so all you really need to do is make a few changes in the params.xsl file and write up a CSS file, and you’re set to go. It’s got all kinds of nice features like automatic table of contents building, indexing, etc. And if you ever discover you need to add a reference, or a quotation, you just pull out the reference and it explains what to do (with examples). You insert the right tags, and the XSLT does a nice baseline formatting job for you automatically. You can tweak to your heart’s content.
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Latent Semantic Analysis
It’s the technique used in Mac OS X’s Mail program to catch spam, it’s patented :-( and it’s described in an awesome paper An Introduction to Latent Semantic Analysis (PDF) by Landauer, Foltz and Laham. Wow, check this out:<blockquote>
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My magic box
I just read Soekris Router Project . Soekris in case you haven’t probably heard of it is a little company that makes these fantastic little PC-compatible chipsets that are totally solid-state, no moving parts, DC power, just the basics, a couple of ethernet ports, a PC card slot or two, a CompactFlash slot for the media, and a nifty-looking box.
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Reboot videos
Reboot is a tiny little conference held in Denmark somewhere, but they got all kinds of cool speakers this year and made videos of them all. Based on the cartoon summary I I wanted to watch the video of Tim O’Reilly s talk. It was good .. I recommend it. He talked about open source, and the move from software- oriented world to a data-oriented world. (via multiplicity )
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Not long ago
In a galaxy close, close by, my hit counter moved into five digits. Woo hoo!
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