A Best Offer Online Daily site on the Internet which shall remain unnamed publishes an RSS feed, showing their offer of the day with some descriptive information. Let’s call it format X, and location A. After a month or 2, they change the format of that file to format Y, still at location A. 3 days later, format Y moves to location B. A month later they change to format Z at location B. 3 months later, format P at location B. 5 months later, format Q at location C. Funny note there, format P at location B is still there, it just shows the same old item every day and is not cleaned up.

I use this RSS feed in an application and am pretty fed up trying to keep up with their flying shit implementation of RSS. I can’t imagine everyone goes to their site every once in a while and updates their RSS reader to yet another new location. Am I missing the point of RSS? I thought it was fire and forget… Sigh.

Dear Lazyweb,

Is there an extension for Firefox that makes it stable puts quotes around every word in a google query you do? I’m getting sick and tired of a search engine trying to “improve” my searches by polluting the results with matches that have nothing to do with the query thanks to changing the search words (eg junos->juno, newest->new, etc). If not, anyone feel like cooking one up? I will be eternally grateful, or will have to switch to Bing™ 🙁

Yesterday, I upgraded my Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10 laptop (fresh install) to Jaunty 9.04. Turns out this is a typical non-tested Ubuntu upgrade, as literally everything broke. My wifi is non-functional with the 2.6.28 kernel delivered with 9.04, luckily downgrading to the 8.10 kernel made it work fine. Purged linux-generic and all its descendants, so that’s “fixed”.

Next to that, I logged into KDE only to find the main panel missing. Having no clue how to fix this nor feeling like googling (especially since at that point my wifi did not work), I moved my old .kde out of the way and had it create a new one, so it worked again. Copied over some rc files for frequently used apps so most config could be saved, luckily.

When I “unplug” (turn off) my internal bluetooth adapter, or the laptop goes into suspend meaning the bluetooth sleeps too, the “KDE4 Bluetooth Framework” crashes. Somehow the bluetooth system tray icon still works though, it’s just odd.

I get most notifications a few times now, once in a tooltip popup from the system tray icon, and once in a generic yellow rectangle from KDE, containing the exact same text. How’s that for thoroughness!

The network manager icon no longer shows wifi strengh, it’s now a very ugly icon with some kind of antenna with radio wave circles around. Uergh.

KDE4’s battery manager icon is really fugly, and I mean “FUGLY could have done it better myself in mspaint in 20 seconds FUGLY”. Luckily, apt-get install kpowersave gets me the old power icon back with a way more useful hover tooltip, so I could remove the battery monitor applet.

Some game developers seem to be really stuck in the 70’s … early 80’s perhaps too. For example, Electronic Arts’ Need for Speed series does not allow you to have a player nickname longer than 8 characters. In the early days, your name was on the license plate, so I could see some reason into having it fit. But since a few years this is no longer the case, it just says NFS. Boo. (note: perhaps in the latest game this may have changed). There are many others who do the same thing.

Yesterday I played Marbles Balance Challenge on the Wii. Enter player name.. ok, there’s a bigass window to enter it in, should fit at least 50 letters in there. S .. i .. D .. 3 .. W .. i .. N .. D … what? WHAT? 8 character limit? Ok, my fault for picking a 9 char nick (which is actually 10 but reduced for IRC purposes), but what the heck? It’s not like the Wii memory can’t handle this… my analog watch probably has enough storage space. I could of course opt for “Tom” but meh. I don’t see the difficulty in allowing longer player names.

To the moron who bound ctrl-down to Lightning in Thunderbird, please roll over and die and/or make me an option to disable this. (possibly there is, but I don’t know where, as there are no real settings for key bindings).

Update: it seems the Mozilla guys are still as great in fixing bugs as they were before – I wonder if this one will also break records in not being fixed (10 years+ anyone?)

Beste Nederlanders en Vlamingen,

“Paranoia” is een zelfstandig naamwoord. Hoewel het in de Van Dale ook bestaat als informeel synoniem van “paranoïde”, lijkt me dit niet geschikt als vervanger, en al helemaal niet in gedrukte artikels of op TV.

Graag vanaf nu weer “paranoïde” gebruiken, dank bij voorbaat.

To the engineer who made the shopping carts at Colruyt (Kessel-Lo):

DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE
DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE
DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE
DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE
DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE
DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE

FYI: Shopping carts in Belgium are usually used in a forward pushing way, and not pulling it.
As such, you NEED to place the non-turning wheels in the correct position (at the rear) or even better, don’t have any at all!
Consequence of this great piece of engineering is everyone constantly cursing and ramming into people and store racks because the carts are mostly uncontrollable.

To the other shoppers: please have some common sense about where to place your cart when you’re not taking it along, or where to stand when letting someone pass.
To the store owners: don’t put sh*t like cardboard boxes and other stuff in the middle of the hallways if you know your store is overcrowded already. Also, redesign it so you actually have a clear way to the checkout instead of filling up 2/3 of the store with customers waiting in line.
To the motherfsckers cutting in line without any shame (nonsurprisingly most are 60+): I hope you die. Today.

(Yes, this was my last time ever entering that store).

This may sound harsh but I got really ticked off trying not to run away screaming today.

nu.nl/column | Taalfouten doen pijn.

So true.

Well, seems I’m on a (blog, har har) roll, "this just in" … via blade on irc:

View this first: Telenet IDTV broadcast

Then this: TV Vlaanderen DVB broadcast at the exact same time

Do we have to consider this to be normal practice?

Edit: it could be perfectly normal if someone messed up the timecodes to overwrite ads (normal practice, and TN probably pays for it) – thanks David 😉

Warning: minimal rant ahead…

WHY do some weblogs not put the full article in their RSS feed. I can understand for some large sites that they want the reader on their own site because of (sigh) ads placed on-site, but certainly for some (semi-)personal weblogs, this really doesn’t make any sense. Perhaps some people don’t know they’re doing it (I don’t have my own RSS feed in my reader..) but I’m usually not very inclined to click on the actual link in my rss reader (btw, tiny tiny rss rocks). Some of the sites doing this: standaard.be, explosm.net, geenstijl.nl, engrishfunny.com … meh.