...nwood...

This would be a good time to send wishes for safety and peace and justice in Burma (Myanmar). 3,000 were killed in a similar peaceful protest in 1988.

BANGKOK, Sept. 25 -- ...There were also concerns that the government might use provocateurs to stir violence and justify a crackdown, as it did in 1988. The Burma Campaign UK said its sources had reported the junta ordering large numbers of maroon monastic robes and telling soldiers to shave their heads, possibly to infiltrate the monks...

New York Times: Burmese Monks Protest, Defying Junta’s Warning

[G2:3332 class=g2image_float_left]One of the things I love about city life is discovering micro-communities, new recreation opportunities and coming into contact with rich history. All three of these elements converged for me yesterday in my visit to The South End Rowing Club. A recent dip in Bass Lake (Point Reyes) had reminded me that swimming is a skill that I would really like to improve. So I got to thinking, if I were going to swim in San Francisco, where would I do that?

Armed with a new neoprene cap and goggles from Sports Basement - my loins girded with my favorite orange and green bermudas - I ventured to the South End Club during public access hours and tentatively rang their buzzer.

Wow, JQuery is really coming along. Check out ui.JQuery.com - epecially this photo album

[G2:1865]

I've got to study the source to that sweetness!

Safely Arrived

I hadn't been to Trader Joe's for ages. Here is my Bridgestone MB-5. The Jandd Expedition panniers are stuffed with $155 worth of groceries. I conservatively estimate each bag at 50 pounds. I think this is a personal best. Nothing like hurdling down Bush Street at 8:30 pm with a little extra weight on the bike.

Last week I jumped on an opportunity to do some Drupal crusading in my department at UC Berkeley. We are standardized on VB.NET, but I sensed an willingness to consider alternative solutions for an ailing website that offers very light CMS functionality. I don't know of any framework comparable to Drupal that exists in the .NET world. If you do, comment here and let me know! The functionality already present in Drupal 5.1 allowed me to bring up a fully functioning prototype in my free time.

Tonight I spent a little time getting reacquainted with Elliot's LastFM Drupal module. I see where he got to with the implementation of separate blocks for individual users. I'm mapping the route to fold in a few of my options. I hope to finally get this into Drupal CVS in a couple of weeks at the latest. See the next post for info on the Drupal project that took priority last week.

The Loose Salute on MySpace

Purchase album with no DRM

Sala de Estar: Sabor!

Summary: 4 days (take a Friday and Monday off). 2 nights in huts, 2 night snow camping. Fairly challenging. Not many do cool trips like this.

Tonight I was giving Rhapsody another look. I have been using Napster mainly because it was a little cheaper. Rhapsody.com launched back in Dec 05. You can stream from within a web browser and the kicker is you don't have to use Internet Explorer, and they provide an Firefox extension! Sweet! Only one problem, the XPI installer bombs with an incorrect message about insufficient disk space. (Boo! Bugs!) I did a lot of googling and didn't find anyone with an answer, so I resorted to taking a look inside the XPI to see why it's so TWEEKED.

I figured out the url to the XPI download and then used wget to save it to my disk. (Is there an easier way?)

An XPI is just a zip file, so I unzipped it and pulled up install.js in my trusty editor (Emacs). The problem is right here:

var kilobytesAvailable = parseInt(bytesAvailable / 1024);

By looking here ~/.mozilla/firefox/pjfmmgsq.default/install.log I could see that parseInt is returning a very small negative number. Maybe diskspaceavialable isn't returning an int, or maybe it's just broken? I am not a java programmer and it's late (way past bedtime AGAIN), so I took the brute force approach and commented most of this function out.