Jared's Blog
Removing GNOME
I’ve been quite happy with my choice of software for quite some time now. But recently I’ve been getting annoyed by evince because it’s forgotton how to remember things. It never remembers its window size anymore, or the page you were at in your PDFs. And of course it has no way of setting the browser to use for URL hyperlinks.
Of course I blamed gconf, without really finding out if it’s at fault. I have issues with gconf:
- It smells too much like the Windows registry.
- It’s hard to alter program settings in there, if they get messed up. Apparently gconf-editor is something the GNOME folks didn’t even want to create.
- There’s already a perfectly good dotfile convention.
So I decided to get rid of gconf and everything that uses it, which thankfully turned out to be not too much: gnumeric, DVDstyler, gedit, and a few other things. As a bonus, I replaced gedit with the much faster and more featureful geany!
So long GNOME, you won’t see me again.
Posted on Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Back from the Dead
I notice it’s been almost two years since I’ve written a blog post, and probably about that long since I’ve done anything, really, to this website. The excuse, and it’s a good one, is that I’ve been on a big trip around Australia for most of that time.
But now ordinary old life is coming back, and with it a chance to keep my website updated, and do some really interesting things. So what’s in the pipeline for jared.henley.id.au?
- No more Goodle ads. A long time ago now, I got an email from Google saying that I’d have to update my privacy policy as they were now in bed with Doubleclick and were going to start abusing all my visitors by tracking them with some cookie. I absolutely hate Doubleclick, and the ads weren’t bringing any money anyway, so that’s the end of them.
- A set of randomised links to various websites that I want to support, to replace the ads.
- Most of the personal stuff will disappear.
- A lot more information in the Australia section, now that I’ve travelled all over it and have lots to talk about.
- Lots more posts, probably a new Geek blog, about various things I’ve learned or discovered and want to keep documented.
I have a rather long list of other projects to resurrect too, and new things to start. It’s all quite exciting and daunting.
Posted on Monday, May 31, 2010
Potato and Eggplant Curry
For our birthdays, Pim and I went out to an Indian restaurant, Magic Curries, in Turramurra (sorry, they don’t have a website). One of the dishes we had was a potato and eggplant curry.
This evening while trying to decide what to cook, Pim mentioned that we still had some eggplant in the fridge. Knowing that we still had about 8kg of potatoes, I decided to try this recipe for Vagan Bateta nu Shak
First problem was no tomatoes. Second problem was no cumin. Third problem was no fresh coriander. Oh well. I cooked it anyway without those 3 ingredients.
I did run into trouble with stuff sticking to the bottom of the pot during the frying stage. I added a little bit of water to solve that problem. But other than that things went very well. And it tasted great too.
Posted on Monday, June 9, 2008
Being the “Computer Guy”
Tonight I had the pleasure — actually it was the annoyance — of doing IT support for a colleague after hours. He’s wanting to work from home again (ie telecommute) but couldn’t get the VPN set up, so I got a call for help at 8:20pm. Twenty-five minutes later I suggested that I should configure the router for him over the internet, and a few minutes later everything was going.
Its not that I don’t like helping, but sometimes I really wish I wasn’t the go-to guy whenever someone has a computer problem. Most often I end up dealing with some dopey Windowsy problem, which drives me batty because I’ve gone past Windows ages ago. The whole “uninstall — reboot — reinstall” thing, the magical procedures, the way you can’t just manually open a config file and fix the stupid thing, all get at me. So does the way you lose all your application settings at the drop of a hat. Microsoft even provided a tool to back up Office settings, because it’s so damn hard to do it yourself.
Now, can everyone migrate to *nix please? Thank-you. At least I’ll be working on problems that have logical causes and solutions.
Posted on Tuesday, May 6, 2008
AWB — Asciidoc Website Builder — is Go!
Once upon a time I wrote all my web pages directly in HTML using a text editor. MS Word sucked, and I dabbled with DreamWeaver for a while, but never for anything important (personal). But then I wanted a consistent look and tried out shtml. Cool, but I needed more power, so I moved over to php.
But the whole php thing has been wearing a bit thin. I never updated anything because I had to add info in three or five places to get it to build, and of course finding a host was a lot more difficult because they had to support php. With plain html even geocities would do in a pinch.
I was also getting fed up with writing html. I mean, it’s pretty easy, but there’s so much markup that you need to add, and then it’s not very readable. I started looking for an alternative, and decided on asciidoc. But asciidoc is designed for single documents, or even books, but not websites, and definitely not templating.
So I made my own solution. It uses asciidoc for markup — not that asciidoc has a lot of markup — and implements templating, automatic generation of blog features, sitemap.xml generation, and other goodies. The end product is good — seriously good — and I haven’t even made a release yet. It’ll be on Sourceforge soon.
I was casting about for a name for a while, and almost settled on Asciidoc Site Builder (ASB) before realising that AWB would be cooler, with a built-in joke. AWB is also the Australian Wheat Board, who paid $300m in kickbacks to Saddam Hussein before the war.
Anyhow, you should give AWB a go. It’s good stuff, even if I do say so myself.
Posted on Wednesday, December 5, 2007
Copyright © 2005-2008 Jared Henley
This page is best viewed in a standards-compliant web browser.
This site was created using: gedit; the GIMP; and AsciiDoc Website Builder.
If you would like me to create your website, send me a message.
Last updated Monday, May 31, 2010