Month: October 2004

anyone looking for any profound meaning in my last post don’t bother – I was merely demonstrating how a desktop blogger works to a friend who was over for dinner – I was trying to answer the questions what is a blog? and OK, so when you’ve posted it, whereabouts will it end up?

here it is rich

what is it about aeroplane food? I don’t get why the airlines insist on serving the bizarre miniturised rubbery stuff, with bendy plastic cutlery and bits of cellophane and receptacles that fly off the tray when you go anywhere near them, even on a short flight when people would probably prefer a baguette or noodles or something. I know I would. Mmm noodles – haven’t had any for a while, and I used to virtually live on them (but only the unhealthy ones full of artificial flavourings and preservatives).

(this rant was written on a train a couple of weeks ago, shortly after eating homemade sandwiches thinking how nice they were compared to what was on offer on the train)

I don’t have comments enabled on this main blog (mainly because I never got round to enabling them), but I do on my skate blog, and recently found some anonymous links to some directory site buried among the comments, which really annoys me. I’ve been lucky so far, i’ve heard that this type of spam is rife – I think maybe my obscure blog software has kept me out of the loop to a certain extent. Anyway, the spam was deleted, and if it reappears I may just have to change the comments to "approval only" – i’d been thinking of doing this anyway because I don’t get notified when comments get added and sometimes I miss them.

by default kupu displays the background colour and image that is applied to the body of the page. To overide this I added the following to my ploneCustom.css:-

body.kupu {
    background-color: white !important;
    background-image: none !important;
}

it really annoys me when people append “to be honest…” or “i’ll be honest with you…” to the start of a sentence. This is all wrong. I would like to think that when people talk to me they are being honest by default, and they don’t need to warn me when they are about to start being honest, as this implies that the rest of the time everything they say is made-up (to be perfectly honest etc).

whenever I eat with new people, I end up having to have the “why are you vegetarian” conversation. I try to avoid it, skillfully scanning the menu for the token vegetarian options and just going ahead and ordering so that nobody notices, but often i’ll be offered something, or maybe there’s a set menu, or we are eating at someone’s house and i’ll have to admit i’m a veggie.

People want to talk about it. I don’t. mainly for the reason that i’ve had the conversation literally hundreds of times, I know every argument and counter argument and nothing changes and it bores me.
When I was 16 – 17 years old I was fairly opinionated about it, and I remember once in particular getting in a strop when some previously veggie mates ordered some sausage fritters in a chip shop and I refused to sit with them. “don’t be an idiot” one of them said, “come and sit with us”. It made sense – I was being an idiot – so I climbed down permanently from that particular (vegatable fat) soap box and went and joined them – I ate chips and beans, they ate sausage fritters.

So why did I become vegetarian then? loads of reasons all of them except religion probably. I think my main gripe at the time (16 years ago) was factory farming, but the options for non-factory farmed animal products have improved considerably since then. I think that smiths bloke with the quiff and the daffodills that I used to listen to on a daily basis influenced me too and mike vallely. I was also under the impression it made me more popular with hippy chicks 😉

I have no intention of starting to eat meat again unless I move abroad to a non-veggie friendly country where being veggie means eating mushroom omellette and chips every time you go to a restaurant, so until that happens I guess I will have to go through “why am I veggie” pre-dinner routine a few more times.

here is a few notes and ramblings…

msn messenger client
been trying to get the msn messenger client chat anywhere working, but apart from fetching my contact list it bombs out, then resets the treo when I try to log back in. There’;s a couple of others out there which I might try (forgotten the names), but both use a proxy service and both cost money and i’m skint.

Blogging from the Treo
The Blogworks XML (that currently runs this blog) web user interface is just about useable with the blazer web browser that comes with the Treo. My first post seemed to be truncated, but worked when I resent it. I briefly looked at HBlogger as a gui blog client, but this doesn’t currently support Blogworks XML – i’m sure it could, but I intend to move all my stuff to a Plone based blogger in the future so not worth persuing.In the meantime, it might be worth creating a stripped down version of the blogworks web interface though, just strip out everything except the bare essentials to make it download faster and fit the screen better.

I think the best approach is to use memos to write blog content (as i’m doing now) and cut and paste it into the form when ready, to avoid losing data in the event of timeouts etc.This also means that with hotsync you can edit stuff within palm desktop

FTP clients
I’ve been trying FTP clients, mainly so I can upload images captured by the treo to my blog. So far i’ve tried LsFtp, EZFtp and VSFTP. LsFTP is a command line ftp client, and I couldn’t work out how to map to images, either on the sd card or in the image database so I abandoned it.

EzFtp looked promising but seemed to truncate the folder listing on my site, so I couldn’t change into the images directory and Iit didn’t want to let me map straight to it. It also bombed out on me when I tried to either upload or download stuff.

finally I stumbled on VSFTP – i’m running a demo version and it runs a treat.

using the thumb qwerty keyboard
getting used to thumb keyboard. it is very useable when you get used to it, but it is still fiddly enough to make me keep text short and concise where I might digress if I had a full size keyboard at my disposal (maybe a good thing!). You may also notice that because of the fiddliness I havent bothered to hyperllink to various products mentioned above (you’ll have to google for them)

synchronising with hotysync
Palm desktop has so far worked flawlessly. I’ve never had much sucess with sychronisation software before but this just works, even when installed on home and work PC’s.

removing applications from the treo
Another major/minor breakthrough is that I worked out how to remove applications from a Treo 600/ palm device – basically go to the apps launcher, hit the menu button and select delete – this will take you to a list of apps which you can delete to your hearts content. It’s funny how I found this out in an obscure place (buried in Treo updater page on orange website), even though I had spent ages googling and searching forums for advice on how to do it (people were advising to do a hard reset, which would remove all user added programs and data amongst other things!). It’s probably in the manaul somewhere….

posted over here in the lab

I found the answer here:-

http://tomster.org/geek/plonezope/simpleblog-cmfcalendar

haven’t tried it yet.

UPDATE: I tried it yesterday (2004-11-08) and it turns out that the two methods were already in my Archetypes Blog type, so all I needed to do was go into the ZMI, portal_calendar -> configure and select "blog" as one of the types to display.