I downloaded Serendipity 1.0beta2 over the weekend and started trying it out.

My initial thought after setting it up was: *wow*. It really is incredibly easy to set up. No hand-editing of config files. No weird menus or scattering things all about. The whole system speaks of elegance and good coding practices. Except the fact that it ships some files world-writable in the tarball.

As I looked at it some more, I noticed a few problems, though. I submitted bugs or feature requests to the project as appropriate, and am including links to them here:

• No option to display the number of reads for each story. SF 1459385
• No tracking of HTTP referers (or, at least, no integrated interface for viewing them). SF 1459389
• Spartacus, the tool to automatically download and install new plugins over the Web, was broken. The netmirror.org site was unresponsive and the s9y.org site gave a 404 to it. SF 1459370
• It doesn’t seem to offer an RSS feed for the comments on individual posts. SF 1459391
• There’s no RSS feed for individual categories. SF 1167982
• Captcha support is built-in, but seems broken out of the box. (It rejected every attempt to post). SF 1459374

Despite these problems, this looks like a very strong contender. And I was using a beta.

Next up for testing: WordPress.

According to this interesting and funny article in Forbes, Windows Vista is in fact so boring that journalists that were excited to cover it didn’t even bother to keep their voices down while they were mocking it in front of Steve Ballmer.

Apparently laughter broke out about some of its “features”.

Just about everybody hates backing up computers. But it’s important. With more of our information being stored digitally — even photos — it’s critical to back them up.

At home, I’ve been using rdiff-backup for years now. Very slick. It stores backups on the filesystem — they look as if you had used rsync. It also stores metadata (owner, mode, etc.) in separate files, so you don’t have to back up using root. But the neat thing is how it handles incrementals. Incremental backups will update the backup image files to the current state, and store binary diffs to the past state. So you can access the latest backup instantly, and re-generate the previous state if needed. Very nice.

I had just been backing up to a regular IDE drive. But this week, I ordered two Seagate ST3400601CB-RK external drives. The drives support both USB2 and FireWire. We will get a safe deposit box at a bank. At any given moment, one drive will be at home, and one will be safely at the bank. They’ll be rotated periodically.

At work, we’ve been using Amanda for years. It does its job well. (Except on AIX, where both dump and tar are broken in obscure, hideous ways, but that’s not Amanda’s fault.) Recently, I discovered Bacula. This looks very slick. It seems to be the direction Amanda would evolve, if it would ever evolve. We’re going to test it out soon.

And besides, who wouldn’t love a program whose slogan is “Bacula: It comes in the night and sucks the essence from your computers”?

Have you noticed the incredibly annoying dialogs appearing in new Gnome/GTK apps in sid? They no longer allow you to use the keyboard to enter a filename. Not only that, but they are *incredibly* slow when working with large directories. You better go get some caffeine when if you need to open something under /usr/share/doc.

Here’s an example from Firefox:

Other apps, such as Gimp, also have this problem.

I have one thing to say to these people: WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?

The keyboard is still a useful part of a computer, and I have absolutely no inclination to wait 45 seconds for some annoyingly slow dialog to populate because you prefered to remove the ability for me to enter a filename in a dialog box myself.