Distractions, reflections

Distractions, reflections

David Ing, at large … Sometimes, my mind wanders

Shanghai circa 1910-1920

February 26, 2006
On the stack of videotapes that I’ve had in backlog was Temptress Moon, a 1986 movie directed by Chen Kaige. (I had recorded it some time ago from TV Ontario, and was especially brain dead on Saturday, having stayed up from Friday night into the wee hours, finishing up a presentation at 5:30 a.m.)

I’m sure that many other people liked Gong Li and/or Leslie Cheung, but I was actually rather taken by the story. It starts with the children around 1911 (at the fall of the Qin emperor), and goes through the period of opium. Most of the movie takes place during the 1920s, with a sharp contrast between the village and Shanghai — which had western dress, modern buildings, telephone and streetcars.

In the movie, there’s a phrase something like “don’t you know what’s happened in the last ten years”? The opening of China must have been amazing. In addition to opium use, the movie also depicted prostitution and gangsters, so I’m probably just as happy to be now in middle class Canada.

This movie also reminds me that I really enjoyed The Last Emperor, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and released in 1987. I remember buying (probably in 1987 or 1988) and reading Twilight in the Forbidden City by Reginald Johnson. Pu Yi was the ruling emperor between 1908 and 1912, and non-ruling emperor between 1912 and 1924, so the times on these two movies overlap.

When I was in Shanghai in summer 2002, I visited the former residence of Dr. Sun Yat Sen — where he lived between 1918 and 1925. In touring the house, I was impressed on how modern it was, with electric lighting and indoor plumbing. I could have been quite comfortable, living there.

Since I’m not into doing more reading, I’m now trolling for other movies that happen in this period of Chinese history ….

RSS Bandit: Subscribing to blog entries with comments

February 22, 2006
I’m used to reading newsgroups, where the responses are threaded (i.e. appear underneath the main entry).

In RSS Bandit, this feature seems to be on the list for the next release. In the meantime, the solution appears to be twofold:

  • On (WordPress, at least) blogs, there’s two feeds: one for posted entries, and one for comments. This means two feeds per blog, for the ones in which I’m really interested.
  • There’s a UnconditionalCommentRss feature described in the RSS Bandit Forum, as well as under Bandit Help (under Advanced Topics … Advanced Configuration Topics … Supported Options …). This seems to work on WordPress blogs only (and not Blogspot or Xanga). This doesn’t appear to download all of the comments when the feed is refreshed, but only when selected.

This is a minor temporary shortcoming that I can live with. I’m getting to be a fan of RSS Bandit. One thing I’ve learned, though, is that it’s better to leave the history of entries “marked as read” rather than to delete them. (I guess I’ll worry about space considerations, later.)

Off Thunderbird RSS, onto RSS Bandit

February 21, 2006
I like the Mozilla community. I’ve moved over almost entirely to Firefox — particular, in thanks to IE View, a plug-in that allows me use Firefox for surfing, and then start up another window in IE when the page calls for it. For personal e-mail, I was a long time user of Eudora, but switched over to Thunderbird when it was released.

On my work e-mail on Lotus Notes client, I typically work up against the 3-month expiry deadline, with somewhere between 200 and 300 message in backlog. A lot of these are push e-mail, as subscriptions from magazines such as Business Week and Forbes. (I used to subscribe to the paper editions by mail, but my stack was so huge, I had to do something to simplify my life).

So, with Thunderbird v1.5 supporting RSS, I stopped my e-mail subscriptions . Unfortunately, as I started having problems with the RSS feeds stopping, the clock has been ticking. It’s not absolutely crucial to keep on top of everything, but there doesn’t seem to be much encouragement in terms of movement on Bugzilla. I’m sure they have their plate full.

So, I started search around again for another newsreader, … and ended up choosing RSS Bandit. There are a number of reasons for this:

  • Web newsreaders don’t cut it for me, because there’s the latency of waiting for pages to load. I’m trying to find way to speed things up, and I know I’ll get frustrated waiting for a page to load.
  • Of the Windows platform choices, RSS Bandit is an open source, sourceforge.net project. Although part of my motivation is open source philosophy, I’m also pragmatic in choosing packages that have a lot of activity. There’s some other alternatives that don’t seem to have much going on.
  • I had previously installed RSS Bandit when I was trying to find a route to manage blog feeds down onto my Palm TX. I did figure out how to get Bandit2Plucker working, but settled on Sunrise, instead. Still, I may have to revisit that choice sometime in the future.

I’ve already done some “weird” customization of RSS Bandit that I may not ever be able to do on Thunderbird. I’ve moved one of the menu bars (so that it’s easy to get to “next unread’ and “mark unread”) from the top of the page, to the right side. In addition, I’ve positioned the reading pane at the top, and list of headlines at the bottom, so my eye doesn’t have to move so much when I switch from reading one article to another. So far, it looks like subscribing to audio (i.e. podcasts) works, too.
I had complained that tabbed messaging would have been nice in Thunderbird, and it’s already a feature of RSS Bandit . RSS Bandit seems to be usable a browser by itself — I’m not sure how it does this, but pages look fine. On newsfeeds (e.g. Business Week), Thunderbird use to render a full web page, whereas RSS Bandit seems to focus on just the text. Is this because RSS Bandit has actually downloaded and cached the pages, whereas Thunderbird would just load the page dynamically?

The immediate crisis of dropped subscriptions is over, so I’ll have to see how I like RSS Bandit. One thing that bugs me is to have yet another application open on my desktop — Lotus Notes, Thunderbird, Sametime, AIM, MSN Messenger and Skype are just the beginning before I actually do any work! — but maybe that’s what the operating system is for.

RSS seems to be rising in importance

February 15, 2006
As I’m gradually moving over from push e-mails to RSS on Thunderbird, I’ve started to notice more and more mentions of RSS as being central to future web technologies.

Forbes had pointed out some internal messages from Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie on the “services wave” in software. Ray wrote:

RSS is the internet’s answer to the notification scenarios we’ve discussed and worked on for some time, and is filling a role as ‘the UNIX pipe of the internet’ as people use it to connect data and systems in unanticipated ways.

In the movement away from a small number of news sources to the larger world of self-publishing in blogs, RSS seems to be more reasonable in handling pull technologies.

RSS in Thunderbird, tabbed messages would help

February 8, 2006
I’ve gradually been adding RSS Feeds to Thunderbird, and removing subscriptions that would be sent to my e-mail. (A lot of Yahoo Groups will support RSS feeds, although some don’t yet).

One annoying feature, so far: an RSS feed (e.g. from Business Week) comes up well in Thunderbird, i.e. it looks like it would in Firefox. However, when I click a link, it brings up a new tab in Firefox — not in Thunderbird. This is actually more-or-less what used to happen when I had the e-mail subscriptions sent to my Lotus Notes e-mail client, and clicking the link there would bring up a page in Firefox. Now that I can use Firefox to view RSS feeds more directly, reading has been a lot smoother. Continue reading “RSS in Thunderbird, tabbed messages would help“

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