Adobe Labs has released a 64 bit Linux version of Flash Player 10. Before releasing 64 bit versions for Windows or Mac. Via Tal, whose review can be summarized with the Bo-ism*: Is Fast!
No more zombie 32 bit plugin wrapper processes thrashing in gasps of mad memory consumption?
The latest release of Kubuntu (the Ubuntu distribution variant I use on my home computer) included KDE 4.13, the fancy new Desktop Environment for people who don’t care why there’s a K in the name. As you know, Jim, there are two major “Desktop Environments” on Linux: Gnome, which tries to be more “usable” (or “minimalist but accessible”) as defined by Linux geeks, and KDE, which tries to be “Prettier” (or more “polished”), as defined by 14 year old Windows users. If earlier versions of KDE tried to be prettier than Windows XP, then KDE 4 finally gets around to ripping off Vista, or the Mac OS, or whatever (I wouldn’t know – I never used Vista, and just clicked a few buttons on a Mac once).
I got a new phone a month ago, a Nokia 6120 or something like that, with internet and shit. This involved finally crossing the line between having an electronic device and having a portable, under-powered computer. An UI that’s fancier but less ergonomic, a power-hungry screen and a laptop’s male-sterility-inducing level of heating-up (one of the first links I found about my specific model was a petition to have it recalled because of overheating issues). Also, this whole “internet” connectivity thing, while pretty impressive and fast (yo! I’m on the street, looking at my blog! Hey! I’m sitting in Dixie, browsing Google reader!), is actually a money-grubbing scheme to charge you exhorbitantly for bandwidth. The phone feels like a platform for Orange to spam me with pointless ads and downloads.
Also, there’s the issue of transfering stuff between the phone and my computer. There’s a USB cable, but the phone doesn’t simply mount as another drive, like any USB drive should. There’s actually some ornate synchronization protocol and some remarkably user-unfriendly tools for using it, which I haven’t managed to get to work. Also, many tools expect you to use a Bluetooth-enabled computer.
I found a good step-by-step tutorial on setting something up here: Nokia PC Suite for Linux with ObexTool on Ubuntu Gutsy. It’s actually not equivalent to the PC Suite thing, because it doesn’t synchronize calenders and contacts, which are hidden away on the phone in some arcane corner. But it works for transfering files (MP3s, photos). So, whatever.
What’s the difference between just bookmarking a resource and posting it to your blog? I suspect it’s the pointless and private gloating it inspires.
So, I was messing around with using XPath to scrape web pages, and since it’s an obtuse syntax (regular expressions for XML, more or less) and the tutorials aren’t that great, I thought it would be cool if there was some tool that would let you play around and interactively apply XPath expressions to web pages. Yes, that would be nice. It would probably be called something like XPath Explorer, wouldn’t it? So I asked the internets and it was so.
Then I thought, wouldn’t it be better if there was something that showed you how the XPath expression applied to the rendered web page you were looking at? Perhaps something that integrated directly into Firefox?
Yes, said the internet. That would be nice.
And so it was.
