Peter Breuls's Weblog

These kinds of popups still crack me up. Brilliant!

I just tried this on my home computer, and it did work. Maybe there's something wrong with the FireFox installation on my PC at work, or I just forgot to restart FireFox.

I've upgraded my PC yesterday. It took about 2 to 3 hours, mainly due to some errors, but my Ubuntu Hoary box has been turned into a fresh Ubuntu Breezy machine. I'm up to date now!

A problem that occured was that while configuring all the new and updated packages, one of them couldn't be processed by dpkg. This caused the entire 'apt-get dist-upgrade' process to stop, and left me with an incomplete upgrade.

I tried several things to get the upgrade going again, and the thing that worked was simple: remove all reasons for Ubuntu to include the failing package so it won't keep on trying. In my case, the 'openoffice2-help-en-us' (or something) was causing the problem, and deselecting 'openoffice2-help-en' in Synaptic solved the problem, for that caused 'openoffice2-help-en-us' to be unnecessary and thus excluded from the process.

Of course, when running into problems during an upgrade, try using apt-get in several ways to find out what you can do. Before I got to the solution, I tried 'apt-get -f install', 'apt-get -f dist-upgrade' and others in various combinations to find out what was the problem.

Luckily the entire system still works, even when you're in the middle of an upgrade. Isn't that one of the beauties of Linux?

Seth Dillingam explains a configurable feature in FireFox. He's right, the pref is there and it's set to false, but when I set it to true it doesn't work. I still have to click twice to select the URL.

Bill Burnham: "Google isn't gathering all this structured data just so they can regurgitate it piece-meal via unstructured queries, they are gathering all this data so that they can build the world's largest XML database. "

But still.. so what?

Dave Winer released the OPML Community Server, which of course is a cool thing. The only downside is that the average web server isn't able to run this. It's a Mac/Windows application, which means a lot of interested users will not be able to install it.

That said: it's cool! Congrats Dave on yet another release of a cool tool for the web to use.

MySQL 5.0 Downloaded One Million Times in First Three Weeks. CUPERTINO, Calif. -- November 14, 2005 -- MySQL AB today reported record interest in the newest version of its popular open source database. MySQL 5.0 has already been downloaded over one million times since its introduction on October 24. [Latest Updates from MySQL AB]

Steve Rubel has a useful list of ways to hack your blog. David Krug has a contrarian list to balance things out.

[Scoble]

Nice stuff. Need to look into that.

Here's how to check an IP address against standard DNS blacklist servers, for purposes of blocking comment spam and such:

dns_check_record is checkdnsrr before PHP 5.

I've got some code somwhere on my harddrive at home that does something similar with njabl.org and Blitzed.org. It's ideal to use this in the user registration part of an online application or, ofcourse, in your everyday weblog comment system.

Maybe, if I can find it. I'll post it.

kottke: "20 unusual non-English words sent in by readers of the BBC Magazine (in response to this article about a new book on unusual words). Plimpplampplettere, the Dutch word for skipping stones, is sublime."

I am Dutch, and I've never heard of the word. It doesn't sound like anything any sane person would say, either. And the Dutch dictionary Van Dale doesn't know the word, so I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist.

Back home from work, where I had Google Talk running all day. Here, at home, I've installed it too.I like the interface. It's clean, easy. No irritating colors, animations or other stuff. Just a neat looking client.

Let's try it for some time, see if I like it. Maybe I'll keep using it..

Dave talks about the new Google IM client and the fact that it's bases on the Jabber way of communicating. Frontier speaks Jabber, so interesting things could be done with it. Sounds like a great toy to play with.