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	<title>Steven's weblog</title>
	<link>http://www.ourada.org/blog</link>
	<description></description>
	<lastBuildDate>Sun, 07 Mar 2010 23:56:17 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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		<title>Brother MFC-9320CW</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Just bought a Brother MFC-9320CW. It&#8217;s good so far. I use Ubuntu 9.10 for almost everything, and Brother actually supplies Linux drivers and source for both the printer and the scanner. The printer driver is just a PPD, but the scanner driver has some code-y components. But they provide a scanner .deb, even for 64-bit. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/436</link>
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		<title>Unexpected/expected</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Have I mentioned before how much I love libraries? If there&#8217;s a single scene that summarizes me as a person, it&#8217;s me walking a couple miles to a library to read about some stuff I don&#8217;t need to know.
I love the insider&#8217;s view of things. Even if I don&#8217;t want to be an insider in [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/434</link>
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		<title>Another reason that ad-supported == teh suck</title>
		<description><![CDATA[This article from &#8216;MicroISV on a shoestring&#8217; (which is a blog worth keeping up with, if you ask me) has an interesting insight. Patrick says that ad-supported sites are less likely to craft a good user experience, because if the site is better than the ads, the site doesn&#8217;t make money. Oversimplified, sure, but it [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/431</link>
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		<title>Worked up</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Y&#8217;ever get worked up about how much you ought to get worked up about something? And then at some point you have to evaluate the inequality about whether the effort of evaluating how much to get worked up, plus the effort of getting worked up itself, is greater or less than the effort of just [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/430</link>
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		<title>More evidence that &#8217;shopping is hard&#8217;</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Huh, I thought shopping for computer-telephony interfaces or scalable web-hosting infrastructure was hard. A little research lately has convinced me that shopping for any sort of insurance must be at least as difficult and probably more.
There is one inherent fact about insurance that seeds the complexity: you&#8217;re trying to predict complicated and rare events. The [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/427</link>
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		<title>Branching is hard</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Ya know, for all the conceptual elegance of the idea of branching/merging in software revision control, it sure can be a pain in practice. Just in the last while, I&#8217;ve run across the following situations:

someone mismerged my code because they merged based on files rather than revisions
had to decide whether to merge someone else&#8217;s code [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/423</link>
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		<title>Web Services interop</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I wonder what the current status of Java < -> .Net Web Services interop is. A year-n-somethin&#8217; ago, it was a bit of a mess, and for the project I was working on we had to create a proxy running on a Windows box to make the calls. Ugh.
Actually, I don&#8217;t really wonder. I don&#8217;t [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/422</link>
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		<title>Simplifying my mail management</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Here&#8217;s a simple thing I did today that will save me some annoyance when dealing with new mail.
I manage my mail in Thunderbird by the simple rule of: if it&#8217;s something I need to respond to or reread soon, it stays in the inbox. If it&#8217;s junk, junk it, if it&#8217;s totally ephemeral, trash it, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/419</link>
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		<title>Annals of weird little problems, part 12</title>
		<description><![CDATA[It&#8217;s fascinating to me sometimes to describe a problem that comes up in software development, outside its full context, just to remind myself of how weird and deep it sounds in isolation. Makes me feel a little better about how long it takes me to solve said problem, maybe.
In this case, in the full context [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/412</link>
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		<title>One cloud ain&#8217;t enough</title>
		<description><![CDATA[One thing I&#8217;ve been learning over the last few months is that if your app is pretty beefy, you might well need more than one cloud provider to deploy it. With the major differences in approach between Amazon EC2 and Google AppEngine, they each have a variety of strengths and weaknesses with respect to a [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/410</link>
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		<title>Stupid, but effective, hack for dev_appserver task queues</title>
		<description><![CDATA[If you work with Google AppEngine and use task queues much, you know it can be annoying to have to press the &#8216;Run&#8217; button on each task to make it actually run. Here&#8217;s a Greasemonkey script to push the button for you. It mindlessly pushes the first Run button it finds immediately on page load. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/405</link>
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		<title>Digit frequency in pi</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Hmmm, pi is a little bumpier than I thought. (It could just be that my statistical intuition is off, though.)
Each bar plot below represents the number of occurrences of a digit in the decimal expansion of pi. The y-axis is an index, and the frequency x is counted over the range of digits y*20 to [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/397</link>
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		<title>asc-gzip/.xfd decompression</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Scott Stafford was nice enough to post code for asc-gzip/.xfd decompression to go with my asc-gzip/.xfd compression code. See this comment. I&#8217;m also reposting it here because the comment formatting is a little more bad than the main-post formatting.

Thanks for your post.  Of course, I needed the opposite, I had one I needed to [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/390</link>
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		<title>XSLT and the wonders thereof</title>
		<description><![CDATA[It&#8217;s always interesting for me to dig into XSLT. I don&#8217;t use it a whole lot, so when I do it&#8217;s all fun and new. This time around, I&#8217;m using 2.0, which wasn&#8217;t really implemented the last time I was doing anything much with the language. Loving the new features; so far I&#8217;ve used several [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/388</link>
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		<title>Dumb ways to lose files, part 18</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Here&#8217;s a bizarre way to lose some files:
rm foo.x `
(didn&#8217;t notice I&#8217;d accidentally hit backtick)
ls
(always do this after file operations, it&#8217;s a weird little habit)
(oops, didn&#8217;t work. Oh, there&#8217;s a backtick in operation.)
`
(a bunch of errors about some files and directories that can&#8217;t be removed.)
(CRAP!)
Running a Bacula restore job as I type this&#8230;
]]></description>
		<link>http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/386</link>
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		<title>Lost clicks in Flash Player, Eclipse</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;ve been having some weirdness in Flash Player and Eclipse, where mouse clicks seem to get lost and so I can&#8217;t click certain buttons. Turns out it has something to do with the new GTK client-side windows. It can be fixed with GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1. If you need more info, ask; I&#8217;m mainly posting this as a [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/385</link>
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		<title>Dirt/hardwood/carpet</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Hmmm, one difference between hardwood floors (which I have now) and carpeted floors (which I&#8217;ve lived with most of my life) that I didn&#8217;t really anticipate: I tend to perceive hardwood floors as &#8216;dirtier&#8217;, in the sense that they&#8217;re more likely to give up their dirt to my sticky clothing and skin surfaces when I [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/383</link>
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		<title>asc-gzip/.xfd compression</title>
		<description><![CDATA[If you should ever find yourself in the position of having to figure out how to compress XFDL files with the asc-gzip encoding, and I don&#8217;t wish it on you, here&#8217;s Python code to do it. Obviously, you&#8217;ll need some imports and error handling and optimization.
This thread gave me pointers to figure this out; Bryan [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/375</link>
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		<title>&#8216;Parented to&#8217;</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Language morphs in interesting ways. Fields of endeavor adopt various words from the general language as terms of art. But of course, the metaphors break down around the edges and the terms morph to reflect that.
In computer science, the terms &#8216;tree&#8217;, &#8216;parent&#8217; and &#8216;child&#8217; were taken to talk about a certain way of structuring data, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/370</link>
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		<title>urllib2</title>
		<description><![CDATA[It&#8217;s been quite a while since I&#8217;ve looked at the HTTP client libraries in Python. urllib2 has a pretty cool pluggable-pipeline architecture, with a bunch of standard handlers for things like cookies, redirects, basic auth, etc. Nice.
]]></description>
		<link>http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/369</link>
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