Story of my life.
Fun flash game though. 
It’s called gravity. You aim this particle, try to have it miss the planetoids as gravity forces act upon everything.
Gravity - GasGames
TechProsaic
I write about great software, Internet technology, cool gadgets, and The Next Big Thing.
Psi website down
We had the database go all screwy last night. I’ve decided to rebuild everything on our new webhosting provider instead of remaining on the old troublesome server. I’m about 75% done rebuilding the site.
Update @ 2:30PM
The site is operational now at our new webhosting provider (me). The new website address is http://psi-im.org. Forums are not up yet but I’m working on it. Thanks for your patience.
OpenOffice.org 2.0 torrents and mirrors up
Torrents: http://borft.student.utwente.nl:6969/
Mirrors listed in comments on this digg article
thanks downloadsquad.com
JabberMaps is ready for public beta testing!
Everybody put your hands together for JabberMaps! Before you say, “hey hasn’t this already been done?” let me answer.
No, it hasn’t. This is for servers, not jabber users! Created by CarlB of Jabberzilla fame, we have a new system for finding the fastest and most reliable Jabber server for YOU.
When choosing a Jabber server, what are the criteria?
- Location, for latency issues
- Uptime, for reliability issues
JabberMaps, by taking advantage of Google Maps (duh, isn’t everyone?), can help you pinpoint precisely where that server is located. Plus it obtains uptime data from the Public Jabbernet database so you don’t pick a dud.
Go there: JabberMaps
Carl has now gotten this app to a stable point and it works well. Now he needs your help. Please try it out. Tweak all of the buttons, take it for a drive. Then use the feedback link and please let him know what you think.
I myself have one comment so far. I’d like to see features, like we have on the location-challenged jabber.org server list. Other than that its just great.
In case you are curious for some more background, my part in this is that jabbermaps is hosted on my server. So don’t slashdot it please. Well, I don’t think we’ve had one before so it would be educational anyways. :/
Also, there has been some new developments since stpeter announced the XMPP Federation, which aims to be a definitive network resource for XMPP. I don’t actually know this, but I suspect it will replace the server list on jabber.org. Peter is also collectiong geolocation data, so there might be some sort of interaction between this database and JabberMaps in the future. We have discussed moving it to his server as well to keep the branding that our communiity would benefit from.
Anyway, please do check it out and and report back.
Instant RSS feed viewing
Well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle! (I have no idea what that really means.) I browse the news this morning and lo and behold, my old buddy Tom.G aka Misfit aka my Psi webmaster predecessor is making Firefox extensions! It’s a pretty neat one too, I’m about to install it.
Feedview
is an extension that allows you to click directly on an RSS feed (yes, the XML itself) in order to preview the contents in a readable fashion. Would be handy to see if its something you are interested in before subscribing in your feed reader.
Way to go Tom! 
Be sure to check out the other things on his project page as well.
(as seen on Download Squad)
PIErony, or Why Won’t You Design for the Small Screen?
I haven’t had much time for web design theory lately, but I have great respect for A List Apart. When I do make time for it, this is one of my must-reads. ALA put an article up on Sep 26th titled Introducing the CSS3 Multi-Column Module. It deals with a proposed solution to the difficulty of flowing text into multiple horizontal columns. Here’s a great picture from the article that explains it very well:
This is all fine and good, but I disagree with the introduction to the article where it states:
While most computer screens are wider than tall, most websites are the exact opposite: longer than wide […] Horizontal space, on the other hand, is quite cheap; we often don’t even know what to do with it.
Wanna konw why I disagree? This totally leaves out small form-factor devices such as PDAs. And I have a perfect example for you. In fact, the PIErony is exquisite. (As in Pocket Internet Explorer.)
Here we have PIE with the “Fit to screen” option disabled:
It doesn’t look all that bad really, however you must scroll left and right to read it, which is HORRIBLE enough on a desktop monitor, but its ten times worse on a 240px wide LCD.
Here the same page with the “fit to screen” option enabled. This is PIE trying its best to fit everything in so that you can read a page without having to scroll sideways. The images are scaled down which helps a lot. Many websites, notably the flexible-layout ones do GREAT with this. Check out ALA:
I scoff at thee, ALA! In case you are curious, here’s a screenshot of my site, not that I wrote the theme myself (it’s a tweaked almost spring). Enjoy:
<angelschanting>
</angelschanting>
Just to show you its not just me:
Amen.
Disclaimer: I think Pocket IE is pretty lame in most respects, simply because its a lowest-common-denominator kind of application. No frills.
Google Reader
Arrrrgh! I had written like a full page of text and it just disappeared. “It was a good paper, too.” AAaaaaaah. Man that sucks. HELLO DOUGAL, WE NEED AUTO-SAVE DRAFTS! Screw it, here’s the link. 
Reader
Ok, the one contribution I will add to this otherwise worthless post is that we don’t see yet what I consider to be one of the obvious next steps–notification with Google Talk. Man that would be a lot of XML flying around. It already has integration with gmail and blogger…
JEP-0070: Authenticating HTTP Requests via XMPP
A very interesting JEP has come up for last call today. Here’s a snippet from it:
Web-based, XMPP-aware applications may wish to utilize known information about a JID when making HTTP requests, without prompting the user for yet another username/password combination (the first being provided through their XMPP Client), thus resulting in automated login or “single-sign-on” functionality.
I was going to write more in this blog entry but instead I have decided to postpone that in order to do it right and flesh out an entire idea proposal (i.e. Jabber Idea #4). Stay tuned for that.