#!0 » Rants

Second thoughts on RSS

Ben Lavery — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 16:23:10 +0000

OK, so back in July I posted my praises of Google Reader and RSS technology. Today however, I’m not so sure. I’ve been without Internet for a couple of weeks, and look at my Google Reader:

Over 1000 stories for me to look at…I’m never going to have the time!

They dont make them like they used to…

Ben Lavery — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 12:59:05 +0000

Faye has got a new phone, some up-to-date Nokia to replace her old 6200. Her 6230 still works apart, just the battery doesn’t hold a charge very well.
This new phone cost about the same price as the six year old phone, has less useful features, doesn’t keep the same charge as the 6200 did when new and broke after six months of use…After getting it back from the O2 shop, they are telling us that it broke because of rust…

The old 6200 has been dropped in photo chemicals, dropped many a time and has been run over by the Faye’s KA. This new one seems to have broken because it has a small amount of photo chemicals dripped over it…

Why oh why isn’t technology today more robust? Or at least as robust as it used to be…Yes, phone manufacturers want you to upgrade your phone every now and again, but every six months!?

XP doesn't do relative links

Ben Lavery — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 11:08:01 +0000

At work I’ve got a situation where I want to store a load of files in a central location, and then scatter links accross the rest of the file system (for reasons best not explained here). The file system will be picked up and moved at some point, and indeed everybody accesses this file system through different addresses, so a relative link is exactly what I wanted.
Under UNIX, I’d do something like this:

$ pwd /var/tmp/test $ ls -l drwxr-xr-x 1 user1 other 7 29 Jul 08:00 link_test -rwxr-xr-x 1 user1 other 29 29 Jul 08:00 foo $ cd link_test $ pwd /var/tmp/test/link_test $ ln -s ../foo bar $ ls -l lrwxr-xr-x 1 user1 other 7 29 Jul 08:01 bar -> ../foo

I know that I wouldn’t be able to do this in Windows anyway, adding the fact that the command line here is off bounds to everyone there was no chance. But Windows users don’t touch ‘cmd’ anymore, right? That’s why Linux is for geeks…So, there must be a way to do this in the GUI. Give it a go, you’ll get an error like this:

[IMAGE TO BE INSERTED]

I wrote to the technical team who, after 24 hours, told me that it couldn’t be done. The worlds most common* Operating System can’t perform this simple operation. They did give me two work arounds:

The usual work around for this is to create a shortcut to the command prompt executable cmd.exe with a switch to start a program or open a file, i.e. cmd.exe /start ..\foo\bar.exe

And:

Create a simple VBS script and run this instead of the shortcut. The code would be as shown below, create a text file and rename the extension to .vbs to execute the code, obviously changing the path as needed.
dim objShell set objShell = CreateObject("Shell.Application") objShell.ShellExecute "..foo\bar.xls", "", "", "open", 1 set objShell = nothing

I was very dissapointed ,and now we have to settle with duplicating files to achieve the same thing (the work arounds didn’t work on our system).

*taken from the W3C page, here