I just tried Sage - a Firefox extension for reading RSS feeds. It’s very beautiful - like an ornate teapot made of chocolate.
Unfortunately it looks like no one ever actually considered using it for, like, reading RSS feeds. There is no way to hide the stuff you have already read. You can mark it read but that doesn’t make it go away.
UNINSTALL
According to the Neurophilosopher a patient with epilepsy was fitted with a BCI2000, a device that monitors brain activity, to monitor his seizures.
Because the patient was required to remain connected to the BCI until he had a seizure, engineers programmed Atari software [space invaders] so that it was compatible with the device, making the wait more entertaining for the patient.
“He cleared out the whole level one basically on brain control,” says Eric C. Leuthardt, an assistant professor of neurosurgery involved in the work. “He learned almost instantaneously. We then gave him a more challenging version…and he mastered two levels there playing only with his imagination.”
The Wii will be out of date before it even ships on November 17.
If there is one application for which a web browser is supremely well-suited it’s reading web pages. That’s why I was happy to use Google’s news reader for reading blogs. Every previous RSS client I had tried behaved as though RSS was “just like reading email” and modelled their client on mail clients. It’s not like reading mail.
Google’s was the first client that was different. Apart from the flaw that meant you had to read the newest entries first, it was perfect. Sure, sure - the subscription management was awful, but the rest was great.
Anyway, they have a new version and it looks like their main goal was to “make it just like all the other RSS clients”. Well, they succeeded and it sucks.
I stuck with it for a week but I can’t get the hang of it and I’m looking for a new RSS client.
Any suggestions?
This article in Salon mourns the death of BASIC.
Only, quietly and without fanfare, or even any comment or notice by software pundits, we have drifted into a situation where almost none of the millions of personal computers in America offers a line-programming language simple enough for kids to pick up fast. Not even the one that was a software lingua franca on nearly all machines, only a decade or so ago. And that is not only a problem for Ben and me; it is a problem for our nation and civilization.
I was a part of that generation that started out with BASIC. It was great. 30 years ago.
About now you are probably shouting, like I did,
What about Ruby??
You can do exactly all the old command-liney stuff that David Brin is all teary-eyed about in Ruby> You can even write the same crap code that you could with BASIC. The book, Learn to Program, that I bought Dylan could easily have been based on BASIC - but it wasn’t. It was based on Ruby and it was all the better for it.
But Brin explicitly dismisses Python and the like - presumably because they are not BASIC-ey enough.
Personally I think BASIC belongs in the dustbin of history and if David Brin wants to teach his son to write crap code, he can teach him Perl. For the rest of our children, there is Ruby and Python and Squeak and Logo.
All the UI gurus say that a good user interface should make the user feel in control. This firefox extension, Mouse Gestures, makes me feel mighty! Swish! You go back. Swosh! You go forward. Slash! That stupid image is gone.
Once you get the hang of it, you can draw a big ‘S’ to view source or an ‘M’ to see the meta-data but don’t try to learn them all at once.
Start simple. Swish, swosh and slash. Be mighty too!
Julio has a list of all the features that would be in his dream MMO.My list would be very similar but with the word ‘not’ carefully inserted into most of the sentences.
But, then again, I haven’t played an online game for a long time and I haven’t really enjoyed one since Ultima Online so it probably does not matter what I think.
Over at www.developertesting.com, I wrote about the Monty Hall problem and how I was convinced of the answer by an unused variable in my Java simulation.
Markus wrote a nice simulation in Squeak (dunno what it will do if you don’t have squeak installed but it makes a good excuse for you to go get it).
I am always on the lookout for ideas for a science project for Dylan. For me, the ideal kid’s science project has a hypothesis that
with extra credit if you can write a computer simulation of it. Dylan’s project last year was “What should you do if draw three cards to an inside straight in poker?”. He said you should raise. I usually beat him at poker 
