Category: General

Firefox Nightly

If anyone's interested, I wrote a Perl script that downloads and installs Firefox Nightly on a Unix-like operating system.

By default, it installs the application into /opt/firefox-nightly, with a link to run it at /usr/bin/firefox-nightly. This way, it doesn't conflict with your already-installed version of Firefox. Furthermore, it will put a launcher item in your Applications/Internet menu.

You can get it from here: http://sh.kirsle.net/ffnightly

$ mkdir ~/bin
$ wget http://sh.kirsle.net/ffnightly -O bin/ffnightly
$ chmod +x bin/ffnightly
$ ffnightly

Kirsle CMS Upgrade

I've upgraded the back-end Perl code that powers Kirsle.net.

It is now running on the same code that Siikir runs on. I did this for a few reasons:

• URLs look cleaner now. Instead of /blog.html?u=kirsle&id=114 you get nicer looking URLs like /blog/kirsle/kirsle-cms-upgrade.
• I want to partition off my blogging some more. I've had the "Channels" view where you can narrow posts by topic, but I want further partitioning: I'll have different usernames on kirsle.net, each with their own blogs. So, expect a user to pop up who will write about personal things that most of y'all probably don't care about anyway.
• The new code is more efficient than the old code.

It only took me a couple days to port the site over. I had to go and program in web blog support, and commenting support (for blog posts, photos and my guestbook page). This means that these features are also going to be coming to Siikir in the near future, once I harden them against dumb users first.

All the old links to old pages on kirsle.net will now automatically redirect to their new locations.

Where did all my free time go?

After my recent move back to my hometown, a guy I apparently used to chat with all the time several years ago found me on Grindr. I had no recollection of who this guy is, and the only person I could think of who shared a name with him was a member of one of my super old social networking sites.

Back when I was about 16 or 17 years old, I created a gay social networking site named RainbowBoi. I later rebranded it to XYBois before losing interest in it entirely, and now it's called Siikir. Anyway, I decided to dig up my old backups of this site to dig up the picture of the guy I think I'm talking to. It was him.

But poking around at the user profile data for the old sites, I got the idea to try dusting the code off and get it running again on my local web server... just for nostalgia's sake. Get the site up, dos2unix convert all its data files so that I can log into it, and just click around and see how the site used to be back in its day, back from 2005-06.

Throughout this blog post, all the small screenshot thumbnails can be clicked to view the full size.

(the homepage. click for bigger screenshot)

This version of the site was in the middle of being rebranded. The Perl source code that powers the site is also the same code I had written for my old AiChaos site, which you can see here on my archive subdomain. The code is ugly to look at, because I was relatively new to programming.

But newbie as I was, I was apparently quite ambitious. This site was very featureful: it had social networking features (including photo comments and private messaging and search and friend lists), it had helpful articles to read about coming out of the closet and topics like that, it had some public photo albums which were surely pretty popular, it had a "straight-acting" quiz. It even had a chat room, where I had programmed my own chat protocol, client program and server from scratch.

It even had used Image::Magick to scale the user photos down, and calculated ages based on birthdates, and syndicated RSS feeds for display on the site. I definitely knew my stuff back then, even if I didn't have a good coding style down yet.

I miss the days when I used to have this kind of free time on my hands. Whenever I dust off my old projects and play around with them, I keep seeing really ambitious ideas. The code may not be pretty, but it is featureful. I don't create anything nearly this cool nowadays. I just don't have the free time or the motivation to do it.

Maybe this is the consequence of doing what you love as a job. As a software developer, I spend all day long writing code to get paid and by the time I'm done, I don't feel like writing any more code for the day. And then on the weekends I just wanna relax and try to have a social life, or else just watch TV and play videogames.

/sigh

Here are 6 more screenshots of the old RainbowBoi/XYBois.

Android Mini PC

The device of my dreams: a no strings attached, open Android-powered device, which is like a smartphone (touch screen etc.), but which is not a phone, but can get a data plan from any cell carrier in the same way that laptops can use 3G cards and get internet anywhere from a cell phone carrier.

It would basically be a miniature PC that resembles an Android phone, but which isn't a phone, but which you can just install Skype on if you really need to make a phone call, since it could still get cellular data service.

And, being like a miniature PC, it would be as open to operating systems as a real PC; it would be just as easy to install and reinstall Android firmwares (or any compatible OS) to it as it would reinstalling your operating system on your laptop.

I imagine Dell would be a good manufacturer for such a device; they would market it just like they market netbooks, as being just a mini PC that happens to run Android (preferably the stock vanilla Android as Google intended it, but being open you could flash any version of Android you want).

If such a device existed I would buy it as soon as it came out. I'm quite sick of the way phone carriers abuse the Android OS and wish there could just be a seriously open device.

RSS Feed

I've finally put together an RSS feed for this particular incarnation of my web blog.

It's available at http://www.kirsle.net/rss.cgi.