No man is an island

Recently i got the idea of scribbling down all the things i learn a day. I firmly believe that life long learning is important and i also believe that we will learn anyway. Mostly we collect all kind of factoids within a week or so. Most of them drop out of our memory within a week to a month.

So last friday, when i got home i recited a short list to me what i learned and it was surprisingly long, about 30 single items. Granted, i counted also small things like learning a new shortcut in vim - but still.

I am still unsure where and how to store the factoids. Naturally i coud spam my blog with this on a regular basis but that would block all future things that could be done, like questionnaires so you can check yourself if you remember what you entered a month ago, thusly refreshing and training it.

For me a natural way to do this would be a (2.0ish) website where other people could do the same and the can check each other’s factoids. Maybe this would be a good django training.

Just read about iReader on Techcrunch and first i thought it would work similar to snap.com’s website picture preview. Eager to get it working i hit the download and it is in fact a firefox plugin.

Check it out for yourself. It is quite nice.

It summarizes the content of the page linked to. Sometimes it doesn’t seem to work or at least not right away though.

Update: What is quite annoying is that you cannot move the popup bubble and there is no close button. Sometimes it pops up out of nowhere and keeps you from clicking the link you just wanted. Often reloading a page is the only solution. They urgently need to fix that

In the past few days i saw several links on website that popped up a screenshot of the site they are going. I thought it was nicely done. Nothing uber-fancy but nice and well done. It is provided by snap.com and registration to use that feature on a site is for free. I immediately decided i want it on this blog and registration+installation literally took me less than a minute

On another note, i got a new DSL connection today. Also nothing uber-fancy but okayish so far. It’s a 6MB/1MB ADSL connection with VOIP, all flat (VOIP is flat to 7 european countries - YAY). The connection comes with a Fritz Fon Wlan box, which is okay so far. One thing that struck me odd was the loading time on one of the setting pages. It displays the DSL spektrum. The spektrum is made up of a lot of small images that get loaded into the browser. And Firefox on windows is DEAD slow loading those images. Takes easily 4 minutes to load them all - mind you this is not on the internet; it’s accessing the local box in my LAN.

That kind of struck me odd since the same page loaded in a blink in firefox on my mac this morning. Turns out it’s not windows, as i first thought, since IE displays that page also in a blink. I thought it may have to do with DNS caching, caching in general and multiple channels to retrieve data. Without wanting to dig too deep into all this (was already suffering from IT burnout since i configured reverse proxies the whole day) i installed FasterFox! The page loaded a LOT faster after that (though still slowish). It can be tweaked with a few settings and finally i was able to properly browse the normally extremely slow Bioware boards. Now that an extension i warmly recommend to any Firefox user.

oh noooh… i missed it again. Well at that time i was in Lisboa anyway and might have gotten quite strange looks ordering Galau with ‘yarr, matey’