Yermo and friends on topics dear to Geeks and Gearheads.

Per request - repost of 2003 Easter Fire Pictures

12/13/2004 3:18PM

I had inadvertently deleted the albums I had on yml.com when I moved everything over to the MOBIE backend. Per request, here's a repost of the 2003 Easter Fire neophoto album.

Photo Albums

BZFlag goes Platinum

12/11/2004 3:46PM

Yermo

An article over at slashdot announces:
"A little over four years after moving to SourceForge at a current rate of several hundred downloads every day, BZFlag has finally "gone platinum". With over 1,000,000 SourceForge downloads, BZFlag looks to be the third game (following Tux Racer and StepMania) to go 'sf platinum'. While this doesn't include the many tens of thousands distributed prior to the project's migration to sf.net during the SGI days, it's a momentous occasion for open source gaming regardless."

For those that don't know, bzflag is a killer multiplayer "tank" game that isn't anything like what you would expect a "tank" game to be. It's been around for years and is one of those underground games, like wesnoth, that rock.

Games

How to Fix U.S. Patents

12/10/2004 12:58AM

Yermo

From an article at slashdot:
"IEEE Spectrum has an interesting article on how to fix the U.S. patent system. It starts with an example of how broken the system is, with Smuckers suing a small company for crustless PB&J. It has a great overview of how the system has evolved and how much it favors the big patent holders, and suggests 3 specific fixes: 'create incentives and opportunities for parties to challenge the novelty and nonobviousness of an invention before the PTO grants a patent,' examine the important patents meticulously; don't waste effort on the unimportant ones that can be ousted early, and for examining prior art, use judges and special masters rather than uninformed juries."

Doom 'n Gloom > Software Patent Fiasco

Green Roof FAQ

12/09/2004 6:42PM

buffalo

Green roofs on commercial buildings offer substantial economic, environmental, and aesthetic benefits. Check out the FAQs for yourself.

In light of the greenhous gas problem and recently released climate change studies, this kind of technology is likely to become far more necessary and critical to the overall environmental mitigation process.

Doom 'n Gloom > Glimmer of Hope

CLOG v 0.8 bugs and suggestions.

12/09/2004 4:41PM

Yermo

I've created Admin->Bugs and Admin->Suggestions categories. It'll be alot easier for me if we keep suggestions and bug reports here on the clog. YML.COM is, after all, pretty much a test site.

So far from me and Anatoly:

Right now in Thunderbird all articles come up as from "anonymous"; you should set the author field for each article.

When trying to use the Paste function in the new editor, I get an 
"unpriveledged scripts can not cut/copy/paste programmatically for 
security reasons."  It directs me to this page:

http://www.mozilla.org/editor/midasdemo/securityprefs.html

This is using Firefox 1.0.  I wonder if there is any other way to get 
around it without making users modify their preferences.

there doesn't seem to be a good way to get around this. Copy/paste works if you're viewing the source, however (click the <> button). It looks like i'm going to need to provide some kind of script to do that update; getting our users to edit that file will be nearly impossible. -- yml

BTW, image URLs in RSS articles also need to be absolute URLs, otherwise 
they will show up in the reader as broken images.

I think I have this working now in my development copy. I'll be installing the update shortly. -- yml

I think you should add a link at the end of the RSS article to go to the web site to read the articles.

I've made some fixes in the XML which seems to have taken care of this. --yml

double category bug on editing an existing article.
search bug where articles are listed multiple times.
post comments from the list view don't like to the form.

fixed -- yml

clicking on comments from the list view doesn't scroll down to the comments.

fixed --yml

If you notice any other problems or have suggestions please post comments to this article.