My statistics show that IE has dropped to 66% of all page requests for involution.com for the month of November.

Well, another piece of hardware failed here at HQ. The chipset fan on my main server seemed to have stopped, and it was causing the Via KT133A chip to run very, very hot. This was causing intermittent lock-ups and other odd behavior on my box which is typically very reilable. I made an afternoon trip to Fry’s to try to find a very esoteric chipset cooler that would attach to my motherboard. To my delight, they did manage to have a
Thermaltake Orb Chipset Cooler heedlessly tucked away on a clearance shelf. I think the Orb cooler is intended for Geforce cards, but it does fit precisely in the two pre-drilled holes on my A7V133 motherboard. So, after installing the new chipset cooler, all was still not well. Apparently, there was some problem with my PSU’s 5V rail. So, I replaced that with a spare that I had laying around. After that, everything seemed to be back in working order, and my chipset was running 7 degrees cooler.

Uh, apparently, I managed to bork the Firefox RSS Parser by including a link with an ampersand in the one of the xml containers in the previous post. I fixed it this morning.

I was wondering out loud on the Gnu Screen mailing list today about whether or not it can support per screen .bashrc. The answer was, yes it can do! The winning answer came from Mikael Schonenberg, who unwaveringly opined:

However, when it comes to sourcing different .bashrc files, having a very simple test in your .bashrc making use of the WINDOW environment variable will probably do the trick:

if [ -e $HOME/.bashrc_$WINDOW ]; then
    . $HOME/.bashrc_$WINDOW
else
    . $HOME/.bashrc_default
fi

Mike is apparently the expert on the Gnu Screen “hardstatus line” as well. I’m looking for some way to do custom hardstatus lines per screen which apparently doesn’t exist quite yet.

The famous yax helped me out with the following foo that I use to reconnect my screen using .bashrc.

Basically, you want to be sure that you’re not running screem and are connected to a terminal before you execute the reconnect command. This seems to work for me:

if [ "$SSH_TTY" != "" -a "$TERM" -a "$TERM" != "screen" -a "$TERM" != "dumb" ]; then
    screen -d -RR
fi

I’ve been playing around with iTunes (on Windows 2000) the past couple of days. I’m generally pleased with the way that it organizes music and helps with manually tagging. Say, you add five mp3s to your playlist that weren’t properly ID3-tagged. You can go through and enter in the song names on the playlist, select the new songs, right-click, choose “Get Info”, then enter in the Album, Group Name, Genre, Equalizer, and Volume Settings, and it properly tags the selected songs with the updated information. I especially like the per song equalizer settings which really helps maintain sanity for a large playlist. Winamp 2.x can do none of this on its own. Also, Winamp’s playlist support has always been a little dodgy since forever. I always hated that it didn’t save the playlist by default, and that it doesn’t have a save button in a convenient place. You have to click twice, and then it brings-up a “Save As” window. Then you have to click “Save”, then “OK” to overwrite the file. That’s no less than four-clicks to do a Save. iTunes takes zero clicks. Just add the song to a playlist, and it adds it to the playlist.

The major problem I have with iTunes is load time. What I like about Winamp is that it’s FAST and can load in under a second. iTunes takes about twenty times longer to load on my machine (800MHz/512MB). I think I could probably whack-down a Venti Latte in the time it takes for iTunes to load and start playing music. There’s got to be some way for Apple to get iTunes to load faster. I know that they probably don’t think much about it, but I’d like to be able to use iTunes for all my music needs. Right now, I leave all my mp3s associated with Winamp in Explorer because of load times on individual tracks and because there’s a cadre of plug-ins that support flac, shnf, mp3, ogg, and even mp4 (the iTunes format). Now, I’m using iTunes to listen to and organize playlists.

The other problem I have with iTunes is that the buttons (Play, Pause, Next, Previous, etc) don’t seem to work when the window doesn’t have the focus. What exacerbates this problem is that unlike nearly every other windows application, the brushed aluminum-style title bar does not indicate when iTunes _does_ have the focus. I know there’s probably some esoteric technical reason involving toolkits and some Aqua to Vole conversion foo, but it needs to get fixed as it’s highly annoying.