I listen to a lot of music whilst working, and I'm currently having a few… issues with my media players. Namely that I can't find one that's supported and doesn't have issues that make me want to scream at them.

Below, I'll list the media players I've tried, and a brief review. [Updated]

I used Akregator for my RSS reader, right up until about 10 minutes ago, when hotplugging a drive (yes, in a hot-plug port.) caused the PC to reset. Upon starting, I made the delightful discovery that Akregator had eaten the feeds.opml file (Where my rss feed links are kept.).

After a long time of seeing a livejournal aggregator in the logs, looking for the old RSS feed (this is due to the migration from Wordpress to Drupal), I've finally fixed up a working redirect to the new one.

RewriteCond %{query_string} feed=rss2
RewriteRule ^/blog/ /index.php?q=rss.xml [R]

Hopefully, that should fix that. (Although, I'll have to wait and see.) And now, to get on to adding module support to Harlie, like I originally set out to do about 8 hours ago.

Noun (Singular) bonus (plural bonuses)

1. Something extra that is good
2. An extra sum given as a premium, e.g. to an employee

The employee of the week receives a bonus for his excellent work.

It is not something you are entitled to. It is something that you get if you exceed expectations. And for RBS, I really don't think they exceed expectations. This is the bank that posted a £2.2billion loss pre-taxes[1], and is selling off branches because it can't afford them. It is also planning a scheme that will increase the government's share in the bank from 70% to 84%, by dumping £282billion of it's assets into a program for toxic assets.

And what, you may ask, prompted this rant? The news that the board of RBS is threatening to walk out if they don't get their bonuses.[2] And you know what the worst part of it is? Either get their 'bonuses' or they'll walk out and straight into another cushy job where they get paid huge 'bonuses' for doing nothing.

Anyone wonder why I hate management staff already?

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8345922.stm
[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8392147.stm

Okay, we now have a stable v0.2 of Harlie, and you can pull this from the branch "v0.2". (You may get a warning about it being ambiguous. This is because I was stupid and named the branch the same as the tag. Please go easy on me, I'm slowly getting the hang of git.)

Or, if you hit the downloads page on the wiki, you can grab it there.
http://www.furryhelix.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Downloads

EDIT: Just wanted to clear a few things up… There are a lot of things missing, and this is more of a preview of where Harlie is headed rather than a fully functional release. There's a list of things that need to be done, after the break.

After taking a break from working on Harlie, today I cranked up Emacs and dove back in. And was immediately struck by the need to add a few more comments. When folks say you need comments even if you're the only one to be working on it, they're definitely right.

It's only been 4 weeks since I worked on the code, and some bits are almost incomprehensible. Another thing that struck me was the need to have a bit of a tidy-up of some of the code. However, that may turn into a complete refactoring project, so I'm going to leave it for now whilst I'm hacking deep into the code.

So I connected to my server today and found a spam post uploaded to the front page. I just checked. 3 obvious spam users. Oh, shit.

EDIT:
Panic Averted. I thought I'd been hacked (despite running the latest version of drupal, but it wouldn't surprise me that there's vulns that haven't been found by the good guys yet.), but it turned out I'd left authenticated users with the ability to create blog posts. Not quite what I intended, but nowhere near as bad as what I thought.

Spam users blocked, and the spam nuked. We now return you to your scheduled programming.

"They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them." — Laurence Binyon

Whilst hovering about in IRC, I noticed a conversation that both annoyed and confused me. The basics of it were as follows:

1. Sibling plays MMORPG
2. Sibling becomes addicted to said MMORPG
3. Sibling very nearly fails out of school due to said addiction
4. Therefore, the game and it's developers are evil, and the game should be avoided like the plague.

With a little help from my friends, I have apache's virtualhosts working nicely. :)
It was a little simpler than I expected, but they're finicky.