Juho Snellman's Weblog

Evil Compiler Engineer

jsnell@iki.fi — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 22:20:00 GMT

If I ever get bored with my current job title (Software Archaeologist), Evil Compiler Engineer will be probably be near the top of my list of alternatives:

Feed moving

jsnell@iki.fi — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 05:00:00 GMT

I've moved my blog away from the University of Helsinki Department of Computer Science servers, where it's been living for almost two years. In anticipation of this moment I originally made all the links to my rss feeds through as forwarding service. When the blog moves, just flip the redirector to point elsewhere, and the users won't notice a thing!

At least that was the plan.

Apparently a lot of people still managed to subscribe with the target URL of the forwarder (http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/jesnellm/blog/rss-...), instead of with the forwarder URL (http://www.iki.fi/jsnell/blog/rss-...), and thus would still be seeing the old feed after the move.

So now I've just set up a HTTP 301 (permanent) redirect on the old location. Smart RSS aggregators are supposed to update the feed URL when seeing a permanent redirect, but judging from the access logs few do this in practice. Instead a 301 is treated the same as a 302 (temporary) redirect.

Which brings me to the actual point: If you want to keep on subscribing to this feed indefinitely, please check that you aren't using the cs.helsinki.fi URL. I'm hoping to graduate this year, which might also imply losing the 301 from the old location to the new one.

While moving servers, I also took the opportunity to redo the blog as a dynamic application (using Araneida) instead of generating static pages. I'll see whether I can procrastinate myself into adding comment support in the future.

A Feast for Crows review

jsnell@iki.fi — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 00:30:00 GMT

No plot spoilers.

Capsule review: We waited five years for this crap?

Finished reading A Feast for Crows, the fourth book in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, earlier this week. After a five-year wait since the previous volume this is a huge dissapointment. Essentially nothing happens, the book mainly has viewpoints from the most boring characters of the earlier books, and introduces a bunch of pointless and mostly boring new viewpoint characters. The only exception to the boredom are the Cersei chapters which I find rather entertaining.

Supposedly there was originally supposed to be a multi-year gap in story time between books three and four. Actually this book picks up where the previous one started, and moves forward maybe a couple of months. And to top it off, the next book is going to be in parallel to this one. If something had actually happened, this might be acceptable, but as far as I can tell, the story has completely ground to a halt here. Not quite a Robert Jordan-style halt where, when I finally stopped reading, a book consisted of three story days of people having internal monologues and sniffing, but the signs are there.

There's of course a fair bit of the ASoIaF trademark cruelty, violence and sex (ooh, hot medieval lesbian bondage action...), but it feels somewhat contrived compared to the earlier books.

Wait for the mass market paperback. If you absolutely can't wait and live in the Helsinki area, I'd be happy to sell you the hardcover... :-)

emusic

jsnell@iki.fi — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 19:30:00 GMT

I've been a happy user of emusic.com for over a year now. Basically their business model is selling subscriptions that entitle the user to download a certain amount of no-strings-attached non-drm mp3s per month (starting from 40 songs/month for $9.99). Originally I signed up just to get the 50 free downloads that they offer for new subscribers, found enough interesting stuff to continue with the cheapest subscription, and finally had to upgrade to 65 songs/month (for $14.99/month) since my "save for later" list was starting to get too long.

A few reasons I like emusic:

The price per song is hard to beat, about 80-90% cheaper than the approximate price per song on CDs bought in Finland.
They have a pretty good selection of the sort of music that I like, and some of it is stuff that would be hard to find in record stores around here. Your mileage may vary.
There are reasonable tools for finding new music that I might like.
The music isn't copy protected in any way, so I can be reasonably sure that no matter what I do I won't be breaking the new Finnish copyright law (passed by the corrupt politicians a few months ago).

It's by no means a perfect service, but definitely worth a try.

Testing

jsnell@iki.fi — Wed, 28 Jan 2004 00:00:00 GMT

I've decided to replace my ad-hoc, bug-ridden perl scripts + Makefiles for generating html pages (mainly used for some bloggish purposes, though not strictly for blogging) with some over-engineered Common Lisp code. Let's see what happens.