decafbad recaffeinated

I wish feeds of items I've marked as favorite on YouTube and Flickr could include the datestamp for when I did so. Not when the original item was published, or when it last received an update or a comment — I want the datestamp of when it caught my attention. That would make building my accumulator so much easier.

I feel like I should have some sort of epic end-of-year wrap up post, since it's been kind of an epic year. But, mostly, I'm just happy to have my back to it. In stark contrast to the year before, not much went the way I hoped or planned — so there's a lot of room for improvement in 2008.

So, instead of going anywhere for the holidays, I just hunkered down in hermitage at home and worked on doing absolutely nothing. I got the accumulator out of my system, which had been percolating for awhile.

But after that, there's been a lot of navel gazing and reflection. This was against a background of marathon viewing sessions of various nerderies including Buck Rogers, Knight Rider, and Street Hawk. There was also a lot of WoW played and illusory accomplishment enjoyed.

It's been pretty much a 2 week period of complete regression and sloth, but it's been a long time since I last had a vacation. I'm in the final lap now — and not quite ready to be done — but it's time to start spinning up the turbines again.

I really wish this port of WebKit to PalmOS was further along. Not sure what the exact technical challenges are for the semi-modern PalmOS environment, but I'm rooting for the Universe browser.

Have I mentioned lately how ImageWell rocks? Well, it does. For quick image tweaking and publishing, it's the bees knees.

Not sure how I missed it, but I just now realized it saves to Flickr. I'd already been using it with local folders, as well as saving to my remove server via SFTP. But, the Flickr thing? Hot.

Just drag an image into it from a browser, Grab, Finder, or iPhoto. Make a few tweaks and crop. Send and done — awesome.

Hey, how'd my last story get featured on the front page of Ficlets? Neat!

So, I was trying to think of something clever to write about this ZDNet blog entry / column about the enterprise-readiness of services like Twitter, when I noticed something toward the bottom of the page: The good old default set of blogroll links that (used to?) ship with WordPress.

Of course, blogs.zdnet.com doesn't exactly work to hide the fact that WordPress is in use. But, the otherwise custom ZDNet theme made this encounter with lingering defaults all the more unexpected.

Man, those guys must be rolling in PageRank from all the unmodified default WordPress blogrolls out there in the wild.

Hmm. In WoW, I've managed to level one character to level 70, another to 60, and a half-dozen or so others to between levels 20-40 — and I'm barely literate in WoW lore.

So, I'm poking around at ways to bulge my brain into this Centro and hacking a bit. I see that the built-in browser, Blazer, claims to support JavaScript. I've yet to see any evidence of this, though I do indeed have a "Disable JavaScript" checkbox in preferences which is duly unchecked.

I don't really care about Blazer supporting JS in the sense that it works with existing sites - I'd just like to make something for myself involving JS that works on my Centro. But it seems like a big no-op.

As it turns out, JavaScript on the Centro's Blazer browser does work — and to a surprising degree. The DOM, though existant, presents its own pile of fussy bugs — but I've started feeling out their borders. I'm tempting fate and tentatively trying to use YUI, but think I may fall back to an older-school common.js to build up a collection of things that work.

Next, I try to wedge some form of AJAX into the poor thing. It looks like hacks involving cookies or iframes may be viable, if XMLHttpRequest is unavailable.

All this because I just can't bring myself to wrestling a GCC cross-compiling environment for Palm working on OS X again. Last time I tried that was like 2002, and I almost didn't survive the ordeal. And also, I don't yet want to buy an iPhone.

Oh, and it's been awhile since I really tried some masochistic hacking.

So, I don't yet have anything worth writing home about on the Centro's Blazer browser. But, besides discovering that there's next to no documentation on the web for it, I've figured out a few things. Mainly, it seems to be firmly rooted in an era of capabilities not entirely dissimilar to Netscape 4. Constraining and limited and buggy, though not entirely a stupid browser.

The main limitation to something resembling modern techniques is that while it seems like DOM traversal exists and I can modify attributes and node values - all the methods for creating, inserting, or removing nodes appear to be no-ops. So, I can declare nodes in an HTML document, but thereafter never dynamically create or destroy nodes.

I'm at a stage now where I'm trying to decide if this mess is worth playing with further, and if I can think of anything interesting to build.

Including the infamous beefstick!