Merry Christmas!

Great Circle Mapper

Peter showed me this useful little tool (Great Circle Mapper) for working out the great circle distance between places around the world.

Among other things, it's useful for estimating how many frequent flyer points you'll get on a round-the-world plane trip.

Prompt reply from Egress developer

So, as I mentioned in my previous post, I contacted the developer of Egress to ask if they could investigate the issue of RSS feeds from Blogger Beta blogs not playing nicely with Egress.

I'm very happy to report that I received a prompt response thanking me for the notification, and saying that they'd found the issue and will implement a fix in the next version of Egress! I'm very happy to hear this!!

My iPAQ is heavily customised and has a great number of third party applications. So sometimes I do come across bugs or have requests. Whenever I email the developers these issues, I always receive prompt and helpful responses. It's really great to see them paying such attention to their users.

Blogger Beta RSS feeds don't play nicely with Egress or Sharp Reader

Something that is really bothering me with Blogger Beta blogs is that RSS feeds from them don't seem to play nicely with Egress. I'm guessing that it's something to do with the changes between Blogger and Blogger Beta because I've been using the same version of Egress for the past few months. Also, Peter is seeing the same problems with Blogger Beta blogs through his RSS aggregator (Sharp Reader)

What happens is that every time I sync (in Egress) the RSS feed from a Blogger Beta blog, all of the entries (or a large number) come down as being published today, even though when I look at the actual blog website I can see the entry being dated weeks ago. Also, the blog entries are synchronising completely out-of-order.

The most annoying thing that's happening is that once I read an entry and it's marked unread, I find that if I re-sync that blog later in the day, all/most of the old 'read' entries become 'unread'. This means that I no longer know when there's actual new content to look at because anything marked as 'unread' might be new content, or it might just be the entry I read a couple of hours ago which has been re-synced back to 'unread'.

I've contacted the developers of Egress to ask if there's any way they can help. I don't know if they can, but I figured it's worth asking. I hope that that something can be worked out because it's really bugging me!

Moved to Blogger Beta

I moved this blog to Blogger Beta last weekend. It's been relatively painless so far. I also decided to refresh the look and feel. I've been thinking about this for a while because I've had the same template for quite a long time.

I'm still working on the template. A lot of the links from my old template are still missing from here. It will take a little while before it's 'finished' (are these things ever really finished?), but it's in a fit enough state for public consumption.

Inactive blogs

How long do you wait before declaring a blog to be dead (or perhaps just dormant?) and removing it from your blog links list? I reckon 6 months without a new post is justifiable for removing the link. Well, actually, I don't completely remove the link, I just comment it out in the code so it's very quick and easy to re-activate it if the blogger starts posting again.

Some of the blogs to which I link haven't had any new posts for 6 months or more, so I'm turning these off for now. However, I'm still watching out for updates through the RSS aggregator on my iPAQ, so I'll reinstate the links if these blogs become active again!

Girls can blindfold solve too

It's mostly just boys who get into blindfold cube solving, or cube solving in general, but some girls can do it too. Here's a video of Shelley Chang blindfold solving. I haven't yet tried this form of cubing, but I will... one day...