index.html Journal Index file http://brucesalem.blogspot.com My Blog on Google scripts/feedback.html Feedback Form A Change This morning I went for my morning coffee at Cafe Barrone in Menlo Park and was outraged to find that they had raised the price from $1.25 to $1.80 overnight. Later I checked at Starbucks and found the rice to fill the cup I use for takeout, which I bought from them, was $1.40. So, yes I had heard that the price of coffee has risen worldwide because a demand from China, and Cafe Barrone had raised the price from $1.10 to $1.25 earlier ths year, but a 50 cent increase all at once is a rip off, not only is it that but the excuse that it was raised to keep the uality high doesn't offset the fact that the quality of using Cafe Baronne has been declining over the months due to overcrowding and rude patrons, so I have decided to either go elsewhere or cut out my coffee habit altogether. I have no ilusions that it matters to them that I may not come by anymore, I am not a big spender, but whereever their priorities are, I don't feel part of it. I have a couple of friends I talk to at Barrone, but no one who is so important to me that I can't leave. This even raises the question of why stay in Menlo Park much longer at all. after all people here are pretty conservative and stuck in a rut. The only reason Cafe Barrone hasn't dropped prices in the past three years is that Menlo Park is home to plutocrats who haven't felt the recession. I wonder how may rstaurants in the nation have been able to keep prices up or even raise them as Borrone has. I think that the fault is the Marina and Josh who now run it are much greedier than Zu and Christy, but in any case they do not need my business. The simplicity of XML with XSLT I invented this template early on, in 2007, long before I got interested in the new web standards or dabbled in dynamic web pages with PhP or Javascript. When I downloaded tthe template to my web site it wouldn't work in chrome but would in Firefox. I discovered that the error was that I had a DOCTYPE declaration for the data definition for the XML. I removed that, making the XML ad hoc, and the pages got rendered in both browsers. I keep returning to this idea as the most elogent because the content and the display of it are truely separate and the XSLT automatically generates a Table of Contents with internal links in a list for the page, which could grow to substancial length and yet still be navigable. Problems from Ubuntu Upgrade Upgrading Ubuntu may always be a losing proposition because of the legacy of files, especially libraries it leaves behind. I noticed that an upgrade from 8.10 to 9.04 left about 7 GB additional files for the OS files. Most of this seemed to be libraries that were either not properly cleaned up or were left because older versions of apps installed on the older version caused legacy libraries to be kept. The sweeper tools are not sophistocated enough to both leave third party apps alone or find orphaned depandancies and remove them. I tried one and it clobbered Google Chrome, which I had to reinstall. Another serious problem is that although I wanted the upgrade from Mozilla 3.0 to 3.6 the latter appearently leaks memory so bad it saturates my CPU. I had heard this mentioned seaveral places on-line and it is a recurring challenge for that browser. Still I was able to show that CSS3 features like gradients do work in the upgrade whereas they didn't work in the older version. I do not test in IE because I don't have it installed in Linux and I don't boot often enough into Vista to try it out. I have the later version of Mozilla installed on Vista and I figure that anyone who hasn't enough knowledge to install it on a Windows system doesn't want to read my pages anyway. The lesson of the attempt to upgrade Ubuntu verifies what several people have said on the forums, that it is better to do a fresh install every time you move to the next revision. Ubuntu is in the mid range in rate of upgrades where the support policy pretty much forces a reinstall about every two years. U. 9.04 will go out of support in three months, and 10.04 LTS is probably the version to install. The challenge this represents is that I need to make a new partition for a new install and remove the old install from the partition I have with my home directory on it and mount that separately on /home. It is not the policy to build /home as a separate filesystem, but it sounds like that is the optimal way to do this. Also, since I did install lots of optional packages in need a partition with somewhat more than 10 GB. I have space on my Vista partiton that I could use, but I have to steal the space in a nice way so as to not hurt the NTFS filesystem, and I have to reinstall grub2 during the reinstall to make sure everythng boots. What's Old is New again at Facebook Facebook has announced that it wants to be the biggest e-mail provider in the world with its half billion accounts but it seems that it has yet to get past the blog and discover threads by topic which appeared on the USENET in 1982, so e-mail, which dates back to 1974, and the real need for threads are new again at Facebook. The idea of Facebook, the six degrees of separation, and the geometric progression of friends of friends in a simple blog environment quickly becomes impractable. So, there is the group of people I went to High School who post hundreds of comments a day, most of which does not interest me, is banal, or promotes some ideology I am not concerned with, and no mechanism to mark off and skip that things you don't want to see, as you would with e-mail threads. It is disconcerting and a waste. So the same historical progression is going to repeat, e-mail, spam, threads, security enhancements. Even the multimedia angle isn't new.