Invalid credit cards, UQM, Pan is cool, Mozilla add-ons
I decided to keep my Discover Classic, despite the fact that I wanted the Discover Platinum. Maybe I can get them to quickly bump my credit limit up to the supposed $5,000 minimum needed for the Platinum. Anyway, I had the dilemma of signing my card. Some people sign, “Please see ID” or something similar. I’ve always been a card signer. Google around, though, and you find people saying that the official Visa/MasterCard policy is to refuse a card that is not signed with the person’s signature. One of the first hits I found, in fact, was a LiveJournal entry from someone who claims to have had their card rejected at the post office because it wasn’t signed. I went ahead and signed it, more because that’s what I’ve always done and… who really gets their card checked anyway? These days a lot of the people that even look at the back of the card will ask to see my ID regardless.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned this in my web log yet: “The Ur-Quan Masters,” the open source port of the 3DO version of Star Control 2, rocks. I can now play SC2 on my Linux/x86 machine, my Windows desktop, and my Linux/PPC Powerbook. Of course, my save games only work on x86, and I suspect this is because the save game files don’t pay attention to endianness. I recommend a CVS build. For Linux this should be quite easy. For Windows, try Striker’s CVS builds. Also recommended: mining map, and once you get into Quasispace, this map of Quasispace outlets will help; information about organisms on planets; and a SC2 constellation search engine. Beware the search engine, though: it may give you spoilers when you search on a constellation and it has something interesting in it (”comments” field).
Pan is cool. I was using Forte Agent to leech on my Windows box today, and for whatever reason I decided to fire up Pan and hit my local news server whilst Agent was attacking Giganews. Turns out Pan supports multiple news servers, which I don’t think Agent does. It also defaults to several parallel connections to my news server. I think its task management is better, and it has a task list that I don’t think Agent has. Plus it’s in Linux. It also joined up all the different parts to binaries, which Agent seems to require me to do manually. Overall very impressed. I think I’ll be using this to leech until I find something wrong with it, or I find something better.
I also decided to upgrade Mozilla on my Windows box today. I was going to go with Firebird, but it doesn’t have an installer; they lose. I like things to be listed in Add/Remove Programs, sorry. I did notice the list of Firebird extensions though, and then realized that many/most of them work in Mozilla as well. In particular I think the Yahoo! Companion bar for Mozilla has the potential to score points: bookmarks that are stored at Yahoo! Finally we can have synchronized bookmarks between Unix and Windows? Perhaps. Aggreg8 looks cool, but I didn’t try it. I get the feeling its developer is on temporary hiatus, and I don’t think it can beat News Is Free — other than the fact that I could add my own RSS feeds. Maybe I’ll look at it for that fact some day. I also installed Diggler and Tabbrowser Extensions. I suspect the latter has some bugs, but it might be nice to at least be able to move tabs around in order, or move them from window to window. I always want to do that.
