Tao of Mac

Dec 8th 2003 · 2 min read

Neat Little Things

I've just stumbled upon Simon Haertel's site, and found two little gems:

But if you're getting into the spirit, you'll probably like :

The (Broken) Spoke

After reading about 's foray into blogging for a while now, I decided to take a look at The Spoke. The homepage looks a bit shabby, but the interesting part is that clicking on links soon provided me with ample entertainment:

For extra brownie points, looking at the source code for the error message gave me a remarkably Tomcat-like exception dump hidden in an HTML comment:

[FileNotFoundException]: C:\Webs\www.theSpoke.net_12022003\firstpage.aspx
   at System.Web.UI.TemplateParser.GetParserCacheItem()
   at System.Web.UI.TemplateControlParser.CompileAndGetParserCacheItem(String virtualPath, String inputFile, HttpContext context)
   at System.Web.UI.TemplateControlParser.GetCompiledInstance(String virtualPath, String inputFile, HttpContext context)
   at System.Web.UI.PageParser.GetCompiledPageInstanceInternal(String virtualPath, String inputFile, HttpContext context)
   at System.Web.UI.PageParser.GetCompiledPageInstance(String virtualPath, String inputFile, HttpContext context)
   at e9.thespoke.components.UrlReWriteHandlerFactory.GetHandler(HttpContext context, String requestType, String url, String path)
   at System.Web.HttpApplication.MapHttpHandler(HttpContext context, String requestType, String path, String pathTranslated, Boolean useAppConfig)
[HttpException]: Exception of type System.Web.HttpException was thrown.
   at System.Web.HttpApplication.MapHttpHandler(HttpContext context, String requestType, String path, String pathTranslated, Boolean useAppConfig)
   at System.Web.MapHandlerExecutionStep.System.Web.HttpApplication+IExecutionStep.Execute()
   at System.Web.HttpApplication.ExecuteStep(IExecutionStep step, Boolean& completedSynchronously)

You really have to wonder how much borrows from - and how much of an impression efforts like Tomcat and Cocoon have made on . Embrace, rename and extend, indeed...

And what's the deal with all the blogs only having a couple of entries or so? Not to mention a surprisingly uniform set of interests (I couldn't find a single blogger that was interested in , let alone ...), which makes me wonder - for a supposedly student-oriented site, this shows very little diversity indeed.

does Anaconda

Looks like there are unofficial ISOs out using the anaconda installer (more on Debianplanet). I actually grinned when I read about this, since I was thinking of giving a go yesterday and settled for instead since I couldn't find the much vaunted "easy installer". In the meantime, I had a conversation that went more or less like this:

friend: so you're going to get rid of the dual CPU or not?
me: I've just slotted in a new HD, think I'm going to see if that fixes
    the corruption problem and use it to compile a Cobalt kernel
friend: you're gonna put BSD on it?
me: nah, I'm trying to figure out how to get Debian on it, for a change
friend: there was that ISO build tool
me: can't find it in that messy site of theirs. You know where the newfangled
    installer thingy is?
friend: yah, but the links are broken. Probably didn't make it past the Party
         Committee for Ideological Code Purity or whatnot.
me: ROTFL
friend: Debian is looking more and more like an 80s Soviet state these days - the
        ideology alone is putting me off
me: given up on the installer thing. Gonna try Fedora instead.
me: just have to toast the third ISO for an SMP install
friend: should work
me: ETA 15 minutes to get a working machine, instead of two hours fiddling with
    dselect and apt unstable
friend: lol