substitute

Actually, what I wanted was the manual page for the date function. But thanks a pantload!

There's a sweet little desktop app for OSX called Huevos.

It's tiny and free, and it's a search helper. You pick a search site, type in your search, and your browser of choice fires up and searches. I recommend it!

You can drop in your own searches, so I took out the ones I didn't need and put in somei new ones. In case anyone is interested, my new ones were:

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/s?index=blended&field-keywords=%@

Blinkx: http://www.blinkx.com/videos/%@

Google Video: http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=%@&sitesearch=

IMDB: http://imdb.com/find?s=all&q=%@&x=0&y=0

Powells: http://www.powells.com/s?kw=%@&x=0&y=0

Software description:

Wkuwacz enable easy lerning of words and can be used for any language. Basic advantage of this program is very easy in use editor, that enable you to create your own word-sets. Wkuwacz is designed for Pocket PC and WinXP.

If you're a consumer, in which category I include ordinary members of organizations, citizens, enlisted men in the service etc., there is no point in telling the organization about a problem.

Try telling the call center at your telephone company about a problem with the phone's software. Try telling the sad vest-wearing people at the megastore that the paint cans are all leaking. Experiment by pointing out a hugely embarrassing typo in the ads for your bank. It's almost always pointless. Some combination of corporate hostility, personal resentment from the underling you encounter, "policies," and the complete inability of "first line customer service" to communicate with functional parts of the organization occurs.

There are exceptions. 911, for example; they're always glad to hear about an oil slick on the freeway or the smell of natural gas, or even the leaky paint can. Individuals who run small stores or one-person open source software projects are generally grateful and responsive to help. Journalists, when you contact them directly, like to fix errors and typos.

My example today is LJ. Once, there was a community of some kind for reporting problems, followed by a bugzilla installation, followed now by an RT installation. RT is a great piece of software. I reported on Sept. 22 that a good chunk of my comment emails were blank. No one took the bug and there were no replies; the problem continued. On november 30 someone categorized the bug but did not take it or assign it. Today I added some helpful information. It's dead. A useful and necessary feature is totally broken, but submitting this information as an ordinary user is totally pointless.

I wonder what the minimum size is for an organization so that consumers are sealed off from any attempt to provide useful feedback from the bottom up? With big companies it appears to be a point of pride now that the call center droids and email answerers are forbidden to communicate with anyone. And even with a well-intentioned application of bug tracking software, it's just ennui reporting anything.

One of our internal webservers at the office blew up. It's an intricate and bizarre hack on a little-used platform, and we're terrified of it dying because our knowledge of the internals is bad. I was pretty sad about it, and especially so because I had to fix it.

A careful search of the internet found a mailing list thread in which many, many other people had the same problem, all starting after 2006-05-12.

The thread starts here: http://www.mail-archive.com/aolserver@listserv.aol.com/msg09812.html

What turned out to be the problem? All these systems failed at the same time, exactly one billion seconds before the 32-bit Unix epoch ends in 2038. The timeouts set for database threads caused the software to look ahead, gasp in horror and died.

Ladies and gentlemen I'm in a select club of the first victims of the Year 2038 Bug.

My job is weird.

Their "friends" setup is bizarrely broken. You can't see anything but photo and their chosen "display name," so you don't know who some people are after a few months when they change their pic to Woody Woodpecker and start calling themselves Antonin Artaud.

I find myself thinking "Who is Potatoes O'Brien?" or "Not only is this woman not Audrey Hepburn, but I don't know anyone who lives in Macon, Georgia. WTF?"

Then it gets funnier with email. Today I forwarded something and saw how that works; you get the list of display names from which to choose. Two of my friends chose the same one, it being their first name. So I didn't know whether I was forwarding to turnip or salome_st_john. Fortunately they have similar senses of humor so I just sent it to both.

It's strange how many recently-built human artifacts are like ancient fucked-up things that Just Somehow Happened.

I think the commute would be a bit much. Thanks, though!This is Deepak Jayasheelan writing to you from Esika Infotech Private Limited www.esikainfotech.com, Bangalore, a leading Talent Search Company. We have a mandate from our client, Yahoo! Software Development India Private Limited, http://bangalore.yahoo.com to acquire talent from the rest of the world. In this regard, kindly let us know if you would be interested in exploring opportunities at Yahoo Bangalore.

I would like to thank evan, atrustheotaku, and logjam for reviving my faith in the open source software community. You can't get a 24-hour turnaround on bug fixes from a commercial software vendor for any kind of money. My problem is now gone!