dpk’s weblog

Edited 5/1/06: As pointed out by Peter, it looks like A9 doesn’t include either the standard Google search or the Google Images search as options. It’s not locale related, as his experience matches mine. Guess I’m going back to google.com directly, although I’ll miss the parallel searches.

Before I start let me explain why I use A9: I get a kick out of seeing the images that come up for my searches, sometimes they’re just ridiculous. The text results show up on the left, and the image results on the right.

It looks like A9 just switched the default engine for my searches from Google to Live. Google has been relegated to the “More choices…” menu. I have nothing against Live, exactly, however I don’t really dig how it was just changed without a user prompt.

The real suck of this, though, is that with Google being a later option than Images, Google search results now appear to the right of the images instead of to the left, which is just plain silly.

While it wasn’t hard to find in “Help”, the method for changing the order of the result boxes is in a non-intuitive place: You can change the order of the search result boxes by going to the “Add/Remove” option of “More Choices…”. Problem solved I guess. Still, an irritating development that I’ll chalk up to the “anti-user user interface movement”.

Time zones are a major source of annoyance for me, when writing code or working with databases that store time-keyed data. It’s especially irritating when you have to deal with the abomination that is daylight savings time.

So, I’ve finally decided to go ahead and set my server clocks to UTC (or GMT). It wasn’t hard to figure out how to do this, but documentation for this specific task was rather sparse as most people seem to want to move away from UTC.

On FreeBSD and Debian (Sarge) Linux, you can do this by copying /usr/share/zoneinfo/Etc/UTC to /etc/localtime . On Debian, you’ll want to replace what is currently in /etc/timezone with the string “Etc/UTC”. Then run ntpdate against your favorite time server, and reboot so all applications have the proper timezone setting.

You’ll need to figure out how you want to set your CMOS clock. I’ve left them as they are, set to local time, because it’s not convenient to load up the BIOS and change them. On FreeBSD, if your CMOS clock is on local time, touch /etc/wall_cmos_clock . If UTC, rm /etc/wall_cmos_clock . On Debian (Sarge) Linux, run “hwclock –localtime” or “hwclock –utc”.