Felocity

My macintosh just got 100 times cooler today. Thanks to John Hicks and his entry on menubars I just added two great applications to my Macintosh. The first of these is QuickSilver which is nothing short of amazing. It's been a long dream of mine to be able to just type in what I want and have the application return it to me. And now, that dream is real. I simply trigger QS, type in what I want, and away I go. Oh, and it also can control iTunes, send messages and files over Adium, locate documents, run scripts and commands, and I bet it could even make an iced mocha if someone had the time to create the plugin. I must say though, their site does little to explain what exactly QS does. Let me take a moment to say that what it does on the surface is launch programs. What it really does deep inside is provide a text-searching interface to anything on your computer with a robust menu that lets you do pretty much anything with anything you find.

The second of these applications is known as Synergy which I had actually heard a lot about, but had never grabbed. Having seen it's interface and having become annoyed with alt-tabbing into iTunes to switch tracks, I decided to give it a whirl. As of Synergy's install, iTunes has been given the Cmd+H treatment, and I don't miss it at all. Plus the next-track flyout reminds me of all those music notices when you are playing an EA game. As if that wasn't enough, it also downloads album graphics off of Amazon for me and is pretty customizable. I have yet to try it with multiple monitors, but I'm really confident it will do fine.…

It's very nice to have alternatives on the IRC market, especially for windows. With mIRC being exploit prone, bulky, weighted, and sluggish while X-Chat gives the GPL the middle finger (and its developers who contributed as well). Suffice to say, the number of powerful and robust IRC clients for Windows designed for heavy use just went from two to zero. That's what I thought until I came across a powerful Windows IRC client called Klient. Klient is a for-pay IRC solution that gives mIRC a run for its money- literally. Well developed with many of the features in mind that people want from an IRC client, and a scripting language that is perfect in many ways, supporting PERL, Python, TCL, and VisualBasic all via a set of predefined hooks and an in-program script editor and syntax checker! Usually, I am pretty opposed to paying for an IRC client. I already paid once for mIRC (oh so long ago), have Trillian Pro, and have Gaim. However, none of these have native nickserv support, do well across 10-12 channels, and provide a well developed community. I'm still waiting on my registration code, but that's okay. Klient proved within the first 15 minutes of use that it was worth the $25 price tag.

We finally have DSL at home, which means I can begin to tackle the dozens of little projects that have been pooling. I think I will start tonight by uploading the new house pictures. Plus, I need them online soon so that I can show everyone back home what our place looks like. I figure between this, Super Mario RPG, some work on my web site redesign, and my programming for tonight, I've got a means to keep myself busy until it is time to go to bed.…

I feel as if finally I have found a decent newsreader; capable of getting regular RSS, ATOM based feeds, and even retrieving friends only postings from LiveJournal and DeadJournal, allows you to authenticate for protected feeds, has systray notification, and is five to seven times faster than any other solution out there. NewzCrawler is the most effective reader of its kind, and is the first for-pay reader that has actually been worth its price tag. At the nice cost of only $25, you get a very clean, simple, and effective 3 paned interface with compatibility for everything that you need. Normally, I am a fan of open source solutions that are free to develop and tweak. I am very happy to say there is little I would change about this product.

The catch is, you must use LiveJournal's new "digest" mode authentication for RSS. You can access it by attaching ?auth=digest to the rss URL. For example: http://www.livejournal.com/user/data/rss becomes http://www.livejournal.com/user/data/rss?auth=digest…

I thought it was going to be hard, but it wasn't. Thanks to the easy export of MT and the import wizard in b2, moving blogs, categories, comments, and authors was a snap! It only took a few minutes to redo a few things to my liking, and now I am running a full php based solution. Many people have made the jump away from Movable Type, myself included. It has started taking longer and longer to do a rebuild, and after trying the Typekey service, I found it did very little for me. (Especially the part where nobody wanted to sign up). I had to get away and try something different.

A while back, I had helped Dave get his own blog up and running. In setting that up, I fell in love with b2's structure. It was kind of clunky, but I could do something I had been wanting to do for a long time- step around templates. I like having a back-end application for data entry, but when I want to display my blogs, I want to most direct access to it. The EvoSkins are nice, but nothing will ever beat the ability to set some parameters in a stub file and have 100% control over your layout on a physical level. Templates are nice, but the instant you start doing things such as custom views, file includes, and php based queries in addition to your blog, the skins just don't work as well as you would like them to. Enter the stub file- small, simple, allows you to set template variables on the fly, and just works. As a person who wants a site dedicated to experimentation and development, I couldn't have found a sweeter deal.…

In case you missed it, there is a wicket OS X exploit out there. It's the stuff other not-quite-so-good systems are made of mostly. Anyway, you want this tool that allows you to disassociate help:// links, disk:// links, and telnet:// links. The short of the exploit is that someone can run remote code on your computer. The non-technical ramifications are that if you click a link your Mac will do everything from mounting a remote .dmg file, running ANY command on your computer, and (related to that last point) DELETE any file you have permission to delete. Since many Mac users run as their "root" account, I'm sure you can guess where this is going. (Update:http://bronosky.com/pub/AppleScript.htm provides proof of concept test using the "disk usage" command. This is just an exploit demonstration site.) Scary shit. Very scary shit.

Speaking of things that are scary, I have to present my capstone in the morning. I'm nervous, but coping as only I know how: reading everyone's blogs.…

I've been doing a few site revisions here and there, mostly housekeeping, and have been constantly fighting a never-ending battle against spam. I have been looking through the list of things people have done to get rid of spam, and have seen everything from the simple "hide a form element" method to the much more elaborate MT-Blacklist Plugin. I finally settle on an initial tool that doesn't require excessive editing (yet). I still feel the blacklist tool is by far the best, but I am not quite ready to go back and get SimpleComments and Threaded Comments working with the plugin. The Intermediate solution then (since blacklisting spam URLs isn't an option) is to employ some very fuzzy logic in the analysis of comments and pings. I'm actually a fan of the Bayes method, so I was excited to see an MT plugin for it. While I prefer a blacklist for speed, a Bayes routine can have a 99.98% success rate with 0 false positives. Suck on that spammers. And if you happen to use MT, pick up the plugin from James' web site. It doesn't take anything major to install, and it is rather effective in its filtering methods.

Incidentally, I wonder if LiveJournal has ever given thought to comment spam...…

It is interesting to see over the years how Blog Software has developed. Back in the days where CMS was a new thing, nuke was a "cool idea", and the word "blog" wasn't even around, the idea of Internet published diaries existed courtesy of news software. Since then, personal news postings have evolved to a new level, where discussions take place in addition to the day to day ramblings. And Blogging software has evolved as well, diving neatly into two little camps: hosted, and provided. For the sake of discussion, we will define hosted as services such as LiveJournal, and OpenDiary, whereas provided software refers to things such as Blogger, MovableType, B2 (and evolution), and Greymatter. The biggest undisputed difference between the two methods is their community. The exposure a blog gets on livejournal is often times much much wider than a personal blog on the Internet would normally get. This is immediately apparent through the rapid spreading of memes and quizzes through a livejournal community. On provided software, you rarely see the posting of memes and snippets from quizzilla, but instead see more technology oriented discussion, most likely a result of a more tech-savvy audience. And so where is this all leading? Well, you can't do something like this for free on the Internet forever, and it was only a matter of time before Blog hosters and providers alike needed to find a way to keep their software and ideas aloft. How they have chosen to do it is perhaps what may eventually make or break the blogging community.

LiveJournal has been around forever, and probably will continue to be around forever more. They have opened their registration up, meaning there is no more invite codes, no more limits to the number of users, and no limit to the number of usernames that are going to be taken by the time you read this. In order to recoup the costs associated with servers, the LJ staff has opted to provide free accounts the option to pay money. With the payment of more money, users get all of 3 things. More pictures, more customization, and the ability to read RSS feeds. For those that have been missing the accelerating demand for RSS, these small files of content make it possible to read things with very little load time. This makes RSS ideal for syndication. The most important thing in LiveJournal though from the average user's perspective is the ability to customize. If you have a web site and you want to include your journal, the easiest (and most accurate) answer is "tough shit, pay up". There is no easy way to work with templates, the style system is impossible for most people to deal with, and in the end, nobody takes advantage of the features they just paid for. Expect LiveJournal to be around for some time, although their source of revenue will never be people who are serious about blogging, but more about people who want the post icons, the easy commenting, and a fast way to check up on all their friends.…

I have heard mixed reactions to the new Winamp put out by Nullsoft. Being a person that doesn't mind trying a new version, I went ahead and threw it on my PC. It launched, it looked pretty, and the playlist feature was simply amazing. I enjoyed it, I really did. So why now am I running Winamp 2.8.x again? The answer is simple: I opened Internet Explorer.

Now, I wouldn't even be complaining that the audio decided to stutter and lag. I suppose when you do several things on a 512mb 700mhz PIII, this is "normal". After all, in a technology world, this thing is considered obsolete. Curious just how much I was hurting for resources, I flicked open the Task Manager. Winamp 3 (Studio.exe) was taking about 15 clock cycles and over 20mb of RAM. That was even more than Windows Media Player at times. This is also a massive jump from the 7mb RAM that the old Winamp used to take. I was curious if other people were having this problem, so I went to the Winamp forums. There was a complaint thread. After reading that I really decided not to go to Winamp 3. And it had nothing to do with the program. It was all about the moderators, who would make comments to forum posters. Someone would raise some valid concerns about the product (for example: will the lite version not have video support? I never use it.) and you would get a reply like this:…

For moderate to advanced computer users: - must know how to text edit files - can navigate directory structure - can back up files to desktop or other location

If you use anything that is "Ad-Ware" (shows you ads and crap so it is "free") here is a non hacking program way to get rid of the ads.…