...more recent posts
I wish there was a way to notify google when their index is incorrect. I get hundreds of hits a day from google image searches for John Lennon (I'm the 4th result of searching for "john lennon".) But the picture they think is on my site is not on my site! And they link to the entire month of September, 2001 so the bandwidth is not inconsequential. Shouldn't I be able to ask their robots to check a particular result in such a case. Like, "hey google, you got this one wrong - you don't have to believe me, but send a robot to check it out."
Note to self: make sure you use the "one time" alarm and not the "daily" alarm when you set your cell phone to go off at 4:30 am.
Related query: does anyone have a clock anymore? I mean one not on your cellphone or computer?
This seems like a sensible compromise: serving google ads only when the referrer is a search engine.
Pashua "is a tool for creating simple, but native Aqua GUIs for Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, Rexx and shell scripts as well as AppleScript." Neat. Very simple to use.
Also from the same people: exif untrasher for recovering pictures erased from a digital camera. Both for OS X. Both free.
New York Bloggers, Monday, May 3rd at the Apple Store.
Here is a Windows program to remove the DRM from iTunes Music Store purchases.
Gmail screenshots. This thing has some serious DHTML kung-foo. I heard it does autocomplete in the search field! How is that possible?
This is page is undergoing some redesign. I've removed all my links, but now there is a larger list that is a slightly edited export of my browser bookmarks on the links page.
In the past I would use the links on my page for much of my daily surfing, but the ability of Safari to simultaneously open all links in a bookmark folder as tabs has won me over. So my plan now is to build my bookmarks in Safari, and then export them to that links page whenever I make substantial changes. The present list is a first pass, and lots more sorting needs to be done.
The free program Safari Bookmark Exporter helps in converting to plain HTML.
MB and a lot of the building went down to D.C. for the march today. I'm feeling a bit guilty for not going, but I just couldn't handle the 4:30 am wake up call. Still, I'm with them in spirit to the degree this is possible. Hopefully more people will be like her than like me and the turn out will be substantial.
Nice to be back in NYC. Beautiful weather. And 2168 spam emails waiting to greet me.
Home tomorrow...
Excellent new Crytpo-Gram from Bruce Schneier, including pieces on national ID cards, and a cost-benefit analysis of stealing an election (he's written extensively in the past about technical problems with electronic voting machines.)
Leaving tomorrow morning for a week in Miami. Lots of running around with my head cut off today trying to get ready. Will hopefully replace my SD storage card in my phone so that I can get the photolog working again.
Temperatures should be around 80. I haven't felt warm in so long!
Shtoom is a open-source, cross-platform VoIP softphone, implemented in Python. As well as the basic phone, the package also includes a number of other applications -Looks like their commercial application uses this in a package that combines blogging and VoIP for the corporate world. Wow, I'm trying to get my head around that.
- shtoom - the end-user phone
- shtam - a simple answering machine/voicemail application
- shmessage - an announcement server
Shtoom should work on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. It ships with user interfaces for Qt/KDE, Gtk/GNOME, Tk and a command line. There will hopefully be native user interfaces for Windows and the Mac soon, until then, the Tk interface works on those platforms.
I'm just hearing about Ecto now. It is a stand alone weblogging application. So instead of posting your blog through a tiny textarea box inside your browser, Ecto gives you a sort of word processing like program with a much richer set of formatting and spell check features. It also does image uploads, and can even crop and resize images. Looks like a pretty slick package. And lots of integration on OS X (it integrates with iPhoto for instance.) Here are some screen shots.
And now there is a Windows version as well.
I'll keep my eye on this, but I don't think it is something I would pay for. Neat idea though.
Nokia 6255. This is the phone I am recommending now (if you don't need an uber geek phone like the Treo600 or S/E P900.) This Nokia has everthing. Very nice.
Experimenting with Bit Torrent & RSS. I wish I could get it together to say more about this combination. Hopefully in the future. I think this might be big.
You can download the Bit Torrent client here (MacOS X and Windows) if you want to play around with it. Sort of like a P2P program, except you don't search for files. Instead, you have to have a link to a .torrent seed file. This seed file then allows you to connect to peers, and download the target file in chunks from many different people at once. As you download bits of the file, you are also uploading bits to other people.
So a server can seed a .torrent file of size x, and then n number of people can download it. But the server doesn't need x * n bandwidth, it only needs x * y where y is some very small number. Then the rest of the people downloading the file (n - y) will actually be downloading it from other people who are downloading it instead of from the original server. So the greater the number of people downloading at the same time (the larger n is) the *greater* the speed you will get (at no cost to the original server.) This is very good for large files that lots of people want at the same time. Perhaps it's the only way to do this.
But, like I said, you can't search for stuff through Bit Torrent. You have to already know the URL of a .torrent seed in order to get started. For instance, here is a web site listing television show .torrents. Just open one of those URLs in Bit Torrent and it will start downloading (be patient, it can take a few minutes to connect and start - but then it will be very fast once it starts.)
If that all makes sense, then the original link to the Bit Torrent + RSS stuff is just about making RSS feeds be able to contain .torrent links, and having the RSS feed reader automatically hand these links off to Bit Torrent. This way someone can publish a .torrent seed, say, in the middle of the night, your RSS reader would automatically get the link, and then automatically start the download. With this setup you could wake up every morning to hundreds of megs of fresh downloads, all without your intervention, just by subscribing to certain RSS channels. (Sounds a little like TV, no?)
Anyway, I'm rushing, and this is not a good summary, but there is something very interesting here. I'll try to come back with better examples.
There might be a Mac OS X trojan in the wild. This would be the first one as far as I know.
Went away for the weekend to a strange house in Pine HIlls New York. About 2 hours north of NYC. It was built with all local stone by a friend's great grandfather in 1921. Beautiful quirky structure on 400 amazing acres. Here are a few (out of order, sorry) pictures of the main house (click the thumbnails for larger images.)
Playfair is an open source program to turn DRM laden (fairplay) Apple iTunes .AAC files into regular .AAC files. Source code only.
Kinja finally launches (beta.) This is the weblog portal that Nick Denton (gawker, gizmodo, wonkette, micro publishing big wig) and Meg Hourihan (megnut, ex blogger co-founder) have been working on for quite some time.
After a quick look it seems like a web based RSS reader (aggregator?) that has a blog like presentation style. You select the channels (RSS feeds from the blogoshpere) and they are aggragated for you on your Kinja page, called a digest. Sort of like an auto generated weblog that is all pull quotes and links with no commentary.
Here's Jason Kottke's digest.
Why isn't the current (voice) phone system considered a danger to national security? Clearly it fails in any large enough crisis. If the telcos would accelerate their switch to an IP based network (which is going to happen anyway) they could solve the problem by scaling back services in times of huge demand (most likely during some major crisis.) Instead of millions of simultaneous voice calls bringing the whole system to a complete stop, the telcos could just drop voice service during such peak times and people would have to use SMS. Not as good as voice maybe, but infinitely better than nothing (which is what most people had in NYC on 9/11.)
Shouldn't they really do this?
Quicksilver is a launcher application for Mac OS X (10.3). Similar to the hugely popular Launchbar, except Quicksilver is free. A little hard to explain, but if you are the type of Mac user who knows and uses all the keyboard shortcuts (I guess this means "power user" but I hate that phrase) you really should give it a look. Amazingly elegant.
My Treo 600 has been out geeked. Okay, this isn't a phone, so it's not really a fair comparison. But Sharp's new Zaurus SL-6000L is the new definitive high end wireless (802.11b) PDA for people who get excited by remote terminal session and reg ex. Slide out thumbboard. Big screen. Runs linux. Case closed.
Well, assuming you can drop $699 on a PDA and you don't mind getting laughed at by all the cool kids with their iPods...
Bluetooth headset shrinks to 5 grams. Paired with your bluetooth phone you can talk without taking the phone out of your pocket (in other words, it's just like plugging in a traditional headset to a cellphone, except with bluetooth there is no cord.) Still a ways to go, but that's a big improvement over the previous bulky bluetooth headsets.
Google launches unbelievably cool free email service on April 1st, and nobody can figure out if it's a joke or not.
The press release reads like a joke, except it's not really particularly funny. And all the wires picked it up as true, so it seems like there might be some SEC regulations that were violated if it is a joke. But I'm really not sure. I definitely want it, but it does seem too good to be true. 1 Gig of free web based email storage integrated with Google's search engine. Who wouldn't switch to this? But how can they give away a gigabyte of storage?
Please be true, please be true...