...more recent posts
Spamhaus, the venerable spam blacklisting service, is starting an invite only whitelist. (Blacklists say "we think these addresses are spammers" while whitelists say "we think these addresses are not spammers"; both can be used by email servers to reduce the amount of spam delivered to users.) The invite only part means, I would guess, that this list will be a big business type thing (I doubt I'll be able to be listed, but I'm sure Chase and Verizon will have no problem). This is the sort of issue that can be tricky in the sense that it seems to split the web into tiers based on something like corporate size, and this seems to cut against the democratic spirit of the web. On the other hand, spam is a ridiculously annoying problem, and this seems like it will only help the situation. So it's a good example of something the younger me might have been against on principle, but which I'm now in favor of for purely pragmatic reasons. The best internet isn't the one that exists somewhere in my dreams; it's the best one we can actually make in reality.
Is the Stuxnet worm targeting the Iranian nuclear infrastructure? Slashdot discussion is here. Debka (grain of salt, etc...) says that Iran has confirmed this to be the case. Pretty interesting.
I've run into an issue where I was hitting the memory limit of Safari on the iPad (loading in very large image galleries) which was causing the browser to crash. (ouch!) It turns out that there is possibly no direct way to unload images from memory in this case, but you can force something to the same effect by changing the src of images you want to unload to point to a small (1x1px) image file. This will unload the real (large) image from memory, replacing it with the small one. Details at the link.
Rsync using sudo via remote shell:
stty -echo; ssh myUser@REMOTE_SERVER/ "sudo -v"; stty echothen:
rsync -avze ssh --rsync-path='sudo rsync'/ myUser@REMOTE_SERVER:/REMOTE_PATH/ LOCAL_PATH
Way behind on a bunch of stuff to post. But I really need to remember this for my own uses since it seems to have improved the performance of Mail.app under 10.5 (which had become so slow it was very frustrating to use and taking up way too much of my time.)
1. Quit Mail.app
2. Back up Mail just in case (i.e., copy ~/Library/Mail to somewhere safe)
3. in Terminal type:
sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index4. Still in Terminal, at the sqlite> prompt, type:
vacuum subjects;and wait for the sqlite> prompt to return (several minutes in my case.)
5. Ctrl-d to drop out of sqlite3 back into terminal
6. Restart Mail.app
Huge speed improvement for me.
Open source (MIT license) Harmony in-browser drawing application. Wow. Demo here. That's all javascript and the <canvas> tag.
Yesterday Google announced it's new Font API and it is completely amazing. They set up a web font directory where they have open sourced a bunch of fonts. To use one of them, say Tangerine, in your web page you just include the following in the document head:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Tangerine">Google also teamed up with TypeKit who open sourced their WebFont Loader which is a nice way to deal with some possible loading issue differences across browsers.
Raph Levien, creator of the great Inconsolata font, works on the project for Google. There is an interview with him about it here.
This is really exciting news for web designers. Typography has been something of a sore spot up until now. Like a lot of helpful improvements to the web, this doesn't break an amazing amount of new ground. You could already do this all yourself with @font-face. But what Google has done is to make it extremely easy to implement, while helping everyone out with the added bandwidth requirements of having to download the fonts to the users computer. Hotlinking the fonts from the same Google URI means that designers can feel very confident of the fonts already being in the users browser cache. Simple and extremely helpful. Thanks again Google. And get ready for much more interesting typography on the web.
I've done a bunch of tweaking to spamassassin which should result in many fewer spam emails getting through to email accounts on my server. I'd be curious if anyone notices any changes from this point forward.
Having some trouble with my jimb at digitalmediatree email (on my home machine, not on the server.) So best to use jim at datamantic (which is really my main email anyway.) Thanks.
According to Slashdot, The London Evening Standard is claiming what has been floating around for 24 hours as rumor: namely, that Apple has offered to buy ARM for $8 billion. That would be some *big* news. This would be a huge, and I think very smart, bet for Apple to make. And, at the same time, it would be bad in general as Apple would then be in a position to possibly deny other manufacturers access to ARM chips (think Google tablet.) Of course other manufacturers could just move to Intel Atom, so it doesn't fully lock other people out (and it would certainly be good for Intel.)
Interesting times. Bold move by Apple if true.