Full Speed

[ December 29, 2006 ]

links for 2006-12-29

[ December 16, 2006 ]

Windows Install LinkDump

I have been reading a large amount of information on slipstreaming and unattended installations of Windows XP/2003 lately, so here’s my linkdump of all of the juiciest nuggets:

I haven’t tried out any of these methods yet, but I’m looking forward to building a stripped down, customized, unattended install CD for both XP and 2003.

[ December 11, 2006 ]

links for 2006-12-11

[ December 1, 2006 ]

links for 2006-12-01

[ November 18, 2006 ]

links for 2006-11-18

[ November 16, 2006 ]

links for 2006-11-16

[ November 14, 2006 ]

links for 2006-11-14

[ November 13, 2006 ]

links for 2006-11-13

[ November 12, 2006 ]

links for 2006-11-12

  • Test Run
    “Test Run is the only hosted Quality Assurance Test Planning application available, and it is the most innovative and efficient test planning software money can buy.”
    (tags: testing QA tools webdev opensource)

[ November 11, 2006 ]

links for 2006-11-11

[ November 10, 2006 ]

Yahoo Doesn’t Quite Get HTML Entities

Why is it that it’s almost 2007, and Yahoo still doesn’t get HTML entities right? Of particular concern is the » entity (»), which is part of the default WordPress install. To say WordPress is pervasive would be understating its reach. And yet Yahoo can’t properly display the titles of millions of WordPress articles because it fails to properly render the » character. This is simple stuff guys, when will you get it straight?

I suppose an example is in order, although I’m certain that one can be found quickly by almost anyone with access to search.yahoo.com. This evening I entered the domain of my wife’s new site, analyzingmind.com, into Yahoo. The results show " instead of » in the page titles. In the HTML source of the page, there is simply a quotation mark where there should be a ».

My first thought when I noticed this oddity months ago was that it was a browser issue. Today, however, I’m running Firefox 2, which tells me that it rendered the page in Standards compliance mode and that the character set for the page is UTF-8. With those bits in order, I’m thinking that it should be no problem to display this simple character. And besides, when I view the site directly, the glyph displays properly.

I am beginning to think that Yahoo, upon crawling and indexing the site, translated the » to a " and stored it that way in its index. The HTML 4 spec linked above states that » is a “right-pointing double angle quotation mark,” and that’s sort of similar to a standard, non-pointing, non-angled quotation mark, right? I’m not sure of the reasoning behind this, but I think it probably has something to do with not wanting to serve up characters that are not displayable in certain browser/font combinations. Whatever the reasoning, something is wrong.

I wonder how they would handle this string in a title: IñtërnâtiônÃlizætiøn. Yahoo could learn a lot from Sam Ruby. After all, Ask is listening.

More LifeHacker

There’s really just so much good stuff at LifeHacker that I can’t seem to stay away. Here’s another dump from my home PC.

links for 2006-11-10

[ November 9, 2006 ]

LifeHacker Roundup

Or “Unloading a Ton of LifeHacker Tabs from Firefox”.

[ November 3, 2006 ]

GMail Macros

Late last year, Mihai Parparita, a member of Google’s Reader team, release a GreaseMonkey script called GMail Macros. Lately, Mihai has been, understandably, a bit busy. So others have picked up the slack. New features have been added. We even have a “GMail Power Users” discussion group on Google Groups.

I have been using Mihai’s script ever since the day he released it. It makes GMail a whole lot more friendly to someone who doesn’t like to reach over to grab the mouse all that often. I stumbled upon all of the new activity around the script last week when some changes were made to GMail that broke the script. It was great to see that the script’s tiny community had come together to not only fix the script but to also add in some really neat features.

There are a few versions of the script up in the files section of the Google Group. The version that I’m currently using is the one that Brent created/modified. I have tweaked my personal copy, mainly changing the appearance of the popup windows a tiny bit. But anyhow, I’m posting a link to my version here. It’s not significantly different from Brent’s script, but I like it.

links for 2006-11-03

[ November 1, 2006 ]

links for 2006-11-01

[ October 31, 2006 ]

links for 2006-10-31

[ October 28, 2006 ]

links for 2006-10-28

[ October 26, 2006 ]

links for 2006-10-26

[ October 24, 2006 ]

links for 2006-10-24

[ October 19, 2006 ]

links for 2006-10-19

[ October 18, 2006 ]

links for 2006-10-18

[ October 16, 2006 ]

links for 2006-10-16

[ October 6, 2006 ]

Yahoo Seeking Advertising Guinea Pigs

When Yahoo announced their Finance modules, I was concerned that they would someday start tossing in unwanted advertising.

Clearly, there is no advertising on this widget today, other than links to other Yahoo properties. And Iâm fine with that. But I have a feeling that the space at the bottom might be allocated for future ads.
Today, Yahoo has issued a call for guinea pigs to test their new “advertising options” in these same modules. I am not impressed.

links for 2006-10-06

[ October 5, 2006 ]

Another Way To Talk To Google

Google launched a pinging service for their blog search today. Much like Ping-o-matic, the service allows bloggers to inform the world of new content. This is the first time, however, that we have been able to directly alert Google that a site has been updated. It will be interesting to see how this is used by the SEO crowd.

[ September 30, 2006 ]

links for 2006-09-30

[ September 29, 2006 ]

Microsoft adCenter Reviewed

I first signed up for MSN adCenter when the beta was announced. I went to the site and submitted my email address to be put on a waiting list. The wait was short, it turns out. It wasn’t long before Microsoft announced that anyone could sign up for the expanded beta for the admission price one-time setup fee of $5.

When I first signed in to the site, I was disappointed that it only worked with IE. At the time, I primarily used a Mac at home, so this was a major dealbreaker. And since I had successful AdWords campains and a decent Yahoo Search Marketing campain running, I wasn’t really needing another outlet for my advertising.

Fast forward to August 5, when the adCenter website got a redesign. It was renamed Microsoft adCenter, and one of the major features was Firefox support! I had switched back to a Windows laptop in June, but with Firefox still being my primary browser, I was happy to see some support. Now I could actually use the system, or so I thought.

I created an “order”, which seems to be the equivalent of an AdWords campaign. This order consisted of an ad along with about 20 keywords. I submitted the order and was told that it would need to be subjected to editorial review next. So I checked back every week or so, each time seeing the status of my order as “submitted”.

Today, I checked again. It has been one month and five days since I submitted my first batch of keywords and ads to Microsoft for editorial approval. The order still shows the same status: “submitted”. Since I had not received any communication from Microsoft, I decided to check into things. I was expecting to see an “approved” status or similar on the order. Instead, the individual items inside had been marked “approved”, with the order remaining “submitted”. Not the result I was hoping for, but at least I knew that my keywords had been approved.

With the approval question answered, I began to wonder exactly when the campaign had actually started running. I requested this campaing to begin on August 24, but the campaign itself doesn’t really show when its ads actually cleared editorial and began running. Since this test campaign has only received 56 impressions, it could have just started today, or it could have been running all along.

Fortunately, this gave me an excuse to try out the reporting tools. A good daily report should show me when the campain began. And as it were, the ads had been running for a while. I ran a report to show all impressions for the month of September, and Sept 1 had the second highest number of impressions. So I ran a report for August. This gave me what I was looking for. My ads had been running since the 26th. So the approval process only took two days, but due to lack of communication from Microsoft and the mislabeling of my “order”, I was completely unaware.

Thinking that user error could have come into play here, I proceeded to check the email settings. My email address was there, and it was correct. The box next to “Microsoft adCenter Member Communications” was checked, so I should be receiving mail. I guess MS just forgot to send that message.

Now that I have finally overcome Microsoft’s attempts to make the adCenter completely unusable, I can form an opinion of the underlying product. In my mind, there are three metrics by which online advertising should be measured: ad creation, performance, and reporting.

Initially, I wanted to give an F for ad creation. I should have received an email when the order was approved. And the order process should not have taken two days. But knowing the limits of the system, I can get by. So for ad creation, which includes keyword adds, etc., I give adCenter a D.

Performance is right on par with what I have been seeing on Yahoo: B-. The prices are good, but there’s nowhere near as much traffic as I see on AdWords.

And finally, reporting. I was really impressed with the adCenter reports. They’re flashy, literally. Each report that I viewed contained slick, Flash-animated graphs. There were the typical CSV export options as well. These are certainly the most beautiful reports in the business. And report templating and scheduling is available as well. adCenter gets an A in reporting.

So overall, I would have to give adCenter a C+. I will probably continue to use it, but I won’t like it. I expect to be having plenty of discussions with adCenter support on how they can improve.

links for 2006-09-29

[ September 27, 2006 ]

More Efficient Computing

There are several hard technical problems surrounding power efficiency of computers, but we’ve found one that is actually not particularly challenging and could have a huge impact on the energy used by home computers and low-end servers: increasing power supply efficiency. All computers, including personal computers and servers, have power supplies to convert the alternating current (AC) from the outlet to the direct current (DC) needed by the machine. Typical power supplies waste 30-45% of their input power, and relatively simple modifications can bring this waste down to 10%. […] We believe that the development of a new open standard is necessary to achieve very high efficiencies at low costs, so we have begun discussions with Intel and other vendors that we hope might lead to significantly more efficient power supplies.
Google Blog

[ September 16, 2006 ]

links for 2006-09-16

[ September 13, 2006 ]

TiVo Series3 HD Finally Available

If you like to get your TV signal over a wire and have been holding out for a decent HD DVR, TiVo has finally brought what the market has been begging for: the 300-hour TiVo Series3 HD DVR. Actually, it’s DMR — Digital Media Recorder — although I’m not really sure what that means. But since it’s the only product out there that claims to be a DMR, it’s the first to become THX certified. It’s probably the first THX certified DVR, too, but they don’t mention that on tivo.com.

The box will hold up to 300 hours of SD or 32 hours of HD content. Nothing special there, just a bit higher than the Series2 HD DVR that TiVo sold through DirecTV. The peanut is back, but now it’s got a backlight. This box has a huge feature that DirecTV never would allow: (working) network connectivity. “Schedule recordings anywhere from tivo.com.” And that also means that you can download content off of the internet for viewing on your TV. Photos, internet radio, podcasts, weather reports. Ok, I see where the “Media” in DMR is coming from now.

The new box is $799. TiVo fees are in the $12-15/month range, depending on how much you prepay.

null

[ September 7, 2006 ]

links for 2006-09-07

[ September 6, 2006 ]

links for 2006-09-06

[ September 4, 2006 ]

links for 2006-09-04

[ September 1, 2006 ]

links for 2006-09-01

[ August 28, 2006 ]

links for 2006-08-28

[ August 25, 2006 ]

links for 2006-08-25

[ August 24, 2006 ]

links for 2006-08-24

[ August 23, 2006 ]

links for 2006-08-23

[ August 21, 2006 ]

links for 2006-08-21

[ August 16, 2006 ]

links for 2006-08-16

[ July 27, 2006 ]

Questions for the Jury

FlickrBlog has been running an excellent series of interviews from some of my favorite photobloggers this week. Here are the three that they have released so far:

If you have some free time, I highly recommend browsing through the photo collections of these three.

[ July 20, 2006 ]

San Francisco Streets

The Flickr Blog today featured some excellent portraits of people living on the streets of San Francisco.

[ July 17, 2006 ]

Amazon Grocery Is Out of Beta

Found on the Amazon.com homepage today:

Amazon Grocery

Customizable Yahoo Finance Modules

Yahoo has finally let loose with their new Finance site modules. Naturally, this was timed to coincide with the launch of the new Yahoo homepage as well as the new Finance page.

I have some problems with these things, though. First of all, I added a red border to the example below so that you can see the large whitespace at the bottom. The height of the iframe can easily be changed to compensate for that, but I have no way of knowing that the space in question will never be used, so I am hesitant to remove it. I have tried adding more stock symbols to see if that would increase the height of the widget in order to fill the whitespace, but instead of filling the space, the iframe was only made taller.


My second concern is that of advertising. Clearly, there is no advertising on this widget today, other than links to other Yahoo properties. And I’m fine with that. But I have a feeling that the space at the bottom might be allocated for future ads. If I could put my YPN ID into the code and receive targeted ads in that space, I wouldn’t mind. But I certainly don’t want the kind of ads that I expect from Yahoo in that space–the kind of ads that annoy me every time I fire up Yahoo Messenger. The jury is still out on this one.

links for 2006-07-17

[ July 16, 2006 ]

Margaritaville Frozen Concoction Maker

I love the name of this thing. Who knew that Mr. Buffett had a whole line of kitchen appliances to go along with his restaurants and bars named after his famous song? It’s smart, too. The Margaritaville Frozen Concoction Maker “automatically mixes the right proportion of ice with the ingredients.” This will be a nice addition to my Caribbean kitchen.

The Internet Is Not a Big Truck!

I’m not sure which I like better: the Ted Stevens remix or the slick Odeo flash player.


[Via Evhead.]

[ July 11, 2006 ]

Bloglines Adds Publisher Tools

Bloglines, which I stopped using long ago, recently added support tools for publishers. This will be very useful if you ever have to move a feed and don’t want to rely on your 301 to handle everything for you. But, if your feed stays in the same place when you move your site to a different domain, you are still out of luck. Here’s hoping someone at Bloglines is once again answering customer emails. I know that the last couple of emails that I sent in went unanswered.

Update: No response from Bloglines, but I noticed that they did manually update my site URL. Once this had been done, I was able to claim my feed and perform edits.

[ July 10, 2006 ]

links for 2006-07-10

[ July 5, 2006 ]

DumpTorrent

I see many searches coming in for “DumpTorrent”. Not having heard of DumpTorrent, I did some searching. Apparently it was a small-ish BitTorrent tracker that never left the experimental stage. I’m not sure if it works, but the source went offline and is barely alive in Google’s cache. In the interest of preserving the tiny tracker, I have mirrored the source file.

[ July 4, 2006 ]

links for 2006-07-04

[ July 2, 2006 ]

links for 2006-07-02

[ July 1, 2006 ]

Best BitTorrent Client Software

In their recent BitTorrent Client Comparison, TorrentFreak named µtorrent as the best BitTorrent client. It supports all of the nine essential features:

  1. Download Prioritization
  2. DHT
  3. Selective File Downloading
  4. Encryption
  5. Built-in Tracker
  6. Remote Control
  7. Super Seeding
  8. RSS
  9. UPnP
Best of all, this client has a very light footprint when compared with my previous favorite, Azureus. µtorrent requires only 7mb of RAM. Azureus needs over 50mb. A new version of utorrent has just been released, version 1.6. If you need a good, feature-packed, high performance, fast BitTorrent client, check out µtorrent.

[ June 30, 2006 ]

links for 2006-06-30

[ June 28, 2006 ]

HSDPA vs. UMTS

With all of the new cellular standards and acronyms, I have been in the dark about a couple of things. Specifically, HSDPA and UMTS. If you don’t know what these are and don’t care to learn about them, you will probably want to stop reading now. :) I know that these are both high(er) speed wireless communications protocols. That was the easy part. I also know that they are both faster than EDGE, a protocol that I have frequently used with cellphones in times of broadband outage.

Now this question isn’t something that I have been really racking my brain on. It’s just been a curiousity lingering in the back of my mind that surfaces whenever I read about the fancy new phones that are becoming available. It seemed to me that the two acronyms were often loosely interchanged. And without digging around to find the differences, I was beginning to think that they were the same thing.

Finally, I posed a question to a couple of fellow Engadget Mobile readers tonight. And as I typically do, I hammered it out and clicked submit before even thinking about doing a tiny bit of research.

So, within five minutes, I found myself on Wikipedia reading about all of the gory details of HSDPA, or High-Speed Downlink Packet Access. I found that I already knew some of this information, such as the fact that the protocol supports downlink speeds of up to 14.4 Mbit/s. (Wow!)

The real benefit for me from the Wikipedia article on HSDPA was mostly in the first paragraph:

HSDPA provides a smooth evolutionary path for Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) networks allowing for higher data capacity. It is an evolution of the W-CDMA standard, designed to increase the available data rate by a factor of 5 or more. HSDPA defines a new W-CDMA channel, the high-speed downlink shared channel (HS-DSCH) that operates in a different way from existing W-CDMA channels, but is only used for downlink communication to the mobile.
Whew! In addition to the above, the UMTS page on Wikipedia says that UMTS “uses W-CDMA as the underlying standard.” Ok, so I’m seeing this as a progression: WCDMA→UMTS→HSDPA. The newer standards are evolutions of the older standards, using and expanding upon previous protocols. Elsewhere, I confirmed the following:
HSDPA is compatible with EDGE and is fully backwards compatible with WCDMA, and enterprise and rich multimedia applications developed for WCDMA will work with HSDPA. Most UMTS vendors support HSDPA.
So here are my conclusions:
  1. HSDPA and USDPA devices should work on WCDMA networks and will possibly work on UMTS networks.
  2. HSDPA devices should work on a UMTS network, but the reverse is not true.
  3. HSDPA is blazing fast
  4. As with most other wireless systems here in the US, we use different frequencies than other parts of the world. Don’t count on your shiny new phone to work with one of these 3G protocols both at home and in other parts of the world.
  5. If given a choice, pick an HSDPA device.
These conclusions may be a bit off, but I feel that my questions have been answered. I didn’t get into EV-DO, as that is a protocol that isn’t offered by the GSM providers here and thus isn’t an option for me. Cingular is said to be planning to offer the Samsung SGH-ZX20 in the near future. That is looking like a winning option for early adopters and bandwidth freaks.

[ June 27, 2006 ]

links for 2006-06-27

[ June 26, 2006 ]

Nature in Dallas

This list has been filling up the tab bar in my browser for a few days now, so it’s time to post it for public consumption. I had no idea that these places existed until recently, and I hope to visit many of them soon.

links for 2006-06-26

[ June 25, 2006 ]

Best Torrent Sites

I have been meaning to update the aging BitTorrent Links post for some time now. TorrentFreak, an excellent BitTorrent blog, has put together a great list of sites that will do for now.

  1. Torrentz
  2. Mininova
  3. ThePirateBay
  4. Torrentspy
  5. Isohunt
  6. Meganova
  7. Bitenova
  8. Bittorrent
  9. Torrentbox
  10. TorrentReactor
If you can find what you need on these sites, chances are that it’s just not out there.

[ June 24, 2006 ]

links for 2006-06-24

[ June 21, 2006 ]

links for 2006-06-21

[ June 18, 2006 ]

Zawodny’s Diet

Links to Jeremy Zawodny’s series of posts on how he lost 50 pounds last year.


[ June 16, 2006 ]

links for 2006-06-16

[ June 14, 2006 ]

links for 2006-06-14

[ June 13, 2006 ]

Inaudible Ring Tones

A recent New York Times article mentioned the new inaudible ring tones being used by students during class. The catch: the tones are very high frequencies. The adult ear gradually loses the ability to hear these frequencies with age, and the kids are using this to their advantage. I heard the sample provided by the Times just fine, but many others my age heard nothing. Ochen K took the argument a step further with frequency analysis and more sample audio. Can you hear these tones?

links for 2006-06-13

[ June 11, 2006 ]

Topeak JoeBlow Pro Floor Pump

If you are in the market for a new bike pump, I highly recommend that you at least take a look at the Topeak JoeBlow Pro Floor Pump. From what I have read on many cycling forum sites, all of the Topeak pumps are excellent, but the JoeBlow Pro is the model I chose. I have never used a pump that was built this well. Granted, I probably haven’t ever spent more than $10 on a bike pump, but now that I have a proper pump, I can’t imagine using anything else.

JoeBlow Pro

[ June 10, 2006 ]

Beyond TiVo Buzz

TiVo has been publishing their Season Pass stats for a while now. They list the 25 most recorded shows for the previous week along with Director Wishlist and Actor Wishlist rankings. By doing this TiVo offers insight into what everyone else is watching.

SnapStream’s BeyondTV takes it a step further. Not only does the new version 4.3 allow recording of over-the-air HD signals in the popular DivX format, but SnapStream now gives us Beyond TV Buzz.

The Buzz site takes the usual list of top recorded shows and breaks it down to present the list of top recorded episodes. And then comes my favorite feature: Top upcoming Recordings. This list offers a peek into the DVR schedules of others around the world. Sort of a social software approach to the DVR.

[ June 4, 2006 ]

links for 2006-06-04

[ June 3, 2006 ]

links for 2006-06-03

[ June 2, 2006 ]

Another Google Reader Error Message

Lately it seems that Google’s Reader is full of surprises in its error screens. It’s amazing that in my months of daily use, I have not seen these errors before. Here’s the latest find:

Oops!

links for 2006-06-02

[ June 1, 2006 ]

On Google’s Current Problems

Forum 30, as it is often referred to, is a favorite online hangout for many who find that it is necessary to complain about Google’s endeavors. Forum member ClintFC summed up these problems quite well in a recent post:

All of Google’s current problems seem to be rooted in a single inalienable truth:

Google currently believe themselves to be much smarter than they actually are.
Granted, this comment was left in a discussion on whether Google’s algorithm are up to the task of determining whether two sites are related and/or relevant, two terms that are often thrown around casually in such forums. But I believe that this explanation holds true for much more than the core of Google’s business. AdWords and AdSense have certainly been affected.

links for 2006-06-01

[ May 24, 2006 ]

Electrons and Leptons, Meters and Liters

Google Reader is down at the moment, and because I enjoy the various web outage screens, here’s Reader’s.

[ May 21, 2006 ]

links for 2006-05-21

[ May 17, 2006 ]

New Feature: Related Entries

There’s a new Related Entries feature here at Full Speed today, courtesy of Adam Kalsey. You can see it in action below. It’s a quick, simple hack that uses MySQL’s fulltext queries and Brad Choate’s eternally useful MTSQL plugin. For the sake of documenting the way things work on this site, I will document the basic steps here.

1) Add a fulltext index to the mt_entry table:

2) Add the query to the individual entry archive template in MT:

<MTSQLEntries query="
   SELECT entry_id, MATCH (entry_keywords, entry_title, entry_excerpt)
      AGAINST ('[MTEntryKeywords encode_php='q'] [MTEntryTitle encode_php='q']')
      AS score
   FROM mt_entry
   WHERE MATCH (entry_keywords, entry_title, entry_excerpt)
      AGAINST ('[MTEntryKeywords encode_php='q'] [MTEntryTitle encode_php='q']')
      AND entry_id != '[MTEntryID]'
   AND entry_blog_id = [MTBlogID]
      ORDER BY score DESC
      LIMIT 0 , 4"><li><a href="<MTEntryLink>">
<MTEntryTitle></a></li></MTSQLEntries>

[ May 13, 2006 ]

Schneier on NSA Wiretapping

This is the line that’s done best for me on the radio: “The NSA would like to remind everyone to call their mothers this Sunday. They need to calibrate their system.”
Bruce Schneier

[ May 12, 2006 ]

links for 2006-05-12

[ May 4, 2006 ]

links for 2006-05-04

[ May 3, 2006 ]

links for 2006-05-03

[ April 28, 2006 ]

links for 2006-04-28

[ April 27, 2006 ]

links for 2006-04-27

[ April 26, 2006 ]

links for 2006-04-26

[ April 25, 2006 ]

Amazon S3 Roundup

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3 for short) is really hot lately. From the site:

“Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.”
For the service Amazon charges a small fee: $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used and $0.20 per GB of data transferred. Interested yet? I thought so.

The first major use of this service that I noticed was when Adrian Holovaty converted his chicagocrime.org site to serve its images via S3. Adrian estimates that this change, which greatly reduced the load on his server, will cost him about 35¢ per month.

The next item I noticed is an important building block for and S3-powered application: a snippet of code that sets a MIME type on S3 when uploading.

Finally, we have a very impressive undertaking—S3AjaxWiki. Sure, this sounds like a lame attempt at exploiting all of the latest Web 2.0 buzzwords, but it’s the real deal: “both the documents and the authoring application are all resident on the S3 servers, loaded and run on the fly in a browser”. More info here and here. This all started out with some work on S3 JavaScript Bindings, and Les Orchard just went hog wild and turned S3 into a Wiki.

links for 2006-04-25

  • stuff
    a javascript demo of how to properly handle tab key presses within a textarea
    (tags: javascript webdev)

[ April 24, 2006 ]

links for 2006-04-24

[ April 20, 2006 ]

links for 2006-04-20

[ April 19, 2006 ]

Meta Descriptions in Movable Type

I have been seriously neglecting the meta tags in my Movable Type blogs. In fact, other than the requisite content type declaration, I haven’t been using meta tags at all. That change today when I finally added entry excerpts into the meta descriptions.

After the first test, I noticed that there was a slight problem. If the excerpt contained quotes, they were not escaped in any way and invalidated the page. Brad Choate’s MT Regex plugin saves the day again:

<MTAddRegex name="dequote">s|"|'|g</MTAddRegex>
<meta name="description" content="<$MTEntryExcerpt regex="dequote"$>" />

[ April 18, 2006 ]

links for 2006-04-18

[ April 14, 2006 ]

links for 2006-04-14

[ April 12, 2006 ]

links for 2006-04-12

[ April 7, 2006 ]

links for 2006-04-07

[ April 6, 2006 ]

links for 2006-04-06

  • FreeBSD Foundation Java Downloads
    The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce the availability of the official Java Runtime Environment (JRE) and Java Development Kit (JDK) for FreeBSD. The Foundation negotiated a license with Sun Microsystems to distribute these FreeBSD binaries. The binaries are based on JDK 1.5 and work with the official FreeBSD 5.4 and FreeBSD 6.0 releases on the i386 platform.
    (tags: freebsd java)

[ March 31, 2006 ]

links for 2006-03-31

[ March 25, 2006 ]

links for 2006-03-25

[ March 24, 2006 ]

links for 2006-03-24

[ March 23, 2006 ]

links for 2006-03-23

[ March 20, 2006 ]

Microsoft and HTTP

Why is it that when you search Google for “http”, Microsoft is the first result? I first stumbled upon this when clicking on a malformed URL in Firefox. Try it for yourself. Since Firefox fires off a Google search on URLs it doesn’t understand, every HTTP URL that doubles up on the “http://” part is sent to Microsoft by Firefox. This just seems wrong on some level.

[ March 19, 2006 ]

links for 2006-03-19

[ March 18, 2006 ]

links for 2006-03-18

[ March 16, 2006 ]

links for 2006-03-16

[ March 15, 2006 ]

links for 2006-03-15

[ March 14, 2006 ]

links for 2006-03-14

[ March 13, 2006 ]

links for 2006-03-13

[ March 10, 2006 ]

links for 2006-03-11

[ March 4, 2006 ]

links for 2006-03-04

[ March 3, 2006 ]

Free Sirius 3-Day Online Trial

Sirius just announced a free 3-day trial of their online streaming service. “Completely free. No strings attached.”

Sirius Satellite Radio Inc.

[ March 2, 2006 ]

links for 2006-03-02

[ March 1, 2006 ]

Big TiVo Announcement Tomorrow

The word on the street is that this could be a TiVo/Comcast announcement, and anybody who has been following TiVo lately knows that a new Series 3 HD TiVo is on the horizon. Either would be welcome in my house where the Comcast standard issue Motorola HD DVR is the worst DVR I have ever used—even making my old DISH SD DVR look like a work of technological genius. More tomorrow.

[ Update: False Alarm. ]

[ February 27, 2006 ]

links for 2006-02-27

[ February 26, 2006 ]

links for 2006-02-26

[ February 24, 2006 ]

links for 2006-02-24

IceRocket is Dumb

I was watching some logs today, just to see how much traffic was being forwarded from this site’s former domain, and I found this interesting bit:206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:20:53 -0600] "GET /index.xml HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:20:53 -0600] "GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:20:53 -0600] "GET /index.xml HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:20:54 -0600] "GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:21:07 -0600] "GET /index.xml HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:21:07 -0600] "GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:22:32 -0600] "GET /index.xml HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:22:32 -0600] "GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
And then, a few minutes later, there was this:
206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:25:51 -0600] "GET /index.xml HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:25:51 -0600] "GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.101 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:26:04 -0600] "GET /index.xml HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.101 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:26:04 -0600] "GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:26:08 -0600] "GET /index.xml HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:26:08 -0600] "GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:26:09 -0600] "GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:26:09 -0600] "GET /index.xml HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:26:09 -0600] "GET /index.xml HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.91 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:26:09 -0600] "GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.101 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:26:09 -0600] "GET /index.xml HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
206.196.125.101 - - [24/Feb/2006:13:26:09 -0600] "GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.1" 301 247 "-" "BlogSearch/1.1 +http://www.icerocket.com/"
It’s bad enough that IceRocket’s blog search is still pulling these URLs, which have been 301’ed for a long time now, but it’s really annoying when the crawler sends back to back requests, ignoring the 301 each time. The 301 status code has been a part of HTTP for quite some time. Why can’t a search engine get this simple detail right?

[ February 19, 2006 ]

links for 2006-02-19

[ February 17, 2006 ]

TV-B-Gone Universal TV Power Remote Control Keychain

Kevin Kelly linked to this great little gadget today, and I couldn’t help but post about it. It’s the TV-B-Gone, a universal TV remote on a keychain. Only this isn’t your average universal remote. It has only one function: to turn off annoying TVs in public places. It’s great for crowded restaurants and other similar places that are noisy enough without the TV blaring in your ears. Oh, and it’s also available in purple.

links for 2006-02-17

[ February 16, 2006 ]

links for 2006-02-16

[ February 14, 2006 ]

links for 2006-02-14

[ February 13, 2006 ]

links for 2006-02-13

[ February 10, 2006 ]

links for 2006-02-10

[ February 9, 2006 ]

links for 2006-02-09

[ February 8, 2006 ]

links for 2006-02-08

[ February 7, 2006 ]

links for 2006-02-07

[ February 3, 2006 ]

links for 2006-02-03

[ February 2, 2006 ]

links for 2006-02-02

[ February 1, 2006 ]

links for 2006-02-01

[ January 26, 2006 ]

links for 2006-01-26

[ January 25, 2006 ]

Europe Through the Back Door

Rick Steves’ Europe Through the Back Door just made it to my Amazon wishlist. Kevin Kelly’s review was quite convincing. Anyone who travels this well is probably worth reading. From the book:

Desperate Telephone Communication

Let me illustrate with a hypothetical telephone conversation. I’m calling a hotel in Barcelona from a phone booth in the train station. I just arrived, read my guidebook’s list of budget accommodations, and I like Pedro’s Hotel. Here’s what happens:

Pedro answers, “Hotel Pedro, grabdaboodogalaysk.”
I ask, “Hotel Pedro?” (Question marks are created melodically.)
He affirms, already a bit impatient, “Si, Hotel Pedro.”
I ask, “Habla Eng-leesh?”
He says, “No, dees ess Ehspain.” (Actually, he probably would speak a little English or would say “moment” and get someone who did. But we’ll make this particularly challenging. Not only does he not speak English – he doesn’t want to… for patriotic reasons.)

Remembering not to overcommunicate, you don’t need to tell him you’re a tourist looking for a bed. Who else calls a hotel speaking in a foreign language? Also, you can assume he’s got a room available. If he’s full, he’s very busy and he’d say “complete” or “”no hotel” and hang up. If he’s still talking to you, he wants your business. Now you must communicate just a few things, like how many beds you need and who you are.

I say, “OK.” (OK is international for, “Roger, prepare for the next transmission.”) “Two people” –he doesn’t understand. I get fancy, “Dos people” – he still doesn’t get it. Internationalize, “Dos pehr-son” – no comprende. “Dos hombre” – nope. Digging deep into my bag of international linguistic tricks, I say, “Dos Yankees.”
“OK!” He understands, you want beds for two Americans. He says, “Si,” and I say, “Very good” or “Muy bueno.”
Now I need to tell him who I am. I say, “My name Ricardo (Ree-KAR-do).” In Italy I say, “My name Luigi.” Your name really doesn’t matter; you’re communicating just a password so you can identify yourself when you walk through the door. Say anything to be understood.
He says, “OK.”
You repeat slowly, “Hotel, dos Yankees, Ricardo, coming pronto, OK?”
He says, “OK.”
You say, “Gracias, ciao!”
Twenty minutes later you walk up to the reception desk, and Pedro greets you with a robust, “Eh, Ricardo!”

[ January 24, 2006 ]

links for 2006-01-24

[ January 13, 2006 ]

Six Apart Affiliate Program

I logged in to Commission Junction today and found that Six Apart had started an affiliate program. I supposed this has probably been around for a while, but the convenience of CJ pulled me in. Here are some samples of the ads:






LiveJournal

[ January 8, 2006 ]

links for 2006-01-08

[ January 7, 2006 ]

links for 2006-01-07

[ January 4, 2006 ]

links for 2006-01-04

[ January 3, 2006 ]

links for 2006-01-03

[ January 2, 2006 ]

links for 2006-01-02

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