Category: Technology

There’s a new Safari beta out. I won’t be able to try it out until late tonight, but it includes tabbed browsing and autofill for forms. I’ve been using Camino lately because Safari was crashing on me a lot, but Camino’s pop-up blocking happens to block pop-ups on one’s bookmark bar. This includes the Movable Type bookmarklet. Total pain. Hopefully this Safari build will be a little less crashy.

Hopefully the various bugfixes mentioned by Dave Hyatt are included, too. I am particularly hot for the cookie fix and I’m crossing my fingers for the title attribute fix.

serious vulnerability present. all doomed. over. is I think my favorite 4/1 posting of the day. Possibly the best of all time. The brilliance of it is that it’s completely accurate.

A distributed denial of service condition is present in the election system in many polypartisan democratic countries. A group of determined but unskilled and not equipped low-income individuals, usually between 0.05% and 2% of overall population of the country, can cause serious disruptions or even a complete downfall of the democratic system and its institutions, and wreak havoc and destruction without using any force.

OK, maybe a little doomladen, but otherwise accurate.

If you’re using Brad Choate’s Textile plugin for Movable Type, you’ve no doubt noticed it’s a pain to edit the pre-formatted <a> tag that’s generated by your MT bookmarklet. And if you haven’t, well, I have. Here’s how to patch your MT installation to make it all pretty and Textile-like.

1. Edit the file lib/MT/App/CMS.pm in your MT installation
2. Go to line 631, which should read:
   $param{text} = sprintf qq(<a title="%s" href="%s">%s</a>\n\n%s),
3. Replace that line with:
   $param{text} = sprintf qq("%s":%s\n\n%s),
4. Go down 3 more lines, to the second instance of:
   scalar $q->param('link_title'),
5. Delete that line (line 634 in an unmodified CMS.pm)

Enjoy.

CafePress wants to know what size books you want. They discuss the sizes they’re considering, and it looks to me like the consensus will settle in around the right area. I continue to be excited about all this.

There is much discussion elsewhere on the message board about the need for CafePress to support Word documents. Five years from now, there are going to be countless CafePress printed volumes of badly formatted poetry at yard sales across American. I hope we’re ready for that as a nation.

Danger has released a developer SDK for the Sidekick, with some interesting restrictions. Namely, user-developed applications can’t be transmitted to the Sidekick over the air unless they’ve been approved by both Danger and (at present) T-Mobile. Let the recrimination phase begin!

I am of two minds about this. On the one hand, it’s hard to deny that part of the Palm’s success was the open SDK and the resulting flood of applications. I want to play IF on my Sidekick… oh. OK, then. (I swear I did not find that link before I chose my sample desired application.) Still, you get the point.

On the other hand, saying that closed-development machines won’t make it in the consumer market is just silly.

The open question, I think, is whether the Sidekick is more like a TiVo or a Palm. The average consumer doesn’t care whether or not he can write applications for his cell phone, or even if there are a lot of third party apps. If the Sidekick primarily appeals to the average cell phone user, the ease of use of the SDK won’t matter. If it’s a high end tech toy, it will be an issue. And let’s remember that despite the avid adoption by the geek market, the Sidekick is intended as a hip teenager-oriented tool.

In other Sidekick news, Danger and T-Mobile released the new software release last week. I can now auto-lock my phone without worrying about not getting phone calls. In an unexpected side benefit, my battery life has been extended by around 50%, which means I can forget to plug it in at night and still have a cell phone in the morning. I don’t know if this is because the keyguard saves a lot of battery life or what, but it’s nice.

The good people at CafePress have finally added data CDs and audio CDs to their product list. You have to send in a master, but they’re working on allowing you to upload MP3s instead. CafePress stores will include audio samples for audio CDs, and the packaging is full jewel cases with inserts. I can’t tell if CafePress’s CDs are commercial grade or CD-Rs. The base price for CDs is $4.95, and shipping and handling is $5 for the first item — so pricing is pretty competitive. You could get slightly better prices going with a specialized CD fulfillment house, but the interfaces there are not as slick.

Can’t wait for the book offerings.

The EBay auction I blogged about earlier turns out to be blocked for a bunch of people — including myself, when I check it from home. EBay has voluntarily blocked German IP addresses from accessing auctions of Nazi memorabilia. Now, the item in question is an Enigma machine, which is not exactly prime fetish material, but I guess it counts under German law. It’s interesting how wide EBay’s net is, though. I’m in Worldcom IP space at home — I wonder if EBay blocks all of Worldcom? Or if not, why the chunk of IP space I’m in?

So I wonder. I’m on some mailing lists which get a fair amount of noise mixed in with the signal. But it’s hard to tell whether a given piece of mail is gonna be signal or noise before I open it. You can’t tell by person — most people say something intelligent at least some of the time. Besides, I really hate categorically killfileing anyone.

I wonder if you couldn’t use spamprobe as an effective mailing list filter?

I wonder if you couldn’t use it as an effective Usenet filter?

Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church has taken a stand against certain aspects of text messaging. They’re OK with prayer exercises over SMS, but you can’t confess your sins over cell phone. Which, I gotta say, seems reasonable.

I know everybody says this, but man, there are a metric boatload of pretty badly formed RSS feeds out there. I have most of an application written that trawls a blogrolling.com blogroll for RSS feeds and generates a “friends” page from whatever it finds. I even respect “Last-Modified” headers. Unfortunately, everyone kicks out bad RSS. Some people also have pretty flaky RSS autodiscovery bumpf — Atrios, for example, winds up pointing my l’il robot to an RSS feed containing the last few comments on his blog. Weird. I could work around that, though, although it would kind of kill the glorious automation purity I’ve got now.

What really gives me hives is the malformed feeds, though. Yeesh. Maybe I can steal some code from Amphetadesk, or maybe Mark Pilgrim has some useful stuff. Oooh, or wait, mt-rssfeed has a liberal parser module which does not require me to run Python. Hm.