Year: 2008

More updates to the ol’ blog software… I fixed the RSS feed (which has been broken for years) and updated a bunch of programming and URLs so things are more organized and have nicer links.

One of these days I’m going to redesign it and (drumroll please) add commenting capabilities, which all three of my fans have requested.

“Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.”

— Thomas Huxley

With nothing really earth-shattering to do tonight, I decided to hack together some programming to allow me to send an e-mail to my server and have it drop right into this blog. So this is an e-mail– we’ll see if it ends up in the right place…

Wow, these spammers are getting nasty. Today I have a message entitled “We have hijacked your baby”. I’m not sure how one hijacks a person, but certainly that sounds like bad news. I guess the message is supposed to be some kind of ransom note.

Of course the zip file containing a photo of my “fume” (?) contains an executable that, on a Windows machine, would probably install a nasty piece of software.

Stupid, stupid spammers.

“Bite off more than you can chew, then chew it.”

— Ella Williams

So Tom abandoned his blog after using it for years, moving over to Blogspot with the masses. I find that an interesting side effect of being a web developer is the subconscious need to “eat your own dog food”, meaning I feel like since I know how to write my own blog software, I should do that instead of falling back to some third-party toolset.

Of course I wrote this four or more years ago, when things like Blogspot didn’t even exist, and I’ve put so much stuff into it that it’s not really worth the effort to move everything to another (perhaps more capable) system. Ah well.

Mmm, dog food.

So the web development world is abuzz with news of Mozilla’s new Ubiquity plug-in. Apparently it allows you to type things like “define ubiquity”, which will open a web page on dictionary.com or something and display the definition. Or “map 653 Elm St. Hoboken NJ” and hop over to Google Maps.

What’s funny is Konqueror (my browser of choice) has been doing this for years. It has “web shortcuts” built in when you install it, and you can customize it with anything you want. As such I have all kinds of shortcuts– and in fact “define” and “map” are amongst them. Just tonight I typed “wp:transcendental number” to pull open the Wikipedia article about transcendental numbers.

I tell you, it’s hard being so far ahead of the curve.

It’s official. Cows generally point north.

A group of researchers who apparently had nothing better to do examined thousands of satellite images from Google Maps, looking at fields where cows were pictured. They found that most of the time, the cows are aligned along north-south magnetic field lines.

Just another factoid to add to my armory of party conversation starters.

“The Bush administration… has made fear the main driver of our foreign policy. It has turned a deadly serious but manageable threat– a small number of radical groups that hate America– into a ten-foot tall existential monster that dictates nearly every move we make.”

— Senator Joe Biden, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee

Although I’m no fan of Obama, and Biden has a bit of a checkered past, his stance against the War on Terror is admirable and I’m hopeful that if he’s elected, we’ll see some changes in American policy– both at home and abroad.