I haven’t shown this site any love for quite some time as other things in my life seemed more important… graduation, a job, getting married and now graduate school. It might not look like much now… but I think I’m moving into bjornrud.net and will be leaving this site behind.
~Tor
A pure Java implementation of me was released this Friday on Android. Thanks to Jamie Rytlewski for pointing this out.
I need to revisit my previous post about OneNote and the MS Office blog integration…
Apparently, using lists screws things up to holy hell. There were tons of malformed <p> tags, a bunch of whitespace, as well as complete disregard for switching from numeric order lists to alpha ordered lists, when nesting lists. Manual intervention was needed to clean up the gobs of whitespace strewn about my last post on fatblogging.
So… needless to say, I wouldn’t recommend using OneNote/Office’s automatic blog posting feature for anything more than the simplest of posts.
My friend Nate insisted I post this to my site for safekeeping, as the joys of having a piece of security software share your name need to be kept for the ages. An article on slashdot maintains,
“Seems like the Storm botnet that was behind the last two waves of attacks is also responsible for this new kind of social-engineering based attacks, using spam to try and convince users of the necessity of using Tor for there communications. They “kindly” provide a link to download a trojaned version of Tor. “
Why on earth is accessible spelled with an ‘I’? I can’t fathom why, and I hope some really smart person who understands word etymology reads this. They probably won’t, but at least I’ll feel better by throwing up this Internet Hail Mary.
I would think that it should be accessable, not accessible. Why must things that are *able* to be accessed be described by a word that makes little sense to me? Bleh.
So, apparently, OneNote has a feature that lets you blog something automatically. This post right now is a result of OneNote’s “Blog This” menu option. I clicked the button, it started up a cracked out version of Word that may or may not be Word 2007 (I’m an ignorant Word 2003 user). As excited as I am about more OneNote integration, because I am a OneNote addict, I’m a bit scared, as there are a *lot* of formatting options.
“Lotta formatting options?? That sounds great!” I think… but my skeptical self bets that this post is gonna consist of some crazy ass MS XML embedded into a normal post, which means, this will be the first, and last time, I use this feature. Let’s hope, of course, that I’m pleasantly surprised, and I don’t have to worry about OneNote generated stuff clashing with my own style sheets on my blog.
On the upside… you might like this tool because it took all of 15 seconds to set up w/ WordPress, and it also grabbed my whole category list, so it’s easy to tag posts with. Methinks, editing and then copy and pasting from word as text will work well enough for me in the future. I guess I should bold and test other formatting stuff too.
Edit: Holy crap. It’s sane XML. It works. I just edited this post in the same document… and republished. Maaagical.
Edit 2: Background and highlighting test, which I’ll probably never ever
ever
use anyways.
Edit 3: I broke it by messing overlapping background colors and highlighting. Made it throw in an extra line break.
I haven’t heard of this bug in Firefox before, but it sure is interesting. This comment was found in the source of the podcast feed for David Allen, author of “Getting Things Done”
This is 512 bytes of nonsense, since the Firefox 2 developers, in one of the strangest decisions ever, decided they would obsolete XML styles by overriding them without permission. Furthermore, the developers appear to be disinterested in fixing this. Therefore, we use the unofficial workaround, which includes filling up the first 512 bytes of a document so that the sniffer doesn’t encounter the RSS tag. I really enjoy using Firefox, but this particular behavior really annoys me! Anyway, since I’m almost at 512 characters, I’m going to ramble on for another minute in this comment, and then, without further ado, present you with a valid XML feed.
Also, Hi. It’s been a long time. Things have been good here.
Looks like someone on the Indian IE development team forgot how many fingers there are in “seven”. Oopsie. She sure looks happy though. :)
Click to see the full image.
I just received an email from Larry Hyrb, Director of Programming for Xbox Live!
Sorry Tor, for many reasons from business to technical, ripping of game titles to the Xbox 360 hard drive is not a scenario or feature we can support.
I get the business side of it, but not the technical. I guess I could go on and on and whine about it but I still can’t think of any problems that aren’t solvable here, especially not because of the technology. Case-in-point: Steam rocks, and it works. Essentially, I rip PC games to the hard drive all the time.
I can however see the publishers getting very very antsy about game ripping and possibly denying all access to a net distribution service. In ten years though, I think this is going to be the norm, and publishers in their traditional role will be left in the cold or diminished severely in power.
Microsoft, court the development studios and cut the distribution channels away.
In a recent interview J Allard (via Joystiq) claimed that the featureset of the 360 was designed to make modding unattractive and obsolete.
So putting piracy aside what did most of them do? They made it a media player. They had it connect to portable devices. They had it copy my music off of my PC so I could get it here. They did visualizers. They made themes. They made it something they could actually participate in. Well, we took a lot of those great ideas and said, “You want to make a theme? We’ll give you a theme editor. Go put themes on.” You don’t have to chip your box to make your box yours. You don’t have to unscrew it to put little green lights in it. Just rip off the faceplate and go put on a theme. Because everyone wants to do a lot of what legitimate modders wanted to do.
He leaves out one major convenience of modding, and that’s ripping games to the hard drive. Please please please, let us rip our games to the hard drive. I can’t stand scratching my discs, and I’m lazy as hell when it comes to switching cds. Given that the 360 supports detachable storage devices, it would be amazing to be able to just unplug your hard drive and take all your games, savedata, and everything else to a friend’s 360. The process for ripping should be as follows.
Microsoft has DRM, it has Live! infrastructure, and patching capability. Make this goodness happen.
Update: Better yet, just implement something like Steam on Live!. I don’t want to wait for pre-orders. I don’t want to move my lazy butt to the store on opening day, or wait out in the cold at midnight. I want to be able to play my games on any 360, and I’m sure you want the retailer’s share of current revenue for yourself.
Scoble said Russel’s thinking of switching back. I just finished switching last night.
You see, I love OS X, and I think it’s a better operating system than Windows XP. It has a better permissions model, way cleaner UI (mostly), better looks, and better UNIX interop. But… I switched away from Apple, back to Windows. Why? The short answer is I outgrew how Apple allowed me to use their product.
The Long Answer (and contributing minor reasons in no particular order)
Your mileage may vary, but for this here guy, it’s no contest.
Update: Magnus Nystedt and a commentor made some good observations on my previous post. First off, these are my opinions, I guess I didn’t state that clearly. Anyone looking for a “superior” platform will find themselves frustrated as these platforms are simply tools. Other OS’s are great at respective things, but they aren’t things I value and that’s why I switched. Use the right tool for you.
Magnus didn’t really like that I thought OS X is too narrow a platform. What I meant to say is… OS X is too narrow of a platform for a majority of developers to target. In many cases, the cost of development or cost of porting for OS X isn’t worth it because of the relatively small userbase when compared to Windows. That is a sad reality. I was in no way saying that OS X has an inferior platform for devs, just that the possible rewards for much software is less in the Apple world.
Lastly, yes, with Yahoo Music Unlimited! I only rent the music for a while, and don’t “own” it. It’s the first service to actually deliver as the “celestial jukebox”. I have more options than I do with the iTunes Music Store music, and that’s well worth the montly fee. The end result is that I consume a metric crapload of more music per month per dollar from Yahoo than I ever did from iTunes.
Heard of 43things? It’s pretty damn cool. Heard of 43people.com? Nobody’s supposed to know what it is yet. But I figured it out.
Here’s proof.
I wonder if they’ll leave the link up…
Today is a better day than most to be Tor. Today’s Slashdot article about Tor, an onion anonymizing Internet protocol, made me giggle. The headline reads, “Tor – The Yin or the Yang?”
“Although Tor claims to improve safety and security, the article goes into detail on how Tor can be used as a anonymous attack platform.”
It’s all true, every last word.