brainscat.com

Mono, the Open Source .Net Framework, is finally at a 1.0 release after three years. They’ve even completely redone their webpage and repackaged Mono into almost any form you like. Grabbing the OS X version now…

Firefox 0.9.1 (the bugfix upgrade) is now out. It’s not typical for Mozilla to do a bugfix on Firefox but the general consensus is that a patch was quite needed.

As for news aggregation, I’ve found the newest and coolest way of doing things, Bloglines. They’re a free online service that aggregates your newsfeeds and does a damn fine job of it. At first I was quite hesitant because I really don’t want my list of feeds getting eaten up if Bloglines goes under or decide to start charging. Thankfully, they smartly implemented an export button that gives you the ability to save your current RSS addictions as an OPML file. Other fine features include newsfeed recommendations based on relationships between what you and other readers share as subscriptions. Even better, you can share what you read. Lastly, they have a sweet notifier plugin to Mozilla/Firefox. If that’s not your style they have other notifiers as well. Slickness.

[update] Ironically, I tried the Firefox/Mozilla notifier for Bloglines only hours before I read about the new release. 0.9.1 Seems to break the Bloglines notifier. So sad. :(

This man was the victim of a driveby squirrel attack. My favorite quote…

His mouth opened, and at the last possible second, he screamed and leapt! I am pretty sure the scream was squirrel for, “Banzai!” or maybe, “Die you gravy-sucking, heathen scum!” as the leap was spectacular and he flew over the windshield and impacted me squarely in the chest.

I have a Gmail invite available. The first to post a comment will receive the invite. Yes, I have comment moderation turned on, so you won’t see your post immediately.

I’ve recently started looking for some high quality photo management software that’s web accessable, Free, and written in PHP. Photos by Alex King looked to be the most promising but doesn’t have all the features I’d like. “No worries,” I thought, “I’ll just add a patch for what I want.”

Well, it turns out the license allows you to change your copy all you like, but you can’t redistribute his code with your changes, and if you give your patches to him, they become property and copyright of Alex King. Undeterred, I figured I’d at least give a shot at trying to plead with Alex to change his license. The emails went cordially enough and no hard feelings are to be had, and he has his reasons for keeping the license as it is. I wouldn’t be forthcoming though, if I didn’t say I was dissapointed. C’est la vie.

Alas, the search continues, and I’m looking for a decent photo organization suite. There’s been some talk about using the digital object repositories (Repos or ProjectBuilder) we’ve built here at work, but those are probably my last resort as they’re quite bulky and suited for a more broad collection. Again, I need something with a Free license as I’m pretty sure nothing out there will do all the things I’d like, so modifying it will be a must.

So, having started a hairy discussion about web application usability over on the wp-hackers mailing list, I’ve been trying to find some UI guidlines written specifically for web applications. That is, web applications using w3 standards. Sure there are tons on web-design, and tons for software UI, but webapps are a totally different beast. You’re so limited to the controls set and methods available to you, while still trying to provide the functionality of a local piece of software. Oh the frustration… I find it hard to believe that a large entity hasn’t written some document tailored to just this type of design. If you know what I don’t, kindly fill me in.

You already know what “blog” really means, right? Along those lines a flog is a blog for a group a friends, a publicly viewable forum for a select set of buddies to press their thoughts upon the Internet.

So, those of you might be wondering what happened to Lorin and Justin…

The fact of the matter is that I got fed up with Simplog and also wanted to set up a more personal space where I could comfortably write about things other than entertainment media. Enter the new WordPress version of Brainscat. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve kept the old site at dev.brainscat.com the address of where I used to toy around with new ideas. After a conversation with Lorin though, I found out people asked him, “Why dev.brainscat.com?”

I was lazy when moving the site. Atmittedly, “dev” makes no sense, and has nothing to do with the content of the site. Not having the heart to delete their space on the web, I figure it’s a better alternative to give them more of a permanent place to stay at http://friends.brainscat.com. “Permanent” of course meaning as long as hosting costs remain reasonable. As you might have guessed, friends.brainscat.com is now the preferred way of getting to their site. Learn it, love it. The address dev.brainscat.com will continue to point to that site indefinately so as not to break anybody’s links or bookmarks.

This one got a bit lost as I was gone for the weekend…

Mozilla Firefox 0.9 (One Tree Hill) is out. Firefox is a Free web browser for all platforms that respects web standards, runs fast, and has a great user interface.

• New user interface.
• Kills some plugins on upgrade, but they can be reinstalled.
• Icon in OS X doesn’t show up in dock. :( [Update: restart fixes this]

Make sure you pick up the WebDeveloper and RSS Reader Panel extensions.

Gmail needs an export. I’ve realized this when trying to move away from Hotmail, and am finding that at the very least, it’s a pain to get the mail I want out. The 1GB limit that Gmail gives is great, but by the time I’ve stored up 1GB of email it would be that much MORE of a pain to get away from Gmail.

Thinking more on this, I was moved to send my thoughts to Google and was able to find this tidbit about Google’s plans on supporting import and export.

Also, their auto-replier fired back with this as well. Leave it to Google to understand my questions and send an automated response 30 seconds later with an acceptable degree of relevance.

Hello,

Thank you for your suggestion — we are forwarding it to the appropriate
team. We certainly appreciate hearing from Gmail users and encourage you
to continue to let us know how we can improve the Gmail experience.

You might be interested to hear that we are working on many upcoming
features:

- Automatic forwarding of your email to another account
- Plain HTML version of Gmail
- Import/export Contacts

We hope you enjoy Google’s approach to email.

Sincerely,
The Gmail Team

Lastly, I have six invitations to give away. The first six people to post comments to this topic will receive them.

I hereby nominate Chauncy Billups and Big Ben Wallace for President, citing their very recent fine work.

Thanks to Tom, I am a proud beta-tester of Google’s Gmail. Yes, I know they keep up to one gigabyte of my email, and yes I know the computer reads and indexes it for easy searching and personalized advertisements. There are many many privacy advocates out there who feel that Gmail is in a position that makes it far too attractive for abuse by a government/corporate entity, and all I have to say to them is, “So what?” With that said, I consider myself a privacy advocate. I even am one of “those guys” who supports the sometimes too liberal, but most of the time spot-on Electronic Frontier Foundation.

However, if you think that Gmail is going to blow the doors off of email security and privacy, you need to wake up and realize that email is in no way a secure method of communicating. I said it once in Brandon’s discussion on Gmail but I think the topic warrants expanded discussion here. Perhaps the name email is misleading, but people tend to think that they are afforded the same level of privacy in their email as they receive in postal mail. In case you didn’t know, your email is stored at one time or another on any number of intermediary computers, and in most cases is stored and passed as is with no encryption. In actuality, email works like a bunch of computers playing the kindergarden game, Telephone, only the computers don’t screw up the message and it persists over time.

For those who are worried about someone reading all email you receive or send to Gmail, it’s just as easy for Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL or any other popular email service to flag your address and read mail off their servers and/or pass it off to government spooks. Google’s technology is in no way going to revolutionize how easy it is for people to read your email.

If you’re really worried about securing your email use an encryption program like Pretty Good Privacy or better yet, the Free alternative, GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG).

Kindly let me know what you think about this either by posting a comment below or shooting me an email at my last name (bjornrud) at gmail dot com (remove parenthesis).

Thanks to Josh Simons from Sun for the heads up on MIT World, a collection of video streams of their main events and speakers. The collection is a killer set of streaming content with a very well laid out set of retrieval and delivery methods. They even offer an RSS feed of the newest content. It’s hard not to envy this site.

During a great plate of spaghetti, I watched The Akamai Story: From Theory to Practice which turned out to be extremely enlightening. In the end it turns out being a great lecture on Internet infrastructure, distributed computing, and business. I was a bit dissapointed at the video quality, but in the end it did little to detract from the lecture.

In a quest to understand the differences between pingbacks and trackbacks and the purpose they serve, I’m creating this little example to sort out the answers. Previously in Trackbacks, Pingbacks, and Italian Plubmers, I linked to Brandon Furtwangler’s writeup on Super Mario Brothers level -1. Having pingbacked him and trackbacked him in the same post, it appears his WordPress software chose to treat it solely as a pingback. Web Standards and Playing Well With Others uses only the trackback method of alerting Matt from Wordpress that I’m writing about him. Here’s the actual location of the pingback example in Brandon’s post comments. This is the trackback example on Matt’s site (comment #17, you have to scroll a bit).

Pingbacks and trackbacks show up as special comments on another person’s blog. They’re different from regular comments in that trackback and pingback comments originate on a seperate page on the Internet rather than the actual page that is the subject of discussion. In this case, brainscat is telling Brandon’s blog that I’ve written about his Super Mario Bros. tutorial, and his site displays a summary of my comments on his page with a link back here. Normally, a comment would be on the same page as the SMB writeup and exist nowhere else on the Internet.

Why would anyone use pingbacks or trackbacks if you can just leave a comment? Well, they serve these various purposes.

1. They bring traffic to your site, allowing for more people to see your blog.
2. Pingbacks and trackbacks let you keep your dialogue in your own space where you can edit and add to it as you please, without having to worry about the limitations of the subject’s software. This provides the ability to make a more rich commentary through the use of diagrams or other links.
3. You server, not the subject’s server, is responsible for the longevity of your comment.

Which method is better?

Pingbacks and trackbacks accomplish the exact same feat. It basically is a matter of what method your subject’s software supports.

Matt from WordPress was getting worked up about how people shirk web standards, or at the very least express the attitude that it’s ok if a few pages aren’t compliant. This all started with an email and a suggestion to mind your business.

If your site isn’t compliant, make compliant it if you have the time. If you’re alerted that you have a problem, try and fix it. I personally am glad if someone let’s me know I have a problem. That said, if you’re writing a bug report about someone’s personal work, they do not owe you anything, and if it really bugs you that their site isn’t up to your standards you always have the option of going somewhere else.

If you feel the need to point out someone’s mistake, do it warmly, succinctly and with a degree of politeness that would make your mother proud. If you are putting something out there to share with the world, do your best to share it in a way that everyone can appreciate it.

My buddy Brandon has a little piece on Super Mario Bros. level -1 and how to get to it, complete with screenshots. If you’ve ever wondered how to find it, take a peek.

Honestly, I’m attempting to figure out how in the hell trackbacks and pingbacks really work. Currently, I’m a bit baffled. Stay tuned for an update with an update to how it actually works.