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.

“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. “

“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.

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.

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)

1. I need ink. I can’t take the kinds of notes I do from my scanned textbooks and classes without my tablet. I’m not going to carry two laptops, a bunch of books, or notebooks. My faster and prettier Powerbook can’t compete with this kind of functionality.
2. Picasa, video games, poker software, ad infinitum runs on Windows. OS X is too narrow of a platform for developers to try and target, and consequently too frustratingly small of a sandbox to work in. It’s a sad but true reality.
3. My personal backup setup is on a Windows machine. Why? It’s easy as hell to setup, and I have no idea how to automate backup easily on OS X.
4. I want to own my media again. Xbox 360 integration, Yahoo Music Unlimited!, Windows Media Connect, Orb, my Windows Mobile phone all give me way more options to listen to my music away from home. What do I have from Apple? My iPod and the draconian iTunes. I can use that on Windows if I really want it.
5. It’s cheaper to run Windows. Yahoo Music Unlimited! kills iTunes Music Store in the value department. Also, the sum cost of OS X releases is waaaay more than the comparitive Windows costs. I’ll pay few hundred bucks and be just fine for five years, thank you.

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.

Here’s proof.

I wonder if they’ll leave the link up…

“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.

If it weren’t bad enough that they created a competing format, they only allow the spec to work with their proprietary format, AAC. The Voxmedia Wiki, the most comprehensive source for how to implement AAC multimedia markup, states that Garageband/Podcast Chapter Tool is only compatible with AAC files. Apple’s decision to only support this markup in their player for AAC files fucking sucks. I’m really, really mad about this. I see no reason why the annotations can’t be applied to other file formats, as it should be the player’s job to associate the timestamp in the XML file with the position of audio playback.

Maybe I don’t get this. I hope I don’t, and if I don’t, someone please set me straight. But from where I’m sitting, this new development is a mixed blessing. It’s too bad that the functionality that podcasters have been desiring is caught up in this GarageBand/iTunes/AAC quasi-open format bullshit.

Found by way of Scoble.
Update: It looks like Simon is a bit miffed too.

For example, this was my old running route.

#opens system default browser
/usr/bin/open

#opens system default browser to brainscat.com
/usr/bin/open http://brainscat.com

I’m beginning to think that I’m cursed, as this is the third or fourth time since coming to college that I’ve had to replace a hard drive. Whatever the reason, I’ve been driven to take more extreme measures now. I’ll be setting up a RAID 1 configuration. I just ordered two Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB drives per the recommendation of ArsTechnica’s budget system guide. In a few days, hopefully this will all be behind me.

From Alexander Barkov’s slides where xml is the column name of the xml data we’re looking to index…

select ExtractValue(xml, '/section/title') from t1;