January 2005
We have confirmation: Cheesecake is tasty
We have two verified reports of the cheesecake being tasty. We also have one unconfirmed feline report that he would like to taste some cheesecake. Over and out.
Powerbooks updated
No G5s, of course.
Summarizing from [Gizmodo]:
Top-end processor speeds max out at 1.67GHz
8x SuperDrives DVD burners.
all models now come with 512MB of memory standard, although only on SuperDrive models
faster Bluetooth 2.0,
a ‘scrolling TrackPad,’ which lets you use two fingers instead of one to scroll though web pages
Faster hard drives
cuddly kitten
Firefox 1.1 Roadmap Updated
Link
This weekend: a hole in a wall, standup mixer, and...
Lets go over what I did this weekend starting from the moment I left work on Friday.
Friday, 4:25PM: I was only supposed to come in for half a day, but we had a whole string of issues that needed addressing so I stuck around to get them fixed. I got my bonus check and I needed to deposit it so I walked over to the Bankone on 4th street. It wasn’t open, though, because [it got robbed earlier...
Site appearance tweaks
I updated the header with a [new picture] and I tweaked the font face and the header text sizes a bit.
Let me know what you think :)
January 2005 Zeitgeist
Jan 01 – Jan 28
Distinct Hosts Served: 13,429 Successful Requests: 545,830 Successful Requests for Pages: 89,036 Data Transferred: 18.90GB
Top Referrers
7811: http://episteme.arstechnica.com/
6252: http://forums.somethingawful.com/
5498: Various images.google.com sites
4326: http://www.ejacqui.com/
2252: http://www.google.com/
682: http://blog.livedoor.jp/
456:...
PHP 4.3.x and DB_Dataobject don't play nice
If you tried to look at or order any shirts from Test Tube T-Shirts in the past 2 or 3 days you may have noticed that our /shirts sections was all jacked up.
I narrowed down the culprit to a PHP upgrade our host did. They upgraded from PHP 4.3.5 to 4.3.10 on January 26th. That’s especially important because I know for a fact that the page was working fine on the 25th and broken on the 27th....
Working at night.
For the second time this week I’m at work because I had to be called in to fix a problem with my scripts. Well the first time this week wasn’t technically my fault. They’d forgotten one tower that they wanted included in this project and they wanted me to come in and generate the scripts for it. That was no problem, but it took me until 4am to get the script generated, applied and someone out...
Apple Commercial Archive
Andrew has made a Bittorent of every Apple commercial ever, or at least the ones he could find.
URI: Apple Commercial Archive.
(Via [photo matt].)
Industry's First Integrated Single-Chip Solution...
Absolutely amazing! This will help us make: 1. Smaller phones, 2. More powerful phones in even smaller packages.
Today’s announcement fulfills a commitment TI made in 2002 when the company announced its intention to integrate the bulk of handset electronics on a single chip, including digital baseband, SRAM, logic, RF, power management and analog functions, and to sample the first product...
WRAL.com - News - Company Fires All Employees Who...
If smoking employees are costing the private employer an inordinate amount of money when compared to non-smoking employees then I think they are well within their rights to fire those employees. I think its admirable of the employer to pay to help those people to quit if they chose to.
Chief Financial Officer Gary Climes estimated that 18 to 20 of the company’s 200 employers were...
Maximum Starbucks density
We’ve only got a SbD (Starbucks Density) of 10 here in downtown Cincinnati. What do you guys have?
Jason kottke notes that at the address of his old job in Manhattan, he had a SbD of 169!!! yech!
Justin notes that he’s got 43 Starbucks within a 5-mile radius of his apartment and now he’s looking for the highest concentration
URI: Maximum Starbucks density.
...
Video of Jobs introducing the Macintosh in 1984
OMG. You have to watch this video. The Mac starts talking and people start freaking out and jumping up and down. Its unbelievable!
Fear not, faithful Mac believers. We have found it. We have found what seems to be the only copy of a public TV broadcast on that very day. It was recorded and preserved by Scott Knaster, the “legendary Mac hacker”, as Amazon puts it. Scott kept the...
TrekToday - 'Enterprise' Not Cancelled Yet
This has definitely been one of the more shakier series. There’s been questions about its viability from the start. I don’t think I’m old enough to know if it was the same way for the previous 3 series’.
As to the remainder of the current fourth season, Coto also denied rumours that Enterprise would be limiting itself to just bottle shows. “In the second half of the season, you can...
Its' currently -18°C outside right now ;_;
With the wind is feels like -25°C!!!
Choice Links for Jan17 to Jan23
Cool stuff I bookmarked this week:
How to install OpenSSH sshd server and sftp server on Win200 or WinXP
The reporters desktop – basically a little portal someone put together with information lookups from all over the web. Very useful if you were researching something.
Subway – A web development stack for Python that is similar to Ruby on Rails
PHP/SWF Charts – Built awesome...
Battlestar Galactica
I’ve now officially watched the 2003 miniseries and the first episode from the 2004 Sci-fi series and I’m liking it! I have to admit that initially I was a little skeptical but I was way wrong. I really really like the series!
Bubbleshack redesigns Purdue's Website
Lets face it. Purdue’s website sucked, and then it got suckier. Then it seemed like every school within Purdue hired the same developers to bring their own websites down to the same level of suckitude.
A design company named Bubbleshack took 3 hours out of their lives to redesign the Purdue home page and came up with something a lot better than what’s up there now.
==
Did you know...
A little bit of Cat Love for the new week
Wordpress Temporary Nofollow Plugin
Collin has modified the plugin I released for WP and made it so that it implements some of the improvements that I had read about and commented on [here].
Here’s a link to his plugin
Based on a friend’s plugin, I’ve made a plugin to add rel=”nofollow” to all links on comments less then 10 days old.
URI: Collin Grady: Temporary Nofollow for Wordpress.
...
adot's notblog*: firefox 1.1 planning
Just a reminder, this is not a feature release, it’s a Gecko update that should provide performance, stability, and website comaptibility improvements for Firefox. We will try to squeeze in a few critical features like Safari migration and default browser settings for Mac that missed the 1.0 boat, but we’re not looking for additional feature nominations.
URI:...
Our mac mini is here!
I posted all about our new mini on HTmini.com
The cats like it:
Do you backup your computer? Please start!
I just came across a pretty neat guide (self-described as comprehensive) to backing up your computer. If there’s anything you value on your computer I suggest you back it up by some means. I do daily backups of some directories on my computer and all my site databases. I back up ~/Library and some other stuff every sunday and full backups of all my websites.
That reminds me that I need to at...
HTmini: A resource for using your Mac Mini as a...
Hey everyone, I made a new site (its addictive!).
HTmini is going to chronicle our Mac Mini purchase this Saturday and its eventual implementation as a home theater machine. We’re also collecting links, stories, reviews, hacks, software, and accessories from all over the web to create the foremost website on Mac Minis and their use as home theater computers!
I’ve been scouring all night...
How many people are planning on going to their...
/me raises my hand
Me and Jacqui are planning on going to the Cincinnati Apple store at Kenwood Towne Center on Jan 22 because we’re purchasing a [Mac Mini]! We’re going to be using it in conjunction with our EyeTV 200 and our massive system of network storage (700GB) to have a super-duper HTPC.
We’ll be getting iLife ’05 with the machine so that’s pretty cool too! :)
SixApart is releasing their noFollow plugin code...
I got an email from Jay Allen today letting me know that they’re releasing the code that they wrote and I subsequently used in my WP Nofollow plugin under the Artistic license
Feel free to make modifications and redistribute but make sure you put notices in the source documenting what changes you made. Read the license for yourself to make sure you’re not violating the license though :)
A good article on NoFollow
This article does a really good job of explaining why Spammers comment-spam and the theory behind the ‘nofollow’ attribute and the author explains why he thinks it won’t work. He thinks it will actually increase the amount of comment spam because they’ll have to send out more spam attempts to keep the percentage of “unprotected” sites they hit at a specific level.
Admittedly this has got...
Asa: opportunity strikes iron
The pictures that Asa links to in his post are amazing! :)
Meteorite 1
Pancam MI 1 MI 2
The Mars Exploration Rover Opportunty has found a meteorite on Mars. This is the first meteorite ever discovered on another planet. Wild.
URI: opportunity strikes iron.
(Via [adot’s notblog*].)
A refinement to nofollow
I think this is kind of a novel idea. Does anyone else think this could have merit? Obviously it wouldn’t help if you had someone with an abandoned blog. Perhaps the “dead man’s switch” he mentioned would fix that issue.
If you post a comment to this site, and include an author URL, or any URLs in your comment body, they will have rel=”nofollow” slapped on them. But, after 10...
Google has fixed the Internet! Google has...
I’m spreading the nofollow love all over the Internet. Here is the article I wrote up for Ars Technica:
The attribute in question is rel=”nofollow” and you’re going to be seeing it on a lot more <a> tags pretty soon. It’s basically a way for you, as an online publisher, to tell search engines that they shouldn’t follow a particular link, nor consider your...
I'm obsessive about my tags (also I am guilty of...
!http://phaedo.cx/images/taggingsystem.jpg!
Justin commented on my post about del.icio.us that I have a clean tagging system. Its true! Its mostly because the firefox plugin I use lets my delimit subcategories by an arbitrary token (I use a period (.)).
That lets me subcategories stuff and I dont have a huge list of tags in my del.icio.us group. However, I feel slightly guilty. No one is...
wp-nofollow: Nofollow filter for wordpress
I wrote a quick plugin for Wordpress (works with 1.2.2) that applies a filter to your comments and will insert the rel=“nofollow” attribute into any link a commenter leaves on your website.
The tough code was ripped from the PHP script included in Six Apart’s plugin for MovableType nofollow
It currently doesn’t filter the commenter’s URL but I’m working on it.
I put a new function in the...
noFollow implemented on phaedo.cx
Comment by <a href=’http://www.phaedo.cx’ rel=’noFollow’>Clint Ecker</a>
Now I just gotta figure out how to make it so links that people post into their comments get a rel=nofollow applied to them.
Google answers questions about rel="noFollow" and...
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Q: Is this a blog-only change? A: No. We think any piece of software that allows others to add links to an author’s site (including guestbooks, visitor stats, or referrer lists) can use this attribute. We’re working primarily with blog software makers for now because blogs are such a common target.
URI: Google Blog.
==
Google also gives us a list of Web Software...
Support for nofollow
The search team at Google approached us with the idea of flagging hyperlinks with a rel=”nofollow” link attribute in order to alert their search spider that a particular link shouldn’t be factored into their PageRank calculations. The Yahoo and MSN search teams have also indicated they’d support this new spec, and we’ll be implementing and deploying this specification as quickly as...
Google to announce a new tag attribute today...
Old news Robert!
Google today will announce a new tag attribute today. I won’t spill it ahead of announcement.
This is a big deal for people who write on the Web.
I hear the announcement will come later today on the Google Search blog.
I assume this is the thing that Dave Winer was saying was going to make us all smile. He’s right. It did make me smile. I’ve been...
XP Cincy Makes a Surprise Move
What an excellent way for me to learn Ruby, Rails, and geek out all at the same time :D I think I will be attending! I hope they don’t mind my iBook :)
If you are interested in Ruby, either a beginner or an expert, feel free to drop by the next Cincy-XP Users Group meeting on February 1. See www.objectwind.com/cgi-bin/wiki.cgi?MeetingTimeAndLocation if you need help finding us.
...
Former McDonald's CEO dies of Colon Cancer
Charlie Bell, who began his McDonald’s Corp. career as a part-time worker in a suburban Sydney restaurant and later became chief executive of the fast-food icon, died early Monday of colon cancer in his native Australia. He was 44.
URI: Former McDonald’s CEO Charlie Bell dies of cancer.
I’m so glad I’ve stopped eating fast food so often. I can’t recall the last...
BooBah - WTF
Ugh
Moving your iPhoto library to an external firewire...
“Moving my iTunes library was easy”: and I was able to do it completely within the iTunes interface. iPhoto was a different story as it provides no mechanism to changing where the library is stored. I took a different route and it worked fine.
I closed iPhoto, you do not want it open when you make this change.
I copied the “Pictures” directory from my home directory to the firewire...
rel="nofollow"
This is most likely what Dave Winer was so excited about and I posted about earlier
Reading between the lines (which in this case isn’t particularly hard), this and this (don’t forget to view source) suggest that Google are soon to announce that they won’t be calculating PageRank for links with a rel=”nofollow” attribute. Finally, an official way of fighting the...
Choice Links
Multi-blog version of Wordpress – might be useful for my little conundrum Python vs. Ruby – something I probably need more education on PythonMiniServer – might good for developing python web apps at work How to sharpen a knife PyTivo – Will subscribe to RSS feeds containing links to torrented tv shows and automatically download them Movable Python – allows you to run python apps on a machine with...
Got a cool firewire HD enclosure
I kept running out of space on my iBook (40G drive) so I went out with Jacqui to the local Microcenter and purchased a Macally PHR-100AC firewire enclosure and I put a Western Digital 3.5in, 7200RPM 80GB hard drive in there.
The enclosure is really nice because the body is aluminum and I guess acts like a heat sink for the hard drive. Most enclosures have a built in fan, but this one...
Another excellent dinner
Man I really love having something different for dinner every once in a while. I think everyone should try something new every once in a while. Jacqui suggested we cook up some mussels tonight for dinner so we bought a bag of live mussels at the store today.
She steamed them in a broth of water, butter, oil, garlic(?), and white wine. They were...
U.S. Conducting Secret Missions Inside Iran
I don’t wanna see anyone trying to act all surprised when we’re invading Iran in 3 years time.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran to help identify potential nuclear, chemical and missile targets, The New Yorker magazine reported Sunday.
URI: Yahoo! News - Report: U.S. Conducting Secret Missions Inside Iran.
...
Watch this space for an exciting announcement
I can’t believe I’m hyping Dave Winer
This is the link you should be watching for extreme excitement.
It almost certainly has something to do with this earlier post of his
==
I just want to mark this moment. A milestone. Real cooperation. I immediately implemented the feature on one of my sites. The same message was sent to a bunch of other people by the same person. I hope they did the...
Seagull PHP Framework
Found this in my del.icio.us/inbox today. Looks a lot like Rails but implemented in PHP, heavily leveraging PEAR libraries. Might be worth checking out sometime! I bet Ed would like it too.
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Welcome to the Seagull Framework project. Seagull is an OO PHP framework with the core modules licensed under BSD, and has the following design goals:
independence of data, logic &...
A small study on the effect of the file system on...
I bought a firewire enclosure for a Western Digital 7200RPM 80GB hard drive I had sitting in a PC in the living room. I wanted to be able to add it to my iBook for extra storage.
I was wondering which file format I should install on it, HFS+ or FAT32. so I formatted them each one way and then ran the really cool IOzone throughput measurment tool to test every possible combination of file...
Luck
I think I had a brief idea about this during high school, then I kinda lost sight of it for a while then I fully embraced it during college and it’s done me pretty well ever since. I always try to keep a positive outlook on stuff and good stuff keeps happening to me. The bad stuff doesn’t phase you and you can even begin to impart your good outlook on other people just by being positive to them...