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Paul's Time Sink

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Visor

Paul Westbrook | 31 July, 2006 23:09

There are times that I need to quickly do something in a shell.  Often I will just switch to Terminal and then open an new window.

Visor is a plugin for SIMBL, made by the same people who make Quicksilver, that displays a shell with a key combination.  This window appears over all other windows, and can easily be dismissed when not needed.

[via The Apple Blog]

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High-Speed Network access on Caltrain

Paul Westbrook | 31 July, 2006 22:16

Caltrain has finished a proof of concept of wireless internet access along a stretch of tracks in the San Francisco Bay area. Soon riders will be able to access the Internet at broadband speeds while on the train.  It looks like this network is using WiMAX (802.16).  I am not sure if this system will require WiMAX cards in laptops or if 802.11 access points will be installed in the train cars.

Now it will not be as easy for me to get away from work.
 (More)

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NetNewsWire sharing ports

Paul Westbrook | 31 July, 2006 03:04

I just set my wife up with a copy of NetNewsWire.  When I was looking at the preferences, I noticed that NetNewsWire has a feature where the list of the feeds that are subscribed can be shared over Bonjour. This is a pretty neat feature, especially if you are in a location like a conference where there would be a lot of people with a similar interest.

In order to get this to work, the port use for the incoming connections needs to be opened up in the firewall.  Port number 30874 needs to be opened to allow this traffic. 

Note to Apple:  There should be a way for an application developer to add a rule to the built-in firewall.  When an application is configured, it should call an API for it to request a port be opened.  This would cause the system to present an authentication dialog, where the user could allow or deny the port to be opened.

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Google Maps smarts

Paul Westbrook | 29 July, 2006 15:12

My wife noticed something pretty cool in Google Maps.  This morning when she was about to head out to the BlogHer conference, she wanted to get directions to the Hyatt.  She entered the address in Google Maps, and then clicked on the Directions link, and it gave reasonable directions.

The interesting thing about this, was that she wasn't logged into Google's services, so it didn't know our address.  It looks like Google estimates the location of the ip address of the client, and uses this as the originating location.

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Luxor

Paul Westbrook | 29 July, 2006 15:03

LuxorWhat do you do when waiting for an appointment, or the train?  When I am in this situation, I have been playing Luxor on my phone.  This is a pretty addictive game.  It is a game where you need to match three or more spheres of the same color, in a moving row of spheres, before the spheres get to the end of the track.

This is game works well a cell phone with the simple controls, and with a small screen.  It looks like this game is also available for Mac OS X and Windows, and for online play.

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Trying Bad Behavior again

Paul Westbrook | 27 July, 2006 23:43

I have decided to try out Bad Behavior again, now that it officially supports LifeType.  This plugin helps prevent spam comments and trackbacks, not by content, but by characterizing the HTTP request itself.

When I tried this last time, it blocked some of the scripts that I use.  I will see if the new version works for me now.

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Sizzling Keys

Paul Westbrook | 26 July, 2006 22:34

Episode number 7 of the Neat Little Mac Apps (This is a pretty good podcast) mentions Sizzling Keys.  This control panel allows key combinations to control iTunes.

I had been using Synergy for this.  But I had stopped using the notification from Synergy as I have been using the Growl notification though Quicksilver.  Also, I haven't be using the menu icons from Synergy.  So I decided to try Sizzling Keys, since it is a lot simpler.
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updated newTunes

Paul Westbrook | 26 July, 2006 20:54

I got a comment on my previous post about newTunes.  The author mentioned that there is an updated version of newTunes, that handles larger iTunes libraries better.  I installed it today, and it works form me.  ....Now there just has to be a album that I want to buy.

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Web browser from the future?

Paul Westbrook | 26 July, 2006 20:24

I was looking at my web server logs from a couple of days ago, and I saw these logs.  It looks like someone was looking at the posts from December 2009.

xxx.66.195.2 - - [24/Jul/2006:14:20:59 -0700] "GET /archives/2009/12/ HTTP/1.1" 200 24148 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
xxx.66.195.2 - - [24/Jul/2006:14:21:02 -0700] "GET /archives/2009/11/javascript:history.go(-1) HTTP/1.1" 200 24152 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"

Probably, this was just an inefficient web crawler.  But it makes me wonder:

  1. What will I hae written in December 2009?
  2. Will there still be Windows NT computers running in 2009?

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software engineer or just crazy

Paul Westbrook | 21 July, 2006 23:34

Some times I wonder about myself.  When ever work is very busy, and I get home late, I always end up working on side projects until late into the night.  And these projects have nothing to do with my day job, but are just things that interest me. 

I am not sure why I do them.  Obviously these are things that interest me, I just don't know why I spend the majority of my time on them while things are busy at work.  Maybe, when work is busy, these software projects help my mind settle.  Or maybe I am a little crazy

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Sociable for LifeType

Paul Westbrook | 21 July, 2006 23:01

I have ported the Sociable WordPress plugin to LifeType.  Now you can add links to various social bookmarking for each of the posts in LifeType.  Here is the wiki page.

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reflection

Paul Westbrook | 17 July, 2006 23:42

I saw this post that mentioned reflection and the Wetfloor WordPress plugin.  I got inspired to write a plugin for LifeType that does the same thing.

Now with the reflection plugin, any image can have the reflection effect

Giraffe 3

One thing that I want to add is some parsing of posts to make it easier to add the effect to images in posts.

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co.mments

Paul Westbrook | 16 July, 2006 22:57

As I mentioned before, I have been frustrated with coComment, as only comments by coComment users are tracked.  (But also blogs that have the coComment javascript will have the comments tracked).

I have decided to try co.mments.  If a user clicks the co.mments link, their services will track comments, without users entering other comments having to do anything special.

I wrote a plugin for LifeType to automatically add the co.mments links for each post.  I am interested in seeing how well this works.  I don't know how well it will parse the comments.  If they define some tags to be put in the comments, I will modify the plugin. 

Right now it is check into svn, I will update the wiki as soon as it is posted on sourceforge.

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Programming Is Like Sex

Paul Westbrook | 16 July, 2006 20:21

This is pretty funny.

[via Labnotes]

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Does competition stall acceptance?

Paul Westbrook | 15 July, 2006 22:14

Can competition of products, without collaboration, cause the whole product space to not become as widely accepted?  I was thinking about this as it applies to internet services.  For example, in the comment tracking space there is coComment, co.mments, myComments, and Commentful.  Each of these will track your comments across various sites, as well as let you view others comments on the posts that you are interested in.

For tracking your own comments, each of these work equally well, as you click a bookmarklet when you add a comment.  But if you want to view other's comments, they would have to use the same comment tracking service as you are.  Otherwise, you would have to look for comments on all of the sites.  I think that this would frustrate users so much that they wouldn't use any of the services.

One way to solve this would for each of these services to work together and share data.  In some ways this is what the IM services have started to do.  Now people on Yahoo's and MSN's IM networks can talk to each other. Prior to that you would have to log into each service to talk to your contacts

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