Olympus m:robe MR-500i

I saw the two ads for the m:robe during the SuperBowl, and I though that this seems like a great looking mp3 player. It is a 20Gb MP3 and WMA player. It also has a built in 1.2 megapixel digital camera.

AppleScript Tips

MacDevCenter.com has an article that lists 10 great AppleScript tips. The ones that I found most useful are:

• Attach a Folder Actions to Network Folder


• Search for Commands Easily in Files

[via The Unoficial Apple Weblog]

Mozilla Sunbird

The Apple Blog has a post that mentions that a new version of Mozilla Sunbird has been released. This is a pretty good looking calendar application. It has the same functionality as Apple's iCal, but also some additional features:

1. Allows you to modify calendars that you are subscribed to. So now you can have multiple computers modify shared calendars.


2. Support recurring to-do items


3. Multi-week view

host records

It seems like the current implementations of host record is inconsistent at best. I just changed my isp, and since I host my own dns servers, I needed to change the host record for the dns server host name. When I had registered my domain name though networksolutions, they provide a web interface to change host records. Aplus.net doesn't provide a web interface, and I had to send an email their support dept.

It seems like there could be a better way to do this. For each name server listed in the whois record that are subdomains of the domain, the ip address should be looked up from the name servers, that are listed in the whois record, that are in a different domain. Then the registrar could update the host records. This would allow the host records to be updated when ever the zone file for a domain is updated.

Prevent spam referrers

I have been noticing that there have been spammers that have been trying to get higher rankings on search engines by sending "referrer spam" to my site. They are sending HTTP requests with referrers from the domains that that they are trying to increase the rankings of. (To me this seems pointless, because I don't display the referrers anyplace that search engines can see.)

I just saw an entry on this pLog bug report, that mentioned a potential solution to this. Put the rewrite rules in your configuration:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*(loans|poker|casino|psxtreme|strip|diet|pills|learnhowtoplay|freakycheats|viagra).* [NC]

RewriteRule \.*$ http://www.freakycheats.com [R,L]

This will cause any requests that have any of those keywords in their referrers, to be redirected to one of the spamming addresses.

Gran Turisimo web site

A few days ago, Autoblog mentioned the web site for Gran Turismo 4. This looks like a great game, and an improvement over Gran Turismo 3.

The animated spectators during the rally races look great, but the feature that I am looking forward to most is the Network play. The web site currently states that it is LAN, but I am hoping that they will extend it to Internet play

Disabled trackback supoprt

I have turned off trackback support, since I started getting some trackback spams. I am going to see if I can extend pLog's Bayesian spam filter to process trackbacks. Also maybe it would be easy to write a plugin that will allow me to moderate trackbacks.

I still think that trackbacks are very useful, and I do want to support them.