Steve Gets A Life

google suggest writeup - alacrity

its one of those days where i find a great article with too many awesome links in it, but i dont have enough time in the day to check them out. so this is my note to myself to check back later: steve, check this later.

alternative file distribution methods

check out this page describing Onion Networks' Swarming Content Delivery.
be sure to check out the two graphs, noting the cost savings and throughput in each scenario.

you can also download the simulation and run it yourself, tweaking values, etc. pretty neat stuff.

almost makes me believe that someday VoD (Video on Demand) will happen.

Onion Networks: Swarming Content Delivery Simulation

RSS + BT = TIVO

awesome. now i dont have to actually remember that Jack & Bobby is on Wednesday nights (its a good show, by the way).

How to never miss an episode with BitTorrent and RSS (pealco.net)

foiled again

just spent about 20 minutes coming up with this cool new web service, but googled a bit and found that its been done. and they seem to be making money off it. thats my money, jerks.
..sigh.
FilesDIRECT

maybe ill still make it and set it free. open source it. let people host their own file servers. take those suckers down. ya thats it, thats the ticket.

semantic PDAs

check out this article about a system going on at CMU using smart PDAs that can suggest where you should go have lunch, based on your location, your schedule, the weather, etc. entirely automated.TheFeature :: A Mobile Web That Knows All About You

sharing photos

similar to yesterday's subject, flickr, the new photo sharing/organizing software from google is named hello.

instead of just being a photo hosting site, they offer a PC (sorry mac users) application that allows you to share your photos with each other. you can chat with each other (think Instant Messages) and exchange photos. you can tell what the other person is looking at, and its all secure. (check out the picture)
download it here

flickr and adobe photoshop album

in a fit of dorkery, i wrote up a tiny web app that will accept pictures exported from APA and upload them to flickr preserving the tags. which is nice. i swear.

check it out.

flickr and php

check out this blog entry about a recent talk by the flickr PHP guru and what they've been doing over there (what it is exactly that google bought). impressive.
id really like to go into something like that.

Niall Kennedy's Weblog: Flickr architecture

some links on "folksonomies"

i dont like the term very much, but its the whole "tag" thing in Flickr and Adobe Photoshop Elements (and should be in every MP3 player, or anything else that categorizes anything)

sorry bout the random, poorly formatted post. in a rush to read/work/etc.

Olivier Travels

Folksonomy: social classification (Atomiq)

One More

new osx

if you want a preview of some of the new things going on in the mac world:
Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger: Developer Overview

Tiger should be out in early 2005.

podcasting

discovering podcasting recently. (ipodder, et al).

the whole "reading your blog into a mic" thing is pretty lame, but there are some real uses. for example, itconversations is neat, allows you to listen to saved interviews, keynotes, etc based on techie stuff.

basically its all about "time shifting" again. there are radio shows popping up that you don't have to tune into (you just download and listen to it when you want).

the whole thing is tivo for your ears.

ipodder.org

rode into work today with headphones, listened to a few of these podcasts. listened to bruce schiener's interview on itconversations (never knew he had a funny voice). and "the daily source code" with an old MTV VJ Adam Currey.

del.icio.us

after seeing it referred to many many times, glancing at it once in a while, and basically ignoring it, ive finally sat down to take a look at del.icio.us and ive got to say, its pretty sweet.

and don't forget the firefox extension to make it even easier to make links. or other nutr.itio.us ideas.

not that having online bookmarks is that new of an idea. honestly the only cool thing about this is the ability to add "tags" to everything. that is, one bookmark can have more than one category.

for example, a link to MarsEdit might be tagged as "blogging" and "osx"

so what? so you don't have to maintain the standard view of your bookmarks in a hierarchical manner, allowing you to find your links faster as you spend less time thinking "ok, now what category does this fit the best under?" because it can fit in any category, perfectly or not.

this concept also isn't that new, but for some reason hasn't caught on too much yet. the programs that use it effectively, i consider very good: GMail, Photoshop Album, Flickr, etc (more?)

this whole concept of mapping one object to several names is very useful. our brains work that way, we are not strictly hierarchical in organizing our thoughts. it reminds me of a better way of organizing files a la kurzweil's brain (java applet) and the much-hyped MS Longhorn WinFS (i think). ive heard that BeOS had a similar filesystem for a while. not sure if that is true anymore.

these tools are so intuitive and easy to use, its just a matter of time before more pop up.

wiki v3.0

so stealing once again from alacrity, i send you off to discover JotSpot, a new type of wiki that is much more than a wiki.

first off, it has improved the wiki interface tremendously, basically it looks a lot better than your basic WikiWikiWeb. it also provides some neat new features, like being able to email to any page for an addition (eg if i cc: a page on the wiki, that email will be appended to the page, a great way to track discussions related to projects). also your standard WYSIWYG tools are available (bold, italic, align, colors, links) so if you know how to use a word processor, you're set. no Wiki formatting required to learn.

just adding those would be nice, would make this a cool new wiki. but what they do next brings this tool into a new realm. as mentioned in alacrity, this becomes sort of the 3rd generation of wikis after (1) basic wikis and (2) Database backed wikis (wikipedia, etc).

What is so great is essentially the introduction of structured data. instead of just being plain text, some bits can be considered "dates" or "values" and can be tweaked, sorted, etc. this allows a wiki to transform from a place to stick a bunch of linked thoughts into a Web Application Development Platform. their example of making a new-hire application is so simple, and so elegant, i just wonder what else can be done that easily. more interestingly, i wonder what tough problems will be find solutions here, ones not immediately obvious.

these guys are a company and they're going to sell this stuff. they just got $5.2M from a VC and it looks pretty neat. im gonna try to hop on early and see just what can be done with this new technology. because, really, thats what this is.

watch the demo (SWF)

cocoa

so ive been dabbling in cocoa and objective-c for a little while now, what with all these macs everywhere. ive been reading some tutorials online, checking out the API every once in a while, but never really got much out of it. the tutorials were all too simple (ok, i can make a currency converter, now what?) and the APIs are a bit much yet.

of course, "get a book" you say. well i had been looking for a while for something really current. something that used XCode and Panther, and i recently found it. the latest edition of Aaron Hillegass' Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X is just what i've been looking for (at least i hope).

more from X

a followup to last week's column, Robert X Cringley tells us what's happened in this last (first?) week of micro-wISPs.

while it's not that exciting, i do like the quote at the end:

I credit Napster (the original Napster, not the new one) and DivX for this relatively sudden willingness for average people to get their hands dirty twiddling bits. Motivated by free music and video, millions of people have learned that it isn't really that hard to do, especially if there is a 12 year-old available to help. And since we seem to keep producing 12 year-olds, I'd say the sky's the limit when it comes to how these technologies will change our world.

cringely goes nuts (university)

say what you will about the guy, but robert x cringely says some pretty insightful stuff. it might not be totally on-target all the time, but he's obviously a smart guy, and everything he writes about is well thought-out and often very insightful (did i mention that already?).

take this last article, for example. very cool. when i see a router running linux, i don't think "micro-ISPs collaborating with VoIP companies to take down the man," do you? he did.

and what about this earlier, similar article? or this more recent, totally different article? i mean the guy is all over the place. its great. he sees problems (that most people don't even see) and comes up with solutions. he doesn't move on them, he eggs people on to do it. kinda funny, even.

by the way, the title of this post is based off a strongbad email

internet is the new cable

watching this video about yahoo's past, present, and future, i picked up on an idea of Terry Semel's regarding contrasting Cable television and the Internet.

when HBO first started, they had to purchase all their content and distribute it for a subscriber's fee. eventually they got some content "exclusively" ("see 'Splash' only on HBO!"), and more recently they have developed their own premium content (Sopranos, Sex and the City, etc).

The idea is that at first, companies like yahoo simply delivered content (search engine, advertisements, etc), with a little bit of premium content (yahoo games, fantasy sports teams, etc). their goal was to get more people to become Yahoo users.

currently people use yahoo because it is not only an easy way to get to the third party content they desire, but because Yahoo is the only one with a certain piece of content, or the cheapest place to get it. eventually it will be that you use Yahoo for something that is totally Yahoo-specific. (yahoo mail is not yahoo specific, i can get free webmail at several places, hotjobs is not yahoo specific, etc). developing this product that will draw users simply through its existence solely on your site is the trick.
that's the next killer app.

just think of how many people subscribe to 24-hour HBO just to watch the Sopranos once a week. thats where you make money.

ichatting (AV)

we've had an iSight in the office for some time now, but its been sitting on an unused computer. just sitting there.

so today the professor who bought it (the local Mac zealot) said "you can just put the iSight on your machine if you want, oh and here's an attachment if you want to take it home and use on your new iBook"

so the image is my very first AV chat (with the very same prof). cool stuff.

sasser worm causes DoS

the latest worm to hit the internet has had a horrible side-effect on the internet, that is, it has effectively DoS'd all internet news and security update sites.
want to know about recent developments in p2p? gotta wade through the sasser-fest first.
even want to learn exactly sasser is? you have to find which one of the zillions of posts has any kind of useful information (tip: it is article number [one zillion minus one]).

ugh. i hate these trends in online publishing. it reminds me of People magazine ("bennifer! bennifer! brad and jen!")

quantum bank transfer

some researchers from the University of Vienna have reportedly transferred money from a bank to Vienna City Hall using a process secured by quantum cryptography.

from what i've heard, this is the first real, publicized use of quantum crypto that uses single photons. read the article for some details, and if you're interested, check out The Feynman Processor by Milburn and Davies for more info on what the heck quantum crypto is. i have a copy, you can borrow it. also check out these other links

why should you care? there are already secure bank transfer mechanisms. well not quite like this. this is really the only provably secure (besides one-time pads) system for data transfer over public channels. everything else is just really close to totally secure ;)

economics of distributed computing

posted by windley, this is an interesting idea of breaking down the economics of computing on a very large scale. the idea that sneakernet (passing information via real-world transports like UPS or your own pair of sneakers and a floppy) is the most cost-effective to move a TB of data is pretty interesting. i would like to think that is simply a limitation of our networks that will be handled in the near future.

gmail testing

so an old friend of mine hooked me up with a gmail account. pretty neat. some of the cooler features (ignoring the obvious 1Gb of storage):
note: if this post violates the gmail agreement (i read most of it, but i'm no lawyer), i will remove it upon request.

• conversations: a nice way of looking at a thread of messages. better presentation than normal email threading (see screenshots). puts a clickable, one-line header (with fancy round corners) containing the sender's name, a short blurb of the content, and the date (including relative time) for each previous message in this thread. very slick, should be quite useful.
• labels: better than folders. allows you to mark messages instead of file them away. sounds a bit lame (why can't i file all my work stuff under a "work" folder?) until you think a bit more. instead of filing messages, you just mark them and archive them (makes them "invisible"). later when you want to see all your work stuff, pull up the "work" label. just as you would pull up the work folder.
  • killer: mark one message with multiple labels. essentially allows you to file a message in two folders at the same time. thanks google.
  • feature request: allow the labels to be arranged hierarchically.
• "star" messages. you know when you get an email and say "ok, i need to get on that." but then it works its way down your inbox till its off the screen? and moving it into a "todo" folder just doesn't work for ya? just "star" the message (zero reload time, just like clicking a button) and its on your "special" list.
• filters: now this might not be all that new of a feature, but combined with labels, its great. everytime i get a message from family, mark it as family. when its my mom, mark it as mom. if it has the word "italy" in it, mark it as "italy trip 2004". don't have to think "ok that message about eurail passes from mom.. did i file that under 'family', 'mom', or 'italy'?" because it is "filed" under all of them.
• address completion: using some sort of mighty (hidden) trickery with javascript / DOM / something, they have managed to accomplish the holy grail of webmail: address autocomplete. you know, like i type "stev" and i get a list:
  • steve@there.com
  • steve@here.com
  • steve@ctu.gov
  very cool. in my opinion, this is a killer feature. that is, it kills other webmails. then again, i dont use many other webmails, so maybe im just behind the times.
• spellcheck: now this might not be all that neat if you're like me running OSX 10.3.3 (spell check built-in in almost all text fields in any app), but odds are, you're on windows so this applies to you.
  whenever you write an email, you can click on "Check Spelling" and the window will change (but not reload, awesome, see below for more comments on that) to a read-only version of your message, with typos highlighted in red. clicking on a red word will pop up a tiny box of suggestions. i swear im typing emails on a native email client when this happens. i have no idea how this works in a browser, but i love it.
• it's fast: webmail clients in the past have imitated native-client interfaces through clicking on buttons, waiting for a new page, then clicking on another button, reload, etc. not gmail. enter some obviously smarty-pants XHTML/DOM/ECMAscript engineers and you have a webpage that responds to your commands instantly. no going back to the server for a whole new page, no reloads. spell-checking, email address autocomplete, that whole conversation unhiding thing, application of labels, resizing and altering all sorts of GUI elements is all done instantly. its really kind of creepy. at first i thought i was just getting really good bandwidth/latency.
  this browser voodoo is awesome. finally, somebody is using the power of our modern browsers.

of course, i have some requests as well:

• IMAP: no way this will happen for free unless the body of the emails have ads appended. in text? html? im betting this will be a pay-for service. first (optimistic) guess: $20 a year.
• mailbox imports: if this works so well, i'd like to move all my old mail into it. the best way i've found to move mail is via IMAP commands. maybe they will allow some sort of limited IMAP calls? this also might not happen because of storage space. sure, 1GB is enough to store 5 years of mail. but what if i've been using email for 7 years now? and ive been good enough to save all my old mail, from all my old ISPs? as a consumer, id love to have all that mail in one place, searchable. as google, id say "no way". The way this 1GB thing works is that almost nobody is going to use even close to that 1GB limit, not for the first year or so, at least. but if you offered a way to let every geek import their entire previous mailboxes, half your userbase is going to suck up their limits and start saying "1GB isn't enough!" so i predict.
• addressbook imports: now this is a lot more plausible. let us upload our thunderbird/mozilla/outlook/turba/squirrelmail/whatever contact lists. support as many protocols as possible. allow for merging of addresses (unique key: primary email address). do it right. allow some kind of synchronization with users' home machines (when i get a gmail from somebody, i might want their address on my palm the next day). they've got the right idea with the auto-collection of addresses you send to / receive from already. just take it another step.
• pay-for no-ads: i predict this will happen pretty quickly. either use this for free with ads, or pay us $50/year to not place ads (but they might still parse your mail, hey i bet yahoo does that anyway)
• hierarchical labels: see explanation above.

interesting tidbit: the source of these pages are very obfuscated. that is, attempting to see how the page is laid out brings you to a bunch of seemingly gibberish such as:

D(["ct",[["gmail",0]
,["jobs",0]
]
]
);
D(["ts",0,50,2,0,"Inbox","fc1310ac71"]
);

this is done in an attempt to dissuade/prevent people from writing automated tools to go out and fetch their mail, bypassing the revenue-generating ads. pretty smart, assuming it works. and knowing google, thats a pretty good assumption.
if i were google, id have an interface to programming the content / layout of gmail that allowed the obfuscation to be totally interchangeable. that way, if the obfuscation were to be "broken" it would simply be a matter of supplying a new method, or even simply passing it a new key of some kind. of course, this is probably exactly what they do.

conclusion: looks interesting. the security nerd in me stops me from really using it very much right now, but we'll see.
i would recommend this to those people i know that are currently stuck on Yahoo! mail or Hotmail (especially hotmail). and, of course, that is exactly what Google wants to hear.

oreilly on gmail

Tim O'Reilly (as in the books) talks about gmail, why the people who are freaking out about it are lame, and why it will change things. more interestingly, he goes on about the eventual Internet-as-a-single-giant-computer thing. pretty neat.
i wish my job was to sit around and envision the future.

gotta start coding again

ive been feeling like i really should start coding again. been looking at open-source projects, looking for one that i might be able to contribute to. hopefully something security related. the only problem is that most of those are pretty hardcore, shellcoding type of stuff. i found metasploit while chatting on IRC the other night. pretty cool looking except its almost all windows exploit stuff. well maybe they need someone to get in there with UNIX stuff.
started reading up on stack/heap overflows again, too. totally know the concept behind them, now im just trying to get a handle on the details. might have to break out an OS or architecture book to remember what the EBX register does, etc. i remember thinking that this stuff was way too much the first time i heard it, and i kinda tuned it out. but now i realize that i have to learn this stuff all the way down to the hardware if i really want to do it. hrm.
in related news, i keep reading about Objective-C and haven't done much actual coding. its hard when my only chance is while im at work, where i have other things to do. ugh.
having gentoo at home is really helping me focus again. just having code so close at hand, a mellow windowmanager (fluxbox) to avoid distractions, and the whole linux feel make me want to code. which is good.

xcodin

blogroll, opml, etc

made a blogroll out of my subscriptions using NetNewsWire. exported the list into an OPML file and then found, modified, and used a simple perl script to generate the final product. this link will on the right side of the page from now on.
now just to automate this process ;)

HP's blog epidemic analyzer

this is a pretty neat tool. you can look up topics to find commonly blogged stories, then get the graph on how that story grew through "blogspace." essentially telling you who initially wrote about the story and who is copying each other (for example, im copying slashdot).
the graphs are pretty neat and the faq mentions they have developed a ranking algorithm to discover these "originator" nodes as the best result, as opposed to maybe a well-read, oft-linked site that copied that originating node.

two videos and some thoughts on HCI for you

first off are the sony robots doing a "fan dance". they're so smooth its creepy.
next is an older video put out by Apple about its idea of the future "Knowledge Navigator." this idea of a personal assistant was presented in the past as the ultimate in personal computing, but as this article points out, it can only be just that, the ultimate.
it will never work in the interim because as these avatars act more and more human, we expect more and more out of them. when they do not deliver, we quickly abandon them. thus, the only avatar that would ever succeed would be a perfect one. while the idea of avatars might appeal as the ideal HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) device, i doubt it will ever arrive without the ability to evolve.

blog (and other site) readers

there's a little something out there called RSS. if you've ever seen a site with a little orange XML icon , you've seen it.
what is it good for? well, i use it to read tons of blogs/news sites/etc in a fraction of the regular time using a "site aggregator" like NetNewsWireLite (Mac) or FeedDemon (PC).
If you click on the screenshot to the right, you can see an example of what the programs do. pretty cool.
So if you install one of these programs, you can simply visit a site you normally read, drag the icon onto the aggregator, and boom! you're using RSS.

security codes on comments

get your brightroom pics quick

attention triathlon-computer-geeks:
using a unix (OSX works if you install wget from fink) machine, you can automate getting pictures of yourself from brightroom.com. im only talking about the low-res ones on their website, not the real-deal ones you pay for, of course.
first, find the site with your pics on it. go to the main page, search for your event, then your bib or name. when you get to a page with your pics on it, run the command:
wget -nd -P pics/ -p --accept .jpg --span-hosts "PUT_URL_HERE" (of course, substitute the URL in).
for example, i used wget -nd -P pics/ -p --accept .jpg --span-hosts "http://www.brightroom.com/view_user_event.asp?EVENTID=3426&BIB=942&PWD="

why spirit freaked

in case you were wondering, the mars rover freaked out because it ran out of storage space. details here. i guess that problem is not limited to the labs i manage, but is actually interplanetary.

ibm brings it on. maybe.

dvorak on how ibm can bring linux to the market, and why they should:
"Windows XP should sell for $29 not $299. This is why Linux has to be put on the fast track. Users cannot pay never-ending forced tributes to Microsoft as if it were the Roman Empire and we its slaves. Right now, the Linux alternative needs some consolidation. To continue my History Channel analogy, there needs to be a Genghis Khan of Linux uniting the warring tribes into one unstoppable force. IBM has the potential to do this."

everything is hackable

a paper linked to by a recent post at the openbsd journal does a very good job at describing a (hypothetical) corporate network setup, that looks quite secure and then describes how it could be broken into. the author takes a few leaps (assuming the insider-attacker happened to get a trusted internal IP address is the biggest one) but it is all very plausible.
he elaborates on the (again, hypothetical) response by the company's internal security team, going into nice details.
anyone who thinks that even one of the most (if not the most) trusted Operating Systems in the world is unhackable, think again. everything can be broken. the point is to minimize potential opportunities, potential damage, and "be prepared" by keeping up with patches, using a secured loghost, deploying nIDS', educating users, and finally never simply trusting internal networks (don't forget Troy ;) )
go straight to the paper.

pretty cool/easy markup

more monkeying around

warning: webmonkey entry ahead

html, body {
    height: 100%;
}

technosavvy. kinda.

i don't know why i thought of this now, but there was this student i met the other day in a lab that was kinda "the computer guy" for his lab. he was talking about how he set up the wireless connection for the lab, etc. he went on to talk about how he did some WarDriving the other day, etc. pretty interesting stuff. i figure "ok, this architecture major is into computer stuff, right on."
he goes on to say how he built a Pringles© can WiFi antenna. so im a bit more impressed. thats some serious geekitude.
but then i ask him a few simple questions about the network setup and he has no idea what im talking about. later he asks me how he can add a printer to his computer and how to change the computer's hostname.
wtf? its like he and his technophobe identical twin switched places without me looking.

all CSS, all the time

word document security

1.) Open a protected document in MS Word
2.) Save as "Web Page (*.htm; *.html)", close Word
3.) Open html-document in any Text-Editor
4.) Search "" tag, the line reads something like 
    that: ABCDEF01
5.) keep the "password" in mind
6.) Open original document (.doc) with any hex-editor
7.) search for hex-values of the password (reverse order!)
8.) Overwrite all 4 double-bytes with 0x00, Save, Close
9.) Open document with MS Word, Select "Tools / Unprotect Document" 
    (password is blank)

auto-iSync

tell application "iSync"
        if syncing is false then synchronize
end tell

mail.app and self-signed certs

if you use apple's mail.app and you get your email from a server with a self-signed certificate (because paying for a cert is a ripoff), check out this link that shows you how to download the crt file and add it to your keychain so mail.app never bothers you again. [note: this might only be for the latest mail.app which does not have a "do not show this message again" option]
here's the gist of it:

1. openssl s_client -connect mail.example.com:993 -showcerts
2. Copy the part of the output between (and including) -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- and-----END CERTIFICATE-----.
3. Press Control-C to exit openssl s_client. save to a file called servername.crt.
4. find that file in Finder and double click it.
5. add it to your X509 Anchors keychain.
   
   
   Posted by Steve on January 13, 2004 08:38 AM | Comments (2)

new site

in other news, i recently bought a new domain. it will be used for stuff related to the wedding, etc. inspired, of course, by andy and dorothy (dont bother clicking if you dont know the password).
its being hosted (of course) by lopaka. im glad to be back on readaccess, ive missed it so (ok, ive been there all along, just not officially).
things i plan to have on it:

• groom / bride blogs (dorky i know)
• a photo gallery
• bios on the wedding party
• directions, etc to the event
• out-of-towner stuff (what to do in SLO, etc)
• other stuff andria will probably come up with

dell rules

ignoring the fact that they provide great support, superbly built/assembled hardware and offer some of the best options for hardware configurations, Dell still out-prices everybody.

gallery issues

if you use gallery (as i do with gallery.mcgheemail.com) and you run into disk space issues, check out the new version of gallery (1.4.1) which enforces maximum sized image uploads (so people can upload huge files straight from their camera and it will only store a reasonably sized copy on the web) and myresize.php (thanks to beckett)
this allowed me to take a 350M site (limit was 333M, whoops) and shrink it to 267M. not a huge difference, but enough, and now all the images are still quite big, but not ridiculous.

fiber optics, manual synchronization, and bluetooth

after a productive morning of troubleshooting a fiber-optic line on a web server (dont ask), a bit of scanner-driver installation, i delved into getting my numbers off my old phone. in the process i came across a few bluetooth wonders.
first: enabling bluetooth connection with Address Book. what does it do? now when someone calls me, i get a little popup on my screen basically saying "your pocket is vibrating, idiot. pick up your phone." useful? not really? cool factor? +3 (out of 5). but what about text messages? instead of just saying "your pocket is vibrating, idiot." it displays the message on the screen. usefulness goes up to +2, cool factor remains at +3.
second:a little program named romeo that lets you do a ton of stuff with your mac, controlled by your phone. again, initial grades come in with low usefulness, moderate coolness (albeit almost +4). if this were my home machine, the itunes and dvd control would be rad, and if i ever did presentations with a laptop, the powerpoint/keynote controller would be killer. that raises it up to a potential usefulness of +4 with a cool factor staying around +3.8.
and all of a sudden, its time to go home. what do ya know.

intro to web design

new phone

its almost done. maybe ill write up a little bit on what ive gone through with at&t trying to get this phone deal done.
anyways, andria and i have new phones (1, 2) now. now that i've got my bluetooth phone, ive realized that my g5 doesn't have a bluetooth module. aaaaagh! then why does it have a bluetooth antenna? dammit. i knew i should have checked on that..
so ya, gonna try to get one from the bookstore, if they're even open on new year's eve.
soooo cloooooose to techno greatness.
update!
got it working. so awesome.
went to the bookstore and got an external bluetooth adapter (only $30!). one stupid complaint: nowhere on the device does it say "bluetooth," not even the little logo (see picture), so it could get confused with a storage USB stick. but ignoring that, its awesome. i can bring it home and sync on my PC too. schweet.

finally

apparently the magic number is 4:20. thats right, 4 hours, 20 minutes on hold with AT&T wireless.
what are you laughing at?
well, i spoke to a real person for all of 10 seconds and she put me on hold again. at least there's music on this one. kinda funky too.
damn. no dice on getting the deal. gotta call up customer service and see if they will give it to me. apparently if your order just doesn't go through, they don't give a crap.

perl does my bidding

wrote a pretty cool perl script today.
not going to go into it, as its part of a larger project im working on right now, but it used DBI and XMLRPC together. pretty cool.
so, this is just for my own reference, pretty much.
carry on.

actual AT&T person [nevermind]

publish your iCal

• just download it
• move the unzipped folder to /Library/WebServer/Documents/
• sudo su -
cd /Library/WebServer/Documents/
ln -s phpicalendar-0.9.5/ ical (just to make it easier on the eyes)
  
• in config.inc.php i made the changes:
  $calendar_path = '/www/DAV/'; (or wherever your webdav share is mounted).
  and $download_uri = 'http://smcghee.caed.calpoly.edu/DAV'; to allow the "download" and "subscribe" buttons to work.

virus free, for free

according to this article, you can go get free anti-virus and firewall software for your PC.

so unless you want to be like the guy in my previous entry, and you dont want to pay for anti-virus softare, go do it now.

phpHelpDesk

making ISOs on Panther

• ISONAME is the name of the resulting ".iso" file (the .iso extension will be added by the program)
• CDNAME is the name of the mounted CD.

bugzilla on safari

1. open buglist.cgi
2. search for my $serverpush
3. add the line && $ENV{'HTTP_USER_AGENT'} !~ /Safari/ so it looks like:
   my $serverpush =
exists $ENV{'HTTP_USER_AGENT'}
&& $ENV{'HTTP_USER_AGENT'} !~ /Safari/
&& $ENV{'HTTP_USER_AGENT'} =~ /Mozilla.[3-9]/
...