Today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year, the beginning of winter. Ironically, today was much warmer than the last couple around here. We had snow flurries on Sunday, with highs in the 30’s. But today the high was in the upper 50’s. Happy Chrismahanukwanzakah, everybody.
It seems that Matt Mullenweg and Peter Saint-André have been kicking around some ideas about how WordPress and Jabber could work together. I used to have my blog set up to send me an instant message via Jabber every time a new comment was posted. I lost those notifications in an upgrade a while back, but I’ve been thinking about redoing it as a plugin. About two years ago, I talked about setting up a … Continue reading
Newly available, WordPress 1.2.2. This is mainly a security and bugfix release. Some users have taken us to task for taking so long to get this release out. But as Matt said, there were several issues being worked on simultaneously, and it seemed more efficient in the long run to roll them all into one release, rather than forcing users to do multiple back-to-back upgrades. Download from the usual location. Of course, upgrades will be … Continue reading
The world’s smallest Peer-to-Peer application, written in 15 lines of Python code: TinyP2P. TinyP2P is a functional peer-to-peer file sharing application, written in fifteen lines of code, in the Python programming language. I wrote TinyP2P to illustrate the difficulty of regulating peer-to-peer applications. Peer-to-peer apps can be very simple, and any moderately skilled programmer can write one, so attempts to ban their creation would be fruitless. Peer-to-Peer (AKA “P2P”) applications make it easy for people … Continue reading
Memo to myself: To turn on inline autocomplete in the Firefox web browser… Enter about:config in the URL field Right-click on the page and create a new Boolean value Enter browser.urlbar.autoFill as the preference name (note, case-sensitive: ‘F’, not ‘f’) Set the value to true There. Maybe next time I won’t have to Google for it again.
Get Thunderbird! This is actually old news at this point, but the Mozilla Thunderbird mail/news/rss reader has reached version 1.0. There haven’t been any earth-shattering changes since I discussed version 0.8 back in September. There’s Global Inbox, Message Grouping, Saved Search Folders, and other minor enhancements and bug fixes. But there’s still no import/export of OPML files for the RSS aggregation. Like many geeks, I use an RSS aggregator to track dozens (if not hundreds) … Continue reading
I was browsing through my referers yesterday, and a site that I hadn’t seen before caught my attention. It’s called Living on the Planet, and it’s basically an aggregation of content from all over the world, grouped by topics and by geography. For example, the referer I noticed was from the Living in Georgia section. The Internet is great at helping us find information from all over the world. But sometimes you want to narrow … Continue reading
Okay, this is pretty darned cool: Metropipe has a product called Virtual Privacy Machine, which is actually a tiny (82MB) Linux distribution which boots into a virtual machine under Windows. It contains common networking apps like Firefox and Thunderbird, and I assume ssh and friends, as well. Since it’s so small, you can load it onto a small USB drive, MP3 player, or whatever portable media you have, mount it up on a computer wherever … Continue reading
Planeta WordPress is similar to Planet WordPress, but with the addition of several Spanish blogs. Thanks to Manuel M. Almeida for letting me know about it. Bueno!
Euphoria is one of the Really Slick Screensavers While on a search for new eye candy, I found Really Slick Screensavers, which really lives up to the name. There are 10 eye-popping OpenGL Windows screen savers available for free, in both senses of word (free-as-in-beer & free-as-in-speech). If you’re interested in the internals of how the graphics are created, source code is available.