Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

WordPress, web development, and world domination.

Mac Mini

Jan112005

Rumors about a “headless iMac” have been out for a while, but now the Mac Mini is official. This new platform comes with a G4 processor at either 1.25GHz or 1.42GHz, either 40GB or 80GB of drive space, 1 FireWire, 2 USB, DVI/VGA video, modem, 10/100Base-T ethernet, can have anywhere from 256MG to 1GB of RAM, optional 802.11b/g and Bluetooth, and OS X 10.3 with the usual slew of cool Apple apps. Starting price is $499. It does not have built-in KVM, as some speculated. But it is obviously the “switcher’s gateway drug” machine, as indicated by this quote on the front page:

Perfect for Programmers

Set a space-saving Mac mini atop your workstation PC and add a KVM switch to share keyboard, monitor and mouse. Mac OS X includes free developer tools for Mac, UNIX and Java. Test out a Mac version of your latest creation, instantly. Pretty soon you’ll be using the Mac full-time, with that PC relegated to the testbed.

I’ve been wanting to try out the new Macs for a while now (ever since Apple first started talking about using BSD as the core for OS X). Maybe when we get some money saved up, this could be a viable option.

PageRank

Jan062005

I’ve seen several people recently who have noticed changes in their Google PageRank. I’ve just now noticed that I seem to be one of them. I used to be at PR6, but now I’m at PR7. What does this mean in the grand scheme of things? Not much. Probably just that I’ll be targetted by even more comment spammers. But hey, PR7. Cool 🙂

Oops!

Jan052005

Yesterday, while doing some experiments in WordPress, I apparently borked the rewrite rules for this site in a fashion that broke permalinks. It’s fixed now. Sorry for the inconvenience, please resume your usual surfing.

Thunderbird 1.0 OPML Import/Export

Jan032005
Thunderbird OPML Import/Export

Thunderbird OPML Import/Export

Aha! I was digging around some more, and thought I’d see if there was any kind of official movement on OPML import for Thunderbird. So I wandered over to the Mozilla bug tracker, and did a search for “OPML” in the “Thunderbird” project. That turned up a single hit, which was Bug #258102. Towards the bottom, were some patches from Justin.

At first, I wasn’t sure how to apply them. His patch touches a file named “subscriptions.js”, which I couldn’t find in my Thunderbird installation. But then I realized that it was packed up in a .jar file. I unpacked the ‘newsblog.jar’ file (it’s just a .zip by another name), applied the patch, repacked the jar, dropped it back into my Thunderbird installation, and voila!

This still needs some work, it is alpha quality at best. Proceed at your own risk. Here there be dragons. Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball. The imported feeds will all be under your main feeds folder, it will not auto-create subfolders for you. The feeds will get imported, but don’t show up in the list when you “Manage Subscriptions”. On a similar note, only your manually added feeds will get exported. I’m sure that these bugs will be fixed at some point. Update: this appears to be a problem on my laptop installation of Thunderbird 1.0. It works better on my Debian Linux install of Thunderbird 0.8 at work.

If the above problems don’t bother you too much, and you just want to get a bunch of feeds imported now, here’s what to do:

  1. Exit Thunderbird
  2. Download my patched copy of newsblog.jar
  3. Find the original newsblog.jar file for your installation, rename it (e.g. ‘newsblog.jar.orig’), and put the new version in its place. Under a standard Windows installation, it should be under “Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird\chrome”. Under Linux/FreeBSD, try something like “/usr/share/mozilla-thunderbird/chrome”
  4. Restart Thunderbird, and go to the “Manage Subscriptions” option of your News & Blogs folder to see your shiny new OPML buttons!

Note: I did not write the OPML import code. All I can take credit for is bringing it to your attention. All kudos belong to Justin Kirby (hey look, another WordPress blog 🙂 ), as far as I can tell.

More SpamAssassin goodness

Jan032005

Related to my previous post, there is a WordPress SpamAssassin Plugin over on IO Error. (via Photomatt). The initial version is pretty simple, connecting to the spamd server and getting a simple true/false spam verdict on a comment. But the author says that he wants to improve it to use the SA scoring system to send “maybe spam” messages to moderation.

Earthquake/Tsunami

Dec292004

There’s probably nothing I can say about the recent Indian Ocean Earthquake that hasn’t already been said by others. We first learned about it on Monday morning, nearly 36 hours after-the-fact. The devastation in the affected areas is horrifying, and our prayers go out to everyone affected.

I know I’m late in mentioning this, but I just felt like it wouldn’t be right to post anything else here without first acknowledging such a widely felt tradgedy. If you are wondering which charity to send donations to, you might want to look at Benjamin Rosenbaum’s Charity Efficiency and Transparency Ratings.

Thank You

Dec232004

As suggested by a thread in the WordPress Support forums, I want to share some Thank Yous…

This list is not comprehensive, I’m sure to leave out plenty of people who deserve to be included. So if you aren’t mentioned, please don’t feel slighted — it’s just my lousy memory at fault. That said, I’d just like to list some people (in no particular order) who have contributed to my enjoyment of blogging. It might be via code, documentation, or just some thought-provoking writing.

Again, there are plenty of others I could, and probably should, be mentioning here. These are just a few that I could bring to the forefront. Thanks, everybody, and Happy Holidays!

Finding WordPress Plugins

Dec212004

Have you been looking for the ultimate plugin for your WordPress blog that will add that final oompf that your site needs? Does a Google search just turn up links to other people looking for the same thing? Or maybe you’ve written the most killer plugin ever, and you’re having trouble getting the word out to potential users?