While I don’t foresee anything coming of these rumors (especially considering it would actually prove John Dvorak right, which we all know is a bad thing), but Apple is reportedly in talks with Intel about using Intel chips for their systems.
Category: Geekdom
What’s With The German Spam?
Apparently it’s the remants from the Sober P virus, which is sending around these e-mails. The e-mails don’t spread the virus, but the virus is a programmed propoganda tool used to send right-wing German messages to millions of computers. Great, so now spam is a scam tool and a tool for folks to send their messages of hate to millions of people. Lovely…
Best (and Worst) Use Of Batch Files
I would never even remotely consider myself a programmer, but I know you should never create a “software distribution, configuration management, and auditing” system with over sixty *.CMD batch files.
mod_rewrite Tips And Tricks
Mod_rewrite is an incridibly powerful tool for Web site admins, but is (at least for me) really complicated. So I’m mostly bookmarking these great tips (and a great thread) for my future use (because I’m sure it’ll come in handy).
An Elite Hacker At Work
This is far too good to be true, but we can only wish that people were this stupid.
E-mailing From The Road
If you’re like me and hate changing SMTP servers whenever you’re on the road, and you don’t want to always be using your Web host’s SMTP server, you can always use Gmail, according to Greg. Great tip, thanks!
Speaking of Gmail, did you you know you could run Linux on it? Or that you can use Gmail as a spam filter? Now you do.
How To Turn Your Blog Into A Gopherlog
This would make a great practical joke down the road (and sadly, I still remember getting information from Gopher sources back in the day).
Adobe To Buy Macromedia
Holy kitchen-appliances. I didn’t see this coming. But I can’t say that it will be that bad of a thing (we’ll just have to wait to see what Ken says).
I’m a user of products from both companies. From Adobe I use Pagemaker (because I can’t afford an upgrade to Indesign), Acrobat, Photoshop and, on rare occasion, Illustrator. From Macromedia I use Homesite more than anything (and have long before it was a Macromedia product), but occassionally use Dreamweaver and Fireworks (haven’t gotten really into Flash development). Both companies develop competing products that each have features that the other should have, and it will be nice to quit seeing them try to one-up each other all the time.
My concerns:
- GoLive had better not replace Dreamweaver, as Dreamweaver is far superior and extendable.
- Homesite better not disappear. While I know there are a hundred good text editors out there, Homesite is what I’m used to and what I’m good with. It’s got it’s quirks, but many of the solutions I’ve tried do, too. Homesite’s original developer asks the same question.
- Adobe is a big supporter of the SVG format which competes directly with Flash. While SVG is a W3C-approved format, Flash is far more mature as a platform for Web applications. Which one will live?
- While I’m not a big fan of ColdFusion, I know a lot of people who are. Adobe better not kill development for that, otherwise they’re going to anger a lot of people (or convince them to move to PHP).
Anyway, this is interesting, and will be fun to watch (and again, I’m sure Ken, who knows more about all of this, will contribute more later on his site). Mezzoblue has some good thoughts on this and he also links to other blog posts with lots of great questions. Here’s a comment from a guy that works at a newspaper
An Amazon Web Services Programming Wish
This is a note to all folks out there who are intimately familiar with Amazon’s API but if somebody could create something simple to do this, I’d be extremely happy (as would the RIAA, for that matter).
Here’s my situation. My wife is trying to create a custom CD for a friend of hers, consisting of some older (Golden Oldies-era, 50s and 60s) type of music. Since we’re really not in the mood to piss of the RIAA by downloading MP3s illegally, and these are fairly popular classics (“Stand By Me” was one of the songs she was looking for), we were curious how much it would cost to buy a CD or two with those particular songs on it (they’re all from the same era, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find them on just a few CDs).
So here’s what I’d like the application/service to do: We would put in a title and artist for a song we’re looking for (“Stand by Me” by Ben E. King, for example). It would then return the cheapest way to acquire that song. It would a have an option to take several songs and find the cheapest way to get all of them. Maybe one of the used sellers has several of the CDs, so we could save on shipping. Or one CD, while more expensive, has several of the songs we’re looking for on it, saving us the cost of buying several CDs.
I would think the RIAA would love this. I’d be legally buying all the CDs I’m trying to make a mix CD from, which is all perfectly legal (as long as I give the CDs to the person I’m making the mix CD for, transferring of ownership, blah, blah…). And I’d probably sleep a bit better at night. Maybe.
Of course, if the RIAA has a fit about something like this (“We’re not making enough money, etc…”) then the program should have a function that will only search record labels that aren’t members of the RIAA.
Anybody out there willing to try programming something like this? I’m not totally familiar with Amazon Web Services, so I don’t even know if something like this is possible, but I figured I’d throw it out there.