90% Crud

Ann Arbor News Weblogs

I had no idea that the Ann Arbor News has weblogs. It's a shame they don't have GeoURL tags or I would have found them a lot sooner. It's also a shame that they don't support RSS because I probably won't visit them again.

That's not a threat against sites that don't RSS, it's a simple fact. NetNewsWire remembers to check sites for me so that I don't have to. If your site doesn't let me check it in NetNewsWire, I won't remember to check it on my own. Sorry.

Occasionally I'll get so frustrated with a site's lack of an RSS feed that I'll create my own. I don't do it very often because it is legally questionably and despite what some people think I'm actually not interested in being sued any time soon. For the record I contact sites about doing getting RSS feeds from their sites and if I don't hear back from them I go ahead.

iTunes Linking

You can link to songs on the iTunes music store a number of ways. You can use the iTunes Link Maker, you can roll your own links, or you can do what I do and right-click in iTunes.

Then you can create links to songs like Double Dutch Bus, albums like To the Extreme or playlists like Missy Elliot's.

Wait a second, if you're using a browser that supports standards like CSS you've probably noticed the icons next to the iTunes links above. If you're really interested, you've probably viewed my source and noticed that I don't have any images in there. WTF?

I adapted a tip I found on Surf*Mind (via 0xDECAFBAD) for adding icons to links based on their hrefs. Whenever a link to the iTunes Music Store appears, CSS supporting browsers will add an image after the link automatically, with no effort on your part.

If you want to do the same, put /images/itunes.gif on your web server, then add the following to your CSS:


a[href*="://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/"]:after{
content: url("/images/itunes.gif");
}


You can do this for lots of different link types, the technique appears to have originated on As Days Pass By.

Ann Arbor is both overrated and RSSed

I found out that it's surprisingly easy to make an RSS screen scraper with Template::Extract. I was able to whip up an RSS feed for ann arbor is overrated in about 15 minutes. This guide to Template::Extract and RSS had all the code I needed, although I modified it slightly to be a cron job instead of a CGI. Enjoy.

Dockage

A few weeks ago people started posting images of their OS X docks. It was an act of solidarity, showing the world that we're Mac users and proud of it. It was an act of advocacy, showing off the cool little applications that people found. It was an act of bragging, showing how much more interesting your apps are.

It started with an article on O'Reilly's Mac Dev Center. Kottke picked up the meme and ran with it, Dave Walker followed suit. Windows users lamented because Start menus just don't look as good, and it just isn't as easy to put on display.

Now Windows users can get into the act with ObjectDock from Stardock, the guys who make all those cool Windows customization apps (and they're local too!). (via PA) So now it's times for Windows users to show off their docks too.

Of course, at a certain point it becomes cost effective to simply buy a mac instead of spending all your time emulating one. Just because you have iTunes doesn't mean that you have all the tight AppleScript integration that Mac users have. If you want one or two features or visual flourishes that a Mac provides, then go ahead and replicate them. Apple's design influences everything on the system, and that's something that no amount of addon software can replicate.

PA Today

Be sure not to miss today's Penny Arcade. Newspost isn't up yet but I'm sure it will have lots of words that I don't understand in odd configurations that make my head hurt.

Remaking the Classics

Looks like they're remaking the zombie classic Dawn of the Dead. They've already made countless Night of the Living Dead remakes, so I suppose it's time to move on. This one is one of my favorites, if for no other reason than the zombie shopping scene. Also, for the record, I hate zombies.

Obligatory iTunes Post

As you are no doubt well aware, iTunes for Windows has been downloadable for a couple hours. Blah blah blah Windows users getting what Mac users have had for years blah blah blah wait until they see iPhoto blah blah blah.

What's interesting to me is the reaction. It seems that most Windows users equate iTunes with the iTunes Music Store. This makes for uninformed discussions, which must be a first for the Internet.

A lot of Windows users are missing the fact that iTunes is an excellent audio library tool. It's a music ripper and organizer with a built in mp3 sharing program (via Rendezvous). Any music fan should go gaga over Smart Playlists.

I've used Winamp, Windows Media Player, XMMS, mpg123 and a few other mp3 players that I've long since forgotten. Never before have I created playlists or kept my mp3s organized because none of those tools makes it as effortless as iTunes.

The iTunes Music Store (which still doesn't have a resale function) is only part of iTunes. It's one of the two reason why Apple is spending money developing iTunes for Windows (the other being the iPod), but it's only one piece of the puzzle.

Stupid Bank

My bank must be in serious financial trouble. I was at the ATM the other day when I saw an ad for CVS Pharmacy on the ATM screen while I was waiting, as well as an offer to hear more information about CVS. WTF?

I could understand if I were a non-customer, I think watching a short ad is a much better than paying $1.50 or $2.00 to use another bank's ATM. I don't understand why they treat their own customers like this. Let's see, I save them money by using an ATM instead of a teller and they see me as a potential revenue source for advertising? No thanks.

Also, does CVS see anything about my banking information? Just how sweet do they make the deal for their advertisers. Demographic information? How much I earn? Advertising and financing in the same place scares the shit out of me. The only reason I could see for them doing something like this is if they really need the money.

Time to start looking for a new bank...

Fix Fark Link Bookmarklet

I've had a problem with Fark links for a while that include arguments (i.e. http://story.news.yahoo.com/ news?tmpl=story&cid=1516&ncid=1516&e=2&u=/afp/20031014/od_afp/ japan_prize_offbeat_us_031014145540 ). The problem occurs in Safari and Mozilla, not sure about IE but I suspect not.

If you're having the same problem so I created a simple bookmarklet to fix it. Drag Fix Fark Link up to you bookmarks bar and click it when you visit a broken Fark link. Read on if you want to know more about the problem.

The problem is caused because Fark encodes the ? and & in URLs it links to so that it can be passed to a script. The script does accounting for them, telling you how many Farkers clicked a link, which is especially important for stories from AskMen.com which Fark gets paid to post. The script then spits out a redirect, which includes the URL of the story so that your browser will go to the story.

Unfortunately, it doesn't decode the ? and & in the URLs and so Safari and Mozilla try to go to a url like with encoded elements (i.e. http://story.news.yahoo.com/ news%3ftmpl=story%26cid=1516%26ncid=1516%26e=2%26u=/afp/ 20031014/od_afp/japan_prize_offbeat_us_031014145540 ). The bookmarklet simply turns the encoded elements into decoded elements. I've tested it in Safari and Mozilla for OS X.

Gubernatorial Prognostication

Scott and I were having a jolly good laugh at the fact that both Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse "the Brain" Ventura were both governors as well as in the movie Predator. Then Scott pointed out that they were also together in The Running Man, at which point I freaked out.

Something like this simply cannot be coincidence, it must be some sort of divine mandate on how the states of God's favorite country should be run. But what message was God trying to send us? Surely there must be some way to use this insight for the betterment of mankind or some sort of gambling.

Looking through the cast lists of both movies I found one more commonality: La Fours. Sven-Ole Thorsen was in both movies. In Predator he was "Russian (uncredited)" and in The Running Man he was "Sven (as Sven Thorsen)." The kicker is he was in Kevin Smith's finest film (no joke!) Mallrats. I'm not sure if the uncredited part will affect his presidential bid, but I'm going to go ahead and say there I am 100% he will rule the world.

Ladies and gentlemen, the next governor of some state:

[Update: Further proof that I'm right: all three were in Batman & Robin and I, for one, welcome our new bodybuilder overlords.]

Moveable Type Comment Spam

There's been a lot of talk recently about spammers posting comments in Moveable Type to attract people to their sites. Jay Allen has created MT-Blacklist which blacklists comments based on the linked content. He surmises that the linked content is what determines what's spam and what's not, I agree. ScriptyGoddess has a guide to stopping Spam.

TeledyN has discovered evidence of weblog SpamBots, which Kevin Donahue's CAPTCHA comment system should do a good job of blocking. Personally I don't like CAPTCHAs because my fingers don't do well typing random characters. They prefer english words, or at least english-like words such as floomper or interflumoxicity.

Obviously it sucks for people who run weblogs to find their conversations attracting spammers. In my short stint using MT I've already encountered a few of these comments, and I can only expect this to get worse. I read somewhere today something equivalent to "blogging can't be cool anymore, the President has one" which means it's only going to get more popular. Popularity is always a target for spam.

So what else can be done about it? I'm surprised no one has mentioned Bayesian filtering of comments. Like most people who've heard of it, I first found out about Bayesian filtering from A Plan for Spam, and how it can identify spam. Since then virtually every spam blocking system has started using Bayesian techniques for at least some part of identification.

I believe that a plugin could be written for Moveable Type that could identify spam based on the content of the comment and the content of linked sites. A score could be assigned to each comment and if the comment met a certain threshold it would be queued or deleted. The queueing process would also allow site maintainers to build their own blacklists and whitelists.

Since Bayesian algorithms "learn" this is ideal for stopping spam comments. A site dedicated to porn would most likely link to porn sites, which many sites would consider spam, but they would still want a way to filter out mortgage spam. Also, since each install is unique, spammers wouldn't be able to craft their ads to get around the filters.

So what do you think, is this something the LazyWeb has built/could build? Are there any fatal flaws with using Bayesian algorithms to identify spam comments?

iChat problems?

Is anyone else having trouble connecting to AIM with iChat? Adium works fine, but no iChat. How am I supposed to show off the Garth Knight buddy icon I stole without iChat?

CPAN weirdness

I was reading CPAN for the articles and found Acme::Playmate. Someone felt the need to create a programmatic interface to a database of Playboy statistics at playboy.com. Example code:

use Acme::Playmate;

print "Details for playmate " . $playmate->{ "Name" } . "\n";
print "Birthdate" . $playmate->{ "BirthDate" } . "\n";
print "Birthplace" . $playmate->{ "BirthPlace" } . "\n";
print "Bust" . $playmate->{ "Bust" } . "\n";
print "Waist" . $playmate->{ "Waist" } . "\n";
print "Hips" . $playmate->{ "Hips" } . "\n";
print "Height" . $playmate->{ "Height" } . "\n";
print "Weight" . $playmate->{ "Weight" } . "\n";


You would do well to look at all the Acme:: Perl modules.

iTunes for Windows... Soon...

According to this post iTunes for Windows will be out next Thursday, Oct. 16th. This will be very interesting to see, Windows Media Player doesn't come close to the ease of use of iTunes. This will act as a client for the 90% or so of the population that uses Windows to access the iTunes Music Store, which should see sales shoot through the roof. (via Slashdot)

Masing for Congress?

I'm not ready to throw my massive political machine behind him yet, but Hans Masing is running for Congress.

There are several things that I like about him, he's an underdog and so I immediately have sympathy. He supports small business, his technology platform is close to mine (he supports the repeal of the DMCA and is anti-censorship) and he's a programmer (Java and Perl from what I could find elsewhere on the web).

There's also some problems I have with him. He's an independent and voting for him is risky until we institute an alternative voting system like Instant Runoff Voting or Condorcet. Also he supports the repeal of clickthrough agreements, especially their liability limitations.

While I do detest the clauses of End User License Agreements on software, their repeal would also negate the General Public License. His platform would destroy most of the open source software Hans celebrates. I think a better approach would be to limit the clauses, such as restricting benchmarks and resale.

Also, ever since Howard Dean made his name blogging every candidate has one. Hans, while he gets points for blogging, loses some of those points for not blogging well. There are no permalinks and he talks about his campaign (good!) but not about current events. Why would such a technologically forward candidate not have something to say about the RIAA subpoenas? Luckily he has 14 months to change this.

Also, a lot of people think that Dean's big thing was to start a blog and immediately people flocked to him. Not quite, he used tools like Meetup and Upoc to allow his supporters to self organize. He even released a open source package to organize supporters. Blogging is a good start, but in order to see momentum he needs to enable people to connect not only with him but with each other.

The bottom line is that he has a lot of things in his platform that I agree with, and if he can convince me that he knows how to get things done in Washington and isn't just a starry eyed idealist like me he'll have my vote.

Moveable Type Comment Icons

Greg at Life On Mars is hacking together icons for Moveable Type comments (via 0xDECAFBAD). The magic happens when a comment is posted with a URL for the author, the script goes to the author's site and looks for its RSS feed. If the RSS feed has an image tag, that image is used. Yikes that's cool.

He's planning on supporting FOAF which I think is a much more elegant solution for this. A persons' FOAF file (or files) mediates their online persona for them, a buddy icon being part of that. I think RSS images should be used for TrackBacks, but FOAF images for comments. My thinking is this: comments and FOAF are related to people while TrackBacks and RSS are related to sites.

I actually want to see this taken one step further, where people with FOAF files are autodetected and linked as user profiles. TypePad already generates FOAF files and LiveJournal's working on it, it would be great to see FOAF more integrated with the web.

OS X.III

According to Upoc's AppleNews group OS X 10.2 10.3 (AKA Panther) has just gone Gold, and should be out in a month. Cool.

Localfeeds

Localfeeds has a Detroit feed set up which you should check out. It looks for weblogs in GeoURL and aggregates their RSS feeds. They also export RSS feeds, so you can watch one feed and see all the updates from your meatspace neighbors.

[Update 2003-10-09] There's now an Ann Arbor Localfeeds page, albeit with a less snazzy URL than the Detroit one.

Attention

There is a new get your war on. That is all. New in the sense that the very latest one is still over a week old, but still. Newish.

$50 DirecTiVo

CircuitCity is offering 35 hour DirecTiVos for $99 with a $50 mail-in rebate. If you have DirecTV I can't understand why you wouldn't pick this up. I more or less forced Bri to buy one and I think he and his wife are 110% satisfied with theirs.

If you don't know what a TiVo is, I don't know how to explain it without making it seem like a VCR on steroids, but it literally changes the way you watch TV. For $50 you can go out to CircuitCity, pick it up and try it for 30 days, and I guarantee that you won't return it. (via PVRblog)