Die, spammers, DIE!!!

Posted on 2006-01-27 by Jim Vanderveen

Over the last few days, I’ve noticed a few spam comments slipping by SpamKarma2. At least a few of the bastards seem to have figured out a way around the javascript payload test. These have all been direct comments, not trackbacks or pingbacks. SK2 still works pretty well, as it’s catching about 20+ spams for each one it allows through, so I’m thinking about supplementing SK2 with WP-Gatekeeper.

I had some trouble with Gatekeeper earlier, but I think it was primarily due to the fact that I have multiple themes on my blog. (I also saw a note in the Gatekeeper changelog about a bug that blocked trackbacks and/or pingbacks in the version I was using.) I’ve upgraded Gatekeeper to RC4, and I’m going to disable the theme switcher (and my other themes). Then I’ve got to hard-code a call to Gatekeeper’s challenge routine in my comment form(s).

Sounds like a job for this weekend, since it’ll probably take a few hours to get all this done. God, I hope that You have a special circle of Hell set aside for spammers!

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Bike Talk Radio/podcast off the air

Posted on 2006-01-26 by Jim Vanderveen

One of, if not the oldest bike-related podcasts, Bike Talk Radio, broadcast its final show yesterday. 🙁

Scott Alumbaugh, the producer/host/engineer/webmaster for the show, wasn’t satisfied with the quality of recent shows and wasn’t able to find somebody to help him prepare the weekly 30-minute show. I know that a half-hour show takes several hours to put together, and having to do it on a schedule while holding down a job and raising a family would be exceedingly difficult.

I only recently found out about this show, and I was very interested in getting together with Scott to do some episodes covering the Sacramento bicycling scene. I’m guessing that Scott would still be willing to work on bike-related podcasts, if he didn’t have to do all the work himself and especially if it wasn’t on a weekly schedule. I’d be more interested in doing an occasional podcast, i.e. whenever I had something worthwhile, instead of being driven by a weekly broadcast deadline. Another benefit of this approach would be a more flexible format–if a show takes 35 minutes, or only 25 minutes, that’d be okay for a podcast.

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Rating podcasts while listening to iPod

Posted on 2006-01-25 by Jim Vanderveen

I love the integrated podcatcher in iTunes, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to rate podcast episodes while listening to them on my iPod. No matter what I do, clicking the select button 2-3 times brings up the show description instead of the rating screen. I can’t figure out a way to edit or erase the show description from iTunes. I even tried writing an AppleScript to erase the description, which compiles and runs, but doesn’t seem to work. I’m beginning to think that maybe Apple rushed podcatching into iTunes a little too quickly. To test my hypothesis, I’m now trying out iPodder. (Whoops, it’s just been renamed Juice.) It has some drawbacks, but at least I can access the rating screen while listening to a podcast on my iPod now!

There are some great features of the iTunes podcatcher that iPodder is missing:

  • Bookmarking–Everything I’ve downloaded so far hasn’t been bookmarkable. This is pretty easy to correct, just set “Remember playback position” setting under track options in iTunes. I’d prefer to have iPodder do this automatically, or at the very least have an AppleScript command for this.
  • Ignoring podcasts when shuffling–Another easy fix, just set “Skip when shuffling” under track options. Again, it’d be ideal if iPodder handled this, or an AppleScript.
  • Auto-stopping at end of show. Sometimes I find this a helpful feature, and sometimes I think it’s a bug. Podcasts that I download via the iTunes podcatcher will auto-stop at the end of the episode. This is handy because it prevents the next episode from automatically being played (and thereby having its status changed from “unplayed” to “played”, i.e. ready for deletion). I’m not too concerned about this yet, since I’m manually deleting podcasts anyway, but this is something I would like to be able to control. I just don’t know what setting handles this.

I’ve written a little AppleScript to take care of the bookmarkable and shufflable settings, but it’s not ready for release yet. If somebody really wants a copy of the current incarnation, leave a comment here and be sure to put your email address on the comment form. If you’re worried about spam, diddle your domain name (e.g. “spam_trap”) and leave your real domain name in the comment text.

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Sacramento Bicycle, Pedestrian & Trails Master Plan

Posted on 2006-01-23 by Jim Vanderveen

I was listening to a Bike Talk podcast (show #5, “Sacramento Area Bicycle Advocates”), and they mentioned SACOG’s Regional Bicycle, Pedestrian, and Trails Master Plan. It took me a bit of searching to find this, so I thought I would post the link. It’s part of their Bike Information and Planning page.

In looking at the SACOG page, I can see why this didn’t turn up as a top search result–the document titles are all graphic images instead of text. LAAAME! Get a clue, SACOG! If you have a document about “Foo”, make sure that “Foo” appears prominently where search engines are going to look for it — HTML title, keyword, head elements, or at the very least as text in the first paragraph of the page! Search engines don’t “read” graphics, and alt tags are more likely to be used in image searches.

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What is iTunes “Grouping” column for?

Posted on 2006-01-22 by Jim Vanderveen

Ever since I first started using iTunes, I have been trying to figure out what the “Grouping” column was for. I rarely, if ever, saw any data in this column after importing CD’s, and there was no information on this column in iTunes’ help. I finally found this:

grouping (Unicode text) : the grouping (piece) of the track. Generally used to denote movements within a classical work.

in the AppleScript dictionary for iTunes.

Finding this in such an odd spot got me wondering where else I might find documentation for the iTunes Library. Since iTunes pulls CD information from Gracenote (formerlly CDDB), I looked around there. I found lots of useful information on their “Guidelines for submissions” page, such as:

  • “Part of a compilation” checkbox (iTunes) is used to indicate that tracks on this disc are by different artists. Turn on the “Part of a compilation” checkbox for all tracks on this CD, and enter the Artist for each track.
  • Speaking of the Artist column, what do I put in this column for classical music–composer or performer? See the “Artist Name (classical)” section of Guidelines for submissions.
  • Multi-disc releases (“box sets”) should have the disc number added to the end of the Album title, e.g. “The Wall (Disc 1)” for the first disc of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” album. Be sure to enter it exactly as: “«space»(Disc «digit»)”. (I’ve always stripped this off in iTunes because it makes multi-disc albums difficult to work with, but it now appears to be a bug in iTunes.)
  • There is quite a long section on First Name versus Last Name of artists, but I don’t think this applies to iTunes. (Too bad, because it looks like it would help quite a bit!)

There’s some very helpful explanations on the Guidelines for submissions page, and I really wish iTunes had a link to it!

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Subversion/Finder integration on Mac OSX

Posted on 2006-01-21 by Jim Vanderveen

I found a lead on why Subversion may not be working with Finder in Mac OSX (Tiger, version 10.4.4) on the System Preferences... tool. There is now an “SCPlugin” item on System Preferences. Open this up and you’ll find a checkbox labeled Enable Finder Integration (which was unchecked on my system). I checked this button, but there was no visible change on any of my Subversion-controlled files. I relaunched Finder, but still no indication of Subversion status on my files. It may be that I need to specify the Subversion Executable on the SCPlugin preferences, but there is no way for me to type in the path–there is only an Open button which launches a Finder-style widget, and I can’t figure out how to navigate to /usr/local with it.

Wait, maybe it is working, sort of… I just right-clicked on a Subversion-controlled file and found the “Subversion” context menu, but none of the operations seem to be doing anything. I’ll have to see if I can figure out how to type in an absolute path in Finder for the svn executable.

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Finished reading Great Expectations

Posted on 2006-01-20 by Jim Vanderveen

I finally finished reading one of Charles Dickens’ masterpieces, Great Expectations. I loved Volume 1 (Pip’s childhood) — Dickens’ humor is prevalent, and Pip is a lovable character. I have to admit, I got bogged down in Volume 2. The pace felt slow to me, and I hated the progression of Pip’s character. Volume 3 was an excellent finish though! Lots of threads (which I didn’t even realize had been left dangling) were all collected together, and Pip was redeemed.

This is a great book, although I thought Our Mutual Friend was even better. If you haven’t read either of these books, they’re almost surely available from your local library. I know the Sacramento Library has copies of both books. Check them out and enjoy!

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This is SO bad…

Posted on 2006-01-19 by Jim Vanderveen

If large-breasted women work at Hooters, where do one-legged women work?
(Click on “more…” for the punchline.)
Continue reading →

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CJD on Google Earth

Posted on 2006-01-14 by Jim Vanderveen

Chris Davis has a tantalizing post about working with Google Earth. It got me thinking about how one might bolt geotags onto Google Earth…

I still haven’t gotten around to setting up HeadMeta for geotagging posts, but CJD’s article(s) may be the kick in the butt that I seem to require to get this done.

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#&*$%@! iPod update

Posted on 2006-01-13 by Jim Vanderveen

I just applied iPod Updater 2006-01-10 on my iPod, and now it’s telling my that I have to use the plug-in charger (vs my USB port) before it will function. WTF?!? This thing was almost fully charged before I updated it, and now I can’t use it at work or on my ride home because I don’t normally carry around the wall charger. GRRR!

My iPod is a 20 GiB color-display model. There is no mention on Apple’s iPod Updater page about needing the wall-wart charger for this update.

😡

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