Well, it finally happened–SpamKarma2 finally let a piece of spam slip into my comments. I installed SK2 about 4.5 months ago, and it’s caught 268 spams out of 269 attempts (99.63% accuracy). It hasn’t yet mischaracterized a “real” comment as spam.
The comment which finally got through had a very short, grammatically correct phrase. It had a valid javascript payload, and the encrypted payload was valid. The spam had an author URL which pointed to a domain that was for sale.
Is Rep. Dan Lungren tainted by the Abramoff scandal? Well, he’s taken $10,000 in bribescampaign contributions from DeLay’s ARMPAC, an organization for which Jack Abramoff was one of the chief fundraisers.
If I can dig up some other sources for these claims, I’ll be asking Congressman Lungren to return the money or donate it to charity.
Has anybody else noticed a sudden increase in the rate of failures of “obsolete” PowerBooks?
Thanks for the laugh, Jason!
I took another geek test today. (Thanks for the link, Punk!) I couldn’t score very many points on the television-related questions, because I haven’t watched TV for several years, and before that I only watched a few shows on PBS. I was a little let down when I scored under 45% (major geek). But then my wife took the test and scored 22.68% (geek), so I got to go back and change the answer to “Did you marry a geek?” This was enough (along with some other things I mis-marked) to push my score up to 46.15385% or “super geek”–woo hoo! My older daughter also took the test and scored 36.09467% (major geek). I’m so proud! My baby’s all grown up, sniff sniff. I think I should get bonus points for having “major geek” offspring!
One of the last questions on the test is, “I can think of other things that should get me points on this test”. Well, of course!
Well, I finally got around to trying out Delicious Library. In a nutshell, it rocks!
I downloaded the demo and tried that first. I didn’t have an iSight camera, so I had to type in ISBN’s and UPC’s by hand. This wasn’t much fun for the few books I tried, but at least information (title, author, publisher, etc.) was returned. Hand-entry for videos sucked–out of 4 relatively recent DVD’s I tried, not one had any information returned. I tried the ISBN, UPC, and any other human-readable text printed in barcode blocks, but I couldn’t get DL to successfully look up any of these DVD’s. I only had two CD’s in the house, one of which was by a local artist. The lookup for the mainstream CD went smooth, but Mike Comfort’s CD had to be hand-entered.
Typing in UPC’s and ISBN’s and such isn’t something I’m willing to do for all my CD’s, videos, and books, so I went ahead and picked up an iSight to see how that worked with the DL demo. ($150, ouch! But I figured I could try to return it if it didn’t work for DL.) After hooking up the iSight I was able to fill up the DL demo shelf (25-item limit) in just a few minutes. It worked great, so I went ahead and bought a license for the full Delicious Library. After forking out $150 for the iSight, spending $40 on DL was a bargain!
With the iSight, my “lookup success” was:
Most of our books, videos, and CD’s are in storage while we remodel our house, so I don’t have a huge sample.
This is a great application, when combined with an iSight. I’m looking forward to exploring it further. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’d still like to see support for boardgames added to this package. (I don’t own any video games, but I have over 100 boardgames that I would like to catalog.)
Update 2006-01-10 19:49:07 According to the DL Help, any FireWire digital video camera will work. I’d guess that there are some much cheaper alternatives to the iSight.
I also scanned the rest of our library at work this morning, 145 books total. Of these, 14 had no barcode (or it was covered by a bookstore sticker), so I had to type in the ISBN’s. Only one book with a visible barcode failed lookup, a 10-year-old book on HTML.
Some time ago I was waiting in line at the DMV, wishing that I had remembered to bring a book with me, when I realized that I always carried my PDA–why not just look for some free e-texts and slurp a few of them into my Handspring? This way I could always have a few books with me, without having to carry paperbacks in my back pockets.
My first stop was Project Gutenburg. They have a huge collection, but it’s limited to works whose copyright has expired. I wanted to read Dickens’ Great Expectations, so this was a worthwhile site. They have many other classics, and even some modern works whose authors have granted PG the rights to distribute their books. But the genre I’m most interested in reading for pleasure is science fiction, particularly contemporary SF, and there is a dearth of that on PG.
A web search for “free science fiction etext” brought me to the Baen Free Library, a site where authors give away some or all of their backlist in hopes of garnering readers’ interest (and money) for their in-print work. It’s also a demonstration against misguided attempts to combat online piracy by ever-tighter restrictions:
Any cure which relies on tighter regulation of the market — especially the kind of extreme measures being advocated by some people — is far worse than the disease. As a widespread phenomenon rather than a nuisance, piracy occurs when artificial restrictions in the market jack up prices beyond what people think are reasonable. The “regulation-enforcement-more regulation” strategy is a bottomless pit which continually recreates (on a larger scale) the problem it supposedly solves. And that commercial effect is often compounded by the more general damage done to social and political freedom.
— from Introducing the Baen Free Library
Well, this was exactly what I was looking for, and the fact that I support the philosophy behind the site is a special bonus. I checked out a few titles and finally decided 1632 sounded interesting enough to download. I liked the story so much that I have now purchased hardcopies of all the books set in that universe. In fact, I’ve discovered about a half-dozen authors via the BFL, and several feet of my bookshelf are occupied by books whose authors “gave away” their work on the BFL, further vindicating the spirit of the project.
The BFL site is a great idea, but it could use a few technical improvements. It employs frames in such a way as to make it difficult to link into the site; for example, I can link to author Eric Flint’s page in the BFL, but the navigation frame will be missing. Another helpful thing the site could provide would be an RSS feed for new content. This would allow book junkiesavid readers to use their news aggregators to find out about newly available BFL “books” automatically.
If you’re looking for free etexts, both of these sites are well worth perusing.
I was finally going through Chris J. Davis’ article, SVN on MacOS X. I downloaded the Subversion package to my Mac and it works fine via the command line, but I ran into trouble with scplugin, (the tool which bolts SVN on to the Finder.)
The first (easy) problem was that the download link for the scplugin binary is out-of-date. It’s now available here, on the Documents & files page.
The second problem: SCPlugin doesn’t seem to work. I’ve restarted the Finder a few times, but I can’t find a Subversion context menu anywhere. This is a bummer, but I can work from the terminal app for a while I guess. I may even have a chance to fiddle with this some more over the weekend.
In case anybody wants to know, I’m running MacOS X 10.4.3 on a 17″ PowerBook G4, svn version 1.3.0 and SCPlugin revision 269.
I installed the Web Developer extension in my web browser this evening. If you do any web development work, or even just browse the web, you really need to check out this tool’s features. It works with Firefox, Flock, and Mozilla web browsers.
Some of the features/uses that I’m stoked about:
I could go on and on. It seems like there are about 100 menu items in this package, and almost every one of them looks immediately useful to me!
I’m using Firefox 1.5 on Mac OSX 10.4, and I ran into a little trouble installing the software. When I first tried to download/install the tool I got the following error:
Software installation is currently disabled. Click Edit Options… to enable it and try again.
across the top of the page. The “Edit Options…” button probably opens the correct dialog/tab under Windows, but the OSX version of Firefox doesn’t seem to have an “Enable software installation” button. After reading Firefox help and searching the web, I finally read the Troubleshooting section of the installation instructions where it tells you how to enable software installation. (Duh!)
Lego announced new Mindstorms products yesterday, just after Christmas? I guess that they knew they weren’t going to be ready for market in time for this Christmas, so they delayed the announcement until after the shopping (and return/exchange) season was over.
Update 2006-01-05 20:51:58 There is a Flash “commercial” for the product which indicates it will be available in fall 2006, just in time for next Christmas, (hopefully!)
This is the final week of the Wikipedia fundraiser, and they’re currently only a bit over half-way to their goal. This is a great undertaking, truly a boon for people all over the world, so please shower a bit of largesse on the project. If you’re undecided about donating, check out this personal appeal from Jimmy Wales. And if you’d rather get something concrete in return for your donation, you can always buy some Wikipedia merchandise at CafePress.