Hurray. Some silly, wonderful folk made a Blackbox for Windows called bblean. Good on you I say. Good on you indeed.

This kind of thing makes me laugh. There are people who will buy this for usefulness I'm sure.

Gmail has started marking some of the official internal spam as normal spam. It's very clever that Google's computers have a better understanding of what humans care about reading than many humans do.

A few days ago I started using Yahoo as my Firefox quick search instead of Google. I am happier with it and am going to keep it. I've never used Yahoo for search, even back when it was big. Now I reckon it is better though.

My new computer came today. It is well sweet. 3GB RAM and 160GB SATA disk. DVD burner. And only $320. A nice surprise was that it's a dual-core Pentium. I had expected that I'd have to scrape by on a single core. I now just have to think of something neat to do with all those cores. Perhaps I'll get one to do nothing but calculate prime numbers while merrily playing some high-intensity (but high FPS) Tetris on the other.

I would like to congratulate mum for getting her own ADSL internet after many years of sharing. I would also like to congratulate her on having a son so clever that he was able to set it up for her.

Amazon SimpleDB seems to mostly complete Amazon's nifty little setup. True to their word, it is very simple. But also rather handy. It's billed by the exact amount of machine utilisation and data transfer and lets you work out how much each transaction costs. You can imagine web services which are free up to some usage threshold after which you start paying for what you use plus 10%.

My 40gb iPod arrived today. I was expecting it to be dumped in box and probably to have scratches and stuff on it. "Refurbished" makes it sound second-rate. I wasn't worried though, because for $200 less I was happy to get a second-rate iPod.

But it is beautiful. It has everything you would need. It was all beautifully packaged. Each and every component has several layers of specially designed plastic wrapper. And the iPod itself is lovely. So shiny and sturdy.

I'm putting music onto it now. My whole music collection will fill up about a third of it. But even that is going to take many hours to move on my poor old USB 1 computer.

Update: iPods are truly wonderful devices.

Update 2: iTunes 6 is slow and crap with my iPod. iTunes 7 is better.

I made a gentle alarm with Dell BIOS timed start, TweakUI autologin, Windows Scheduler, iTunes and some nifty COM scripting. It starts playing music really quietly, and slowly gets louder.

/* iTunesAlarm.js / Version 2 */

var WshShell        = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell");
var iTunesApp       = WScript.CreateObject("iTunes.Application");
var mainLibrary     = iTunesApp.LibraryPlaylist;
var mainLibrarySource   = iTunesApp.LibrarySource;
var alertTimeout    = 5;  // seconds
var alarmFadePeriod = 60; // minutes
var alarmClosePeriod    = 60; // minutes

// Turn it right down
iTunesApp.SoundVolume = 0;

// Play the "Alarm" playlist
mainLibrarySource.Playlists.itemByName("Alarm").PlayFirstTrack();


// Slowly fade in over alarmFadePeriod seconds
for (i = 1; i < = alarmFadePeriod; i++) {
    iTunesApp.SoundVolume = i * 100/alarmFadePeriod;
    if(WshShell.PopUp("Do you want to cancel the alarm?", alertTimeout, "iTunes Alarm", 32+4)==6) {
        WScript.Quit(0);
    }

    WScript.Sleep(1000*(60-alertTimeout));  // Quarter-minutely (25 mins)
}


for(i = 1; i <= alarmClosePeriod; i++) {
    if(WshShell.PopUp("iTunes will stop and Windows will hibernate in " + (alarmClosePeriod+1-i) + " minutes. Let iTunes continue playing?", 60, "iTunes 

Alarm", 32+0)==1) {
        WScript.Quit(0);
        break;
    }
}

iTunesApp.Stop();
WshShell.SendKeys("^{ESC}uh{ENTER}"); // Hibernate

I created a better version instead of doing my econometrics homework. This one has notifications which make it a bit more good. It also turns iTunes off (and hibernates) unless I tell it not to, for those days when I stay at mum's and forget to turn off the alarm. I am teh l33t h4x0r.

Update: [2007-08-19] I changed it so that the fade in lasts longer, and it sets the iTunesApp.SoundVolume to 0 before it starts play. Playing computer was sufficiently sleepy this morning that it was playing at full volume for a few seconds before it got to the loop where it reduces the volume. I got a bit of an abrupt wake up.

The old version is over the fold. (more...)

In my considered opinion and have examining the Adobe website for a good 10 minutes, I declar that Adobe Flex 2 is crap. Just like most Flash, it's trying to solve a non-problem, and solving it poorly. The open-source XMLiness of it is nice, but that doesn't make the whole thing any more necessary. Of course, I reserve the right to decide that it's actually brilliant in the future.

I'm now the owner of a Wikileaks domain. Let's hope doing that wasn't a bad idea. In the spirit of being transparent, let's also hope that putting my real name on everything was not as dumb as it feels.

I am loving the new drive mapping from Jungle Disk. With Amazon S3 I've finally been able to create a properly networked mapped drive. Now I just save everything on the J drive, and my stuff is always there whichever computer I'm on (except for stupid uni work computer because I can't install Jungle Disk). It's pretty sweet. I'd left Textpad open on mum's computer with all my R code in it. When I turned the computer on this morning Textpad told me that my files had been updated and asked me if I wanted to reload them. I did, and all my changes from yesterday and the day before that I'd made in Newtown showed up.

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Apple's new iPhone is beautiful. As with most of Apple's stuff they've done everything you can really imagine to make it productive. Although what amazes me most isn't the phone, but why no one has done all this stuff before. None of it is difficult or particularly brilliant. It feels like the inevitable outcome of sticking a few smart people in a room for a couple of months. It's almost like every other company in the world is frightened of coming up with something new. Like anything that hasn't been done before is dangerous. The industry leaves these gaping functionality holes in their products so that Apple can waltz in and blow them all away with almost no effort at all. I suppose Apple have the size to make risky investments feasible, but virtually all of them pay off. You'd would think that others might have cottoned on by now.

It's a very nice phone though. I'd buy one. And after getting my new Nokia 1110 I'm pretty hard to impress.

I've found an easier way to rewrite Wordpress URLs than attempt to recreate all of the crazy combinations.

url.rewrite-once = ( "^([^.]+)$" => "index.php$1" )

It basically rewrites anything that doesn't have a full-stop in it. So if you use it, make sure all your images and stylesheets have file extensions.

The first time I saw del.icio.us I thought it was kind of lame, and didn't understand why everyone raved about it. But I have since come to love it. It's another one of those simple applications that are immensely pleasing purely because they are done so well. They seem to have got to every idea before you have.

Perhaps Amazon S3 can be used to make thin devices more effective. You have only a 8mb flash for basic bootstrapping, a bigger chunk of RAM and an S3 account. All the configuration and software packages are kept on S3, and get downloaded into memory each time the device starts. It would be faster, simpler, cheaper and more reliable than setting up your own storage network. And I'll surely bet that Amazon will start putting S3 mirrors all over the world, so the latency will start to get pretty low.

I'm thinking about this specifically in reference to my wireless network company.

The IT systems at UNSW are unfathomably bad. They only ever make life more difficult. Devolving of power and decentralising management is bad bad bad. Unless of course you did it well. Which no one ever does it seems.

I'm way impressed by lighttpd. It's very light. And very httpdy. And it's config files rock.

I've just got mailman working with lighttpd and mod_cgi (using mod_rewrite and mod_alias as well). As far as I know, it doesn't work with mod_fcgi (FastCGI).

I had to edit "Mailman.py" to make it listen to my mm.DEFAULT_URL value. I put self.web_page_url = mm_cfg.DEFAULT_URL at the top of CheckValues().

The url.rewrite line redirects "/", "/mailman" and "/mailman/" all to "/mailman/listinfo".

server.modules = ("mod_rewrite", "mod_cgi", "mod_alias", "mod_rewrite")
$HTTP["host"] == "lists.sol1.net" {
   $HTTP["url"] =~ "^/mailman/" {
      cgi.assign = ( "" => "" )
      alias.url = ( "/mailman/" => "/usr/lib/mailman/cgi-bin/" )
   }

   $HTTP["url"] =~ "^/doc/" {
      alias.url = ( "/doc/mailman/" => "/usr/share/doc/mailman/" )
   }
   url.rewrite = ( "^/(mailman(/)?)?$" => "/mailman/listinfo" )
}

footboot.net and fatvegan.com are back up and happy again. Yay.

Update: Well, perhaps not quite back. Perl is still brok.

Update #2: Now it's good for proper.

Since starting university in 2003, I've used a sordid multitude of databases that have attempted to bring together articles from different journals into a useful resource. The vast majority do a terrible job. Even when you are able to find what you're looking for the process is generally painful. UNSW even tried to combine all the databases into one large database, but I've had even worse experience than that.

What I don't understand, is for something so simple, how can so many clever (presumably) people get it wrong? Data storage and search is not that hard. Vast amounts of money must be pouring into these companies. They're all busy competing and reinventing each other's failed ideas.

I've started using Google Scholar. Despite the fact that it doesn't even have most of the articles I want in it, it's far more useable than anything else I've seen. It's so simple. It looks like it's hardly even trying. You search and it tells you if it has it, if it's seen it somewhere or if it's cited by other articles. Even random searches show up a whole lot of freely available research. It's really quite lovely.

Oh my god. Num Sum is so cool. And while they were at it they built a whole MVC framework for Javascript. I don't know how people do it.

This is my first ADSL post. I'm feeling very happy about having ADSL and not silly Unwired. Oh how it made me mad.

I've used some SQL views for my research database. They're pretty damn good. I've even got nested views. So I can dump the file parsing output straight into various tables, and get out a nice data set with no duplicates and the attributes attached to the records. And stuff. It's good.

I'm getting a new phone. My old phone is only a year old and is already borked. And it only fell of the roof of a moving vehicle once! Don't make 'em like they used to.

It is a Motorola. I've heard they have bad user interfaces. I figure they can't be much worse than the current Nokias.

Update: It seems I was wrong. The user interface can be much worse. Just appalling.

I started learning Ruby the other day. I'm scripting one of the things for my uni project in it. It's so easy to learn. And exceptions are way tasty.

Everyone raves about Rails, but I'm a much bigger fan of Ruby than of Rails. Rails strikes me as very bloated and restrictive. Maybe I'll still become a convert though.

I saw one of the guys in the office using ratpoison the other day, and I thought I'd try it because my laptop doesn't have much oompf. Now I really like it just because it's cool. You can set up all these key bindings to do whatever you want. You'd save so much time if you were doing the same sorts of things regularly.

It even has a key-driven little menu dooby, if you can't remember the keys for things. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it's really nifty.

Thanks to Alistapart and their swanky two-column fluid CSS layout tutorial, Fatvegan is now table-free. It's not any faster, or better in any way really. In fact, the divs now go about 6 levels deep, which sucks. And I had to use negative margins, which is rather dodgy and not in spirit of stylesheets. I only got rid of my tables to be more "pure". They worked fine. So I've swapped one disatisfying solution for another. But at least I'm using the same disatisfying solution as all the markup snobs, so they'll no longer mock me behind my back - you know who you are. I know you're out there... mocking me quietly. With your secret trackback networks and your CSS 4 compatible layout.

I despise you, and yet I want to be one of you. Oh cruel, unflinching web standards; how can we be one when you divide us so pitilessly?

It got working good at uni the wireless on Ubuntu. Good stuff Ubuntu. And Debian. And even UNSW. When the software is supported by OS community it just works. Stupid Cisco.

I got a lovely wireless PCMCIA card for my laptop so I can use the wireless internet at university. It's quite exciting. The card is so nice and small. And you just stick it in, and it works. I'll have to try it on Tom's network next door too.