Software

I’m at the library this morning before I go to my appointment at 10:30 today, checking my email, and making sure that the spammers aren’t goofing up the blog with their crap. I had one ‘comment’ to moderate, which was spam, as usual.

I went to check the stuff that Akismet had protected me, and noticed that Akismet has blocked (a bit past) its 20,000th spam comment on this weblog.

I can remember when I used to have to delete spam manually, and the ungodly amount of false positives that I managed to get with everything else in place. While I’d really rather put something in that would spare this server the trouble of even processing these stupid messages in the first place, I’m grateful for the protection that I get by even using Akismet in the first place.

[tags]Akismet, Automattic, WordPress, Spam Protection[/tags]

(psst. hey. I’m sitting in the public library, running firefox portable off their hard drive. I was absolutely sick of IE, and IE doesn’t perform so well with the sites I needed to visit. tomorrow, I’ll remember to bring my USB stick and run portable firefox off that, so I can also work on blending it into their default environment. they’re not even running IE7 on these boxes, so IE lacks tabs, which I really, really think are necessary in a broadband environment. there’s so much to do, that trying to keep track of several open windows, especially with alt-tab disabled, becomes a true nuisance. I guess that tomorrow, I’ll set the stick up with portable firefox properly, and give it an IE skin to help it blend in when I run it. heh heh heh. :D)

A short while ago, I posted about [tag]Giveaway of the Day[/tag], a site that gives away an application on each day of the week.

I was very gung-ho about it, and even had their feeds on my sidebar to show visitors the goods.

I removed their feeds a while back, when their site’s outage was taking out my blog (bad plugin design, I guess), and I was considering whether I would place their feed back here. The reason I was considering this, instead of automatically doing it is, there hasn’t been much of a variety in software submitted, and very little was making me say “wow!” on their releases.

On the software side, a lot of the apps they were releasing had freeware, or open source alternatives that I use on a normal basis. For example, today’s giveaway (Premium Booster) is stuff that I can duplicate with Piriform’s CCleaner, which is free (though that’d be something worth donating a little cash to).
Some of the software was plainly useless (Elprime Clock Pro comes to mind — Windows has a system tray that has a clock in it. Most alternative shells have at least one good analog clock widget, for those who absolutely need one), and to see that the software has a price tag is somewhat disturbing.

On the games side, unfortunately, the majority of the released games have either been some variation on matching bubbles (I love puzzle games, and Sky Bubbles Deluxe was happiness. The rest of the games in this same vein were mediocre), shooting bubbles (There has been at least one Bubble Bobble clone, and at least one Puzzle Bobble clone), and almost no engrossing RPGs to draw in the geekier crowds.
While it’s good for the children (They get something fun to play nearly every day, and can rarely tell the difference in games), it’s not so good for the adults who still play games.

Watching the commentary on each piece of software there is getting a little annoying, though. It’s always a “This sucks! I can do this for free!”,without any sort of meat to the comment.

Right now, it is my hope that Giveaway of the Day starts to grow again, and gets titles that are worth their weight in the price asked for them normally. The lack of variety in applications is making the site stale, and unappealing enough to warrant me not talking about it frequently.

Things I’d love to see for free, even for a day:
Khaled Mardam-Bey’s [tag]mIRC[/tag]
RitLabs’ [tag]TheBat![/tag]

Both are software that I’d love to see appear on the list.
I’d also welcome similar applications, but the point is, it’s nice to offer software that people become dependent on. It’s easier to hook the willing into buying the software willingly for replacement purposes.

Winter is near its end, and many people have received computers as gifts for the winter holiday season.

Some of them may be complete novices to computing and may not understand the importance of, or not even know the first thing about backing up important files and folders on their computer. Others may be of the “Ah, I’ll do it later…” group, constantly putting off backing up important content. I know the latter group quite well, as I used to be one of those types.

Some of these users might not even know that there are Free Online Backup Services available to them, such as the one offered by IDrive.com.

IDrive is a free, two gigabyte online storage solution that is able to do automated backups, taking most of the work out of your hands. Simply define folders to the application for safekeeping, and let the program do the rest.

Need to restore content? Simply launch the application, and select what you need restored.

It removes the excuse of “Well, I’ll do it later…” from your hands, and is easy enough to teach anyone how to do.
(The best part is, there’s no sorting through stacks of DVDs to find the recent backup of pictures of your family to share. :))

[tags]Data Backup, Online Data Storage, Internet File Storage, IDrive, Internet Drive, Automated Backup[/tags]

I’d like to preface this entry with a short note to Ryan Boren:
It’s not you or your fault, Ryan. You just happen to have posted the relevant entry to my rant in your blog, and the comment submission form there has some kind of unfounded hatred for me.

I’m logging in earlier this evening to approve a comment, and double-check a few settings that I wanted to change in WordPress, and on my dashboard, I see “In the Trunk“, coming from boren.nu.

Of course, being the kind of person who usually grabs WordPress from Subversion instead of the release tarballs, I go to have a look.

Before I continue, I should mention:

• I’ve had to use a ‘dirty hack’ (read: an outright file replacement of a core file that is guaranteed to be overwritten almost EVERY TIME I upgrade WordPress) to get Atom 1.0 support for Eau Salée Lunaire.
• I’ve been AdBlocking this new AutoSave script that WordPress uses while writing my entries. I don’t really like it, and would rather be able to just flip a switch to kill it.
• I like, and I dislike all the AJAXy features being added in to WordPress. While it’s nice to be able to reorganize the bar to the right of my entry box, to get things put in the sequence I like them (cats on the top and expanded, post slug underneath and expanded, post status following that, with the rest of the stuff folded, because I almost never use these and wouldn’t object to hiding at least the post timestamp when composing a new entry), and it’s nice to be able to reorganize the Sidebar widgets in a convenient way… There is still room for things to be desired.

I go to read this list, and find myself ticking off on my fingers every thing that I’m thinking about the new trunk changes:
* TinyMCE 2.0.9
– I’ll switch that off in a heartbeat in my profile. Raw XHTML or bust.

* Prototype 1.5.0
* script.aculo.us 1.7.0
* jQuery 1.1.1
– Lovely shiny AJAXy things. Will they make WordPress work faster? I’m living in a cloud of doubt, but we’ll hope.

* WP XML-RPC API (WP-specific API for working with pages, authors, and categories)
– I’m hoping to see an explanation of this, since I’m not entirely sure what this happens to be.

* Atom 1.0 Feeds
– IT’S ABOUT DAMN TIME! (I actually said this one out loud. Very loud.)

* Atom Publishing Protocol support
– Won’t affect me adversely. I don’t have any clients that I use for this, and I doubt I’ll even find a client worth my time to use for it, either.

* Better MySQL UTF-8 support
– Yay!

* User cache streamlining
* Improved options caching
– Caching sounds good, especially when it works.

* Plugin sandboxing
– “O RLY?” I’d love something like that. YEARS AGO. There are plenty of broken plugins out there that won’t work for everyone. One might have a hidden PHP5 dependency. Another might require a blood sacrifice gained from a smashed coffee cup to the forehead.

What bothered the hell out of me on this whole list is, there’re two things that should have been implemented no later than WordPress 2.0, and one that should have followed right up or been on the list for 2.0, and yet these things won’t hit the table until WordPress 2.2.

Atom 1.0 should have been a major priority for WordPress, if they are such a major blogging/cms platform. After all, just how long ago did they deprecate Atom 0.3? (Here’s a hint: Mid-September 2006 = 1 year.)
It’s bad form, and a bold lie to claim that “WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability” (quote taken directly from wordpress.org homepage) when it takes SEVENTEEN MONTHS to get Atom 1.0 FINALLY into svn trunk!
I can understand a month, to give them time to solidify any other changes they might want to offer, but seventeen?
How much longer do the regular end users have to wait to even get this particular development!?

While we’re AJAXing up the place, it’d be nice to have a built-in mouse-over menu for all the stuff at the top, rather than relying on userland fixes (plugins) for this.

For users who have numerous plugins installed that offer options, or a small number of long-named plugins (Google Analytics, CC Content License being a pair of long-named ‘offenders’), clicking on “Options” and waiting for it to show that list of plugins is a bit slow, and not so friendly on the screen real estate. My monitor is 1280 x 960 pixels. I run with my fonts slightly larger to help my eyes, since I read text on screen all day. The result is, with the number of plugins I have, on top of the general Options that come with WordPress, the options bar actually wraps over to two lines. Aesthetically, it does not make any sense.

With all the nifty slide-a-block, fold-a-block AJAX that’s been thrown into WordPress, one would hope that they would actually add something that can prove itself to be genuinely useful, and add a toggle switch for those who could care less.
As much as I like being able to reorganize the bar of crap to the right of my post here in the WP Admin center, I do this perhaps once every few months! The order of these blocks could have been set on the options page, allowing me to set it and forget it, going on with my day to day life.
This is the kind of stuff that makes me miss the old admin interface — the one without alll of this browser-based detergent.

I have the distinct feeling that I will be adding to this in the future, once I feel like ranting on what else in WordPress is making me hate it.

Something to think about when you’re feeling homicidal:

1. Everything around you is a weapon. Even that glass of water.
2. Plan ahead to dispose of the corpses.
3. Have a plausible, concrete alibi to work with.
4. Don’t play Unreal Tournament or similar games if you’re bad at them, when you get these urges. They are likely to enrage you further.

If you can’t plan for numbers two or three, then don’t go on a homicidal killing spree.

Something to think about when you’re sharing a network with the family:

• Having access to their computer, and especially their [tag]HOSTS file[/tag] is EXTREMELY vital if you’re the network’s controller.
• Instantly add lads.[tag]myspace[/tag].com to a HOSTS file or to the router’s blocked list. HOSTS file is preferred, since it doesn’t seem obvious to those who are not computer savvy. This has the benefit of blocking the music that plays on MySpace, forcing the family to actually learn about other websites besides MySpace!
• Install every safe anti-spyware and anti-virus measure (eg: [tag]Spybot S&D[/tag] run in Advanced mode to add its custom HOSTS file definitions as well as its IE sanitizer, [tag]SpywareBlaster[/tag] to further innoculate the system, [tag]Avast! Antivirus[/tag] as one free option that is compatible with the newly released [tag]Windows Vista[/tag]) that you can before you allow them to touch the computer. It saves you from having to perform maintenance every four days on the computer.
• Consider a router with a bandwidth throttle. Whenever they manage to annoy you on your network, throttle them down to the speeds a dialup user gets. Classic example of disturbance is singing off-key while on the internet, watching music videos from sites you didn’t add to the HOSTS file.

For once, I’m pretty cranky, and it can’t be helped.

Well, I was going to log in and blog a disturbing little animation, when I noticed on the dashboard that WordPress 2.1 is finally available to the rest of you.

I’ve been running it from Subversion for quite a while, because I like to live dangerously on the edge, and things like that.

So, I chose to jump on the WP2.1 banner and point it out instead. ;P