Monday, February 28th, 2005
what’s in your bag? flickr pool
I’ve always been a huge fan of gizmodo’s “what’s in your gadget bag, …?”-series (e.g. with Xeni Jardin) but haven’t seen a new one in a while, so i guess they dropped the series.
Recently i found relief for my bag voyeurism via flickr’s what’s in your bag? photo pool. People posting photos of the contents of their bags, sometimes with annotations (gotta love flickr’s feature-set). Grab the feed here.
Sunday, February 27th, 2005
Newcomers to watch
Two interesting new sites surfaced last week. First, odeo which aspires to become a one-stop-shop for all things podcasting. Or something. Read the odeo blog for the inside scoop, an introduction by one of its founding fathers Evan Williams and this article at nytimes for more information. Also: “history of odeo” photo essay.
Embarrassing side-note: their “pronounced like rodeo” remark had me stumbling for a second until i realized that they meant “pronounced like rodeo without an r“. Yes, things like this happen a lot to me, i told you i’m slow.
Second, the observer weblog. Looks like the first msm-outlet to fully embrace blogging technologywise. Comments, trackbacks, feeds, heat maps, delicious linklog &c. The so-far casual and approachable writing looks promising too. Ben Hammersley had his hands in this and he’s written about it here and here.
Saturday, February 26th, 2005
A slightly less sucky real player
The first episode of battlestar galactica is officially available at scifi.com for online viewing. In order to piss me off, it’s only available in real media format.
Real has one of the worst track records in customer relations i can think off. Spyware, adware, crippled functionality, crappy and unresponsive interfaces, in-your-face advertising, you name it - their software is known to be user-hostile and many people wouldn’t touch their products with a barge-pole. Interestingly, content providers are regularly suckered into using it as their exclusive distribution format. Why is beyond me, perhaps they hope to keep their bandwidth low by making their offerings less compelling.
With battlestar galactica tempting me to install a real product for the first time in years, i remembered last years meme about a less sucky version of real player provided by the bbc. Even though a real employee called this bs i figured i should try it, at least it’s unlikely that you’ll end up with an even suckier version of real player. You can download the bbc real player here and it’ll redirect you to a page with something like this url: http://forms.real.com/real/player/blackjack.html?platform2=Mac%20OS%20X&product=RealPlayer%2010%20BBC&proc=… Notice the product part in this string? It says “RealPlayer%2010%20BBC”. If you get to this page from somewhere else, you’ll be redirected to something like http://forms.real.com/real/player/blackjack.html?platform2=Mac%20OS%20X&product=RealPlayer%2010&proc=…, wherein the product part says “RealPlayer%2010″. Looks like you can indeed get a different version through the bbc. I downloaded both files and the bbc-dmg is 6.9mb compared to 8mb for the regular version. The app-files in those dmgs are 18.9mb for the bbc version and 23.1mb for the regular version. I don’t know what the differences between these two versions are, but apparently the bbc player is indeed different and i hope it’s some missing adware&spyware that shoves these 4mb off from the regular version. In any case, as little real player as possible on your computer is a good thing in my book.
Thursday, February 24th, 2005
Hilton Hack
I enjoyed seeing paris hilton’s private data dragged into public view for ridicule and amusement (cover your eyes prudes, ungodly female nipples after that link) as much as anyone, but this is just the icing on the cake:
Her “secret question” for lost password retrieval was “what is your favorite pet’s name?”. The correct answer lets anyone reset the password for her account. Best thing ever? According to this story at macdevcenter the hole wasn’t closed as of tuesday, several days after the leak of her private data. Lesson learnt: don’t use password hint systems. I wonder if the intruders where inspired by this recent piece by Bruce Schneier…
And don’t miss out on defamer and gawker with their extensive coverage of this mess. God bless Nick Denton and his smutpeddlers staff.
TxD VCtwo
Much lauded textdrive is offering a second round of textdrive lifetime hosting spots, a steal at $399. Having missed out on the first round i couldn’t resist signing up, and it feels really good. 1gb server space, 20gb traffic, up to 15 domains, support for php, ruby and python with bindings for mysql, postgresql and sqlite, and more. I’ve always found my old hosting accommodation too limiting and this should make for a much nicer playground.
As i wrote on their forums, this feels “a bit like owning, a bit like betting on the future of the company and best of all, web hosting without the hassles of renting”. I’ve only heard good things about textdrive so far and their team includes illustrious names like Dean Allen of textpattern fame, David Heinemeier Hansson of ruby on rails fame and Matthew Mullenweg of wordpress fame. If you’re looking for a good hosting deal, look no further, just go there and sign up.
Note: for now i’ll keep engadgeted.net with my old host until i have time to figure out how to make the move as smooth as possible.
eng v4
Oh yes, the v4 thing… If you visited this site since yesterday, you’ll have noticed that i’ve redesigned. If you’re in an rss reader, do me the favor and click through to the site, poke around, give feedback &c.
To a small degree this is still a work-in-progress, i just couldn’t wait any longer flipping the switch and putting this online. The old blue-greenish thing i had up here was getting a little long in the tooth and bluntly, i couldn’t face it anymore. Glad to have this online, more later.
Sunday, February 20th, 2005
Upgrade Sunday
Just rushed through an upgrade to wordpress 1.5 like a madman in the most uncoordinated way possible. I fully expect things here and there to be broken. If you find any really bad problems, dead links or missing images, please let me know.
Friday, February 18th, 2005
Thank god the DRM isn’t broken
Everyone’s been linking to the napster hack recently, where someone bypassed drm by having winamp put the audio straight into a wav file. You should be able to find the necessary tools for this through the comments on this slashdot post if you’re so inclined.
Following this story in which a napster marketroid is quoted with “the DRM is intact”, Tome Hume brilliantly notes:
Oh, that’s OK then - I mean, the music’s been stolen, but thank god the DRM is still intact!
Just imagine: a bunch of suits joyously circle-jerking in a conference room because their precious drm hasn’t been broken while kids prop up cheap, craptastic microphones in front of their speakers because they stopped giving a damn about sound quality after they’ve been subjugated to lousily recorded, lossy encoded music for years. The glorious digital future we’ll live in.
Thursday, February 17th, 2005
WordPress Heat Map v1.1 update
Update 05/05/14: There’s a new dedicated projects page for the WordPress Heat Map plugin where all further development will proceed. Please refer to this page for information about this plugin in the future.
A change to the function call for get_category_link() messed up my wordpress heat map plugin so that it wasn’t compatible with wordpress v1.5 anymore. Many thanks to Tyler Brekko who pointed this out to me and tracked the cause of the error.
WordPress Heat Map v1.1 should fix any troubles with nightly builds released after feb 14th and it’s been tested to work with WordPress 1.5 “Strayhorn”. This version won’t work with WordPress 1.2 “Mingus” or older nightly builds any longer, so if you’re still using that, please grab a copy of v1.0 of this plugin. Both v1.1 and v1.0 of this plugin are functionally the same.
Please check the projects page for the most recent download links.
New haircut & appreciative words for GMBHaar
After struggling literally for months picking a salon i finally had my hair done today. Having ranted far too much about the difficulty in finding the right place i figured i might as well write a few words about it.
I ended up going to gmbhaar (obnoxious background music on their site, whoever came up with embedded music on websites should burn in hell for all eternity), to be precise their salon on margaretenstraße in 1040. Apparently being the only person insane enough to leave the house for a hairjob after >30cm snow had fallen over night, i didn’t end up waiting even without a reservation. The place is quite nice with its pepped-up retro look and decent music blasting out of a 4g ipod - good taste in music and personal audio equipment goes a long way in my book.
My hairdresser was the nicest and most attentive person to ever have taken care of my hair so far. It felt like she really cared about making this a pleasurable experience, not just getting the job done, with elaborate counseling and paying a lot of attention to details. I’m very satisfied and feedback on the new cut has been wholly positive so far, but judge by yourself, i just uploaded two quickcamphone pics to flickr.
All things considered i can wholeheartedly recommend gmbhaar if you’re on the lookout for a nice & friendly hairstudio in vienna. Plus they’re open from 10am to 9pm which should accommodate even the most demanding schedules.