Daniel Von Fange

Laptop to go..

I've got my Powerbook hooked up to my Treo for internet access. Now I can be surfing and posting as I travel. No more need to fight hotels or beg dailup accounts off of my relitives. Yay!

I've got about a 435ms ping, a 26 kilobits per second upload speed, and a 176.7 kilobits per second download speed.

Sprint Treo.

I just found this. Maybe I can use my Treo for wireless web access now!

Sprint PCS Vision with Mac OS X.

I was curious how Bob Carey was managing to upload images and make posts while driving. He was kind enough to email me back telling me how he did it. Now I may need to go get a USB cable for my brother's Sanyo phone.

For my own use later, here is how to set the connection up with OS X.

Transmit SFTP Fixes.

How cool is this. Yesterday, while using the new version of Transmit with sftp, Transmit uploaded a blank file to my server instead of the real one. I sent in an email and let Panic know. I got a quick email back from Ian Cely, and I answered a few more questions on the problem. Today there is a new release with the bug fixed. It's nice to feel loved. :)

GPS Camera.

I want a camera with built in GPS. When I take photos, it should tag them with lat/long. For one thing it would make finding photos easier (and very fun). Then when combined with some kind of internet wide search, you could pull up tons of pictures of any place on the world.

Maybe I could hack this together for myself by carrying a GPS. Then later taking the record of where a I was at what time, and by using the photo's capture time, get a location for each photo.

Update: Beth points out Ricoh makes a GPS enabled camera available in Japan. Guess I'll have to wait a year or two... :)

Forum Trackback.

What if VBulletin, or other bulletin board software supported Trackback? What if I could reply to a post right from my blog? Would this usher in a new age of thoughtful discourse?

PHP Templates with PHP.

Brian Lozier has some good points in his article on using PHP for templates. Previously, I've come the same conclusions as he has. For big projects, Smarty rocks. For small projects, php files rock. It's not a which-is-better-debate, it's dependent on the job you are doing.

Nigerian EMail Conference.

I occasionally print off funny scam conversions from scamorama.com, for the family's enjoyment at lunch. Today I found a spoof page for The 3rd Annual Nigerian
EMail Conference . Funny stuff.

QHL.

So I made my own Quick Hack Licence. Sugestions? Criticisms? Pitfalls?

Propeller Head.

I'm learning to fly an RC helicopter on the computer. (It's much more fun than an RC plane.) After about a hour of concentrated flight time after lunch, I'm having my traditional changing-environment-"hang over". Right now if my head begins to move away from the computer screen, my brain instinctively tells my body to push the nose down and add more collective! It's a weird feeling. :D

Andrew goes Racing.

Satuday, little brother Andrew tried his hand at racing his E-Maxx.

He crashed out horribly on every other turn, the first time he was on the track. The second time was slightly better, the third time he pulled into third place on the first lap, and then his car died, and he was out for the rest of the day.

Andrew has a deep seated, subconsious belief that in order to exceed others, and achieve mastery, he must not do things the way others do them. But the potentially frustrating part in watching him learn something new, is that he will not do things the way others do them utill he has tried almost possible alternative. I just had to stay out of his way and let him learn. With time he almost certainly will go on to be the track champion for his class of cars - but he is going to get there his way and nothing you can say will sway him from doing things "his style".

Andrew is great brother. I'm in awe of many of his skills.

Filthy Lucre?.

I'm think I'm going to go to the bank tomorrow and say, "Can you launder some money for me please?" Then, I'll pull out a plastic bag from my pocket. With tweezers I will gingerly lift out this:

Yuck! It's a mold-covered $100 that I lost, and then found.

RC Flight Simulator.

So as the second step in a possible journey to build a UAV, I've gotten the G2 Light RC aircraft simulator. So far this evening I can fly, but I have a problem telling where the view is actualy pointing. With time of course, I will get good at it.

Wuffie Web.

I'm so used to just knowing what people I respect think about things, that when I go shopping for some non-normal items, I feel like I am missing an arm. Take shopping carts, for instance. Yesterday I was looking for one. Quick, take a look at this list on DMOZ and tell me which ones have the things I care about. It ain't gonna happen in under two hours. There is way to many of them.

But hey, if I can see the news I'm interested in in NetNewsWire, surely, eventualy, one day, I can see the products I'm interested in. What I really want to do is see what people that think like me think. That way when I hit unfamilier territory, I know where to look first.

A ecommerce site in flash?.

I just found One Way Out Fonts. Their site is a almost entirely flash, with PHP based X-Cart cleverly integrated behind the scenes.

I'd never seen a "good" flash site until this one.

PS: I want some of those fonts. This is why I don't have a credit card. It keeps me from spending money.

Yahoo Store.

Recently I've had three seperate people come up and want an online store. This morning I was looking at Yahoo! Store. Anyone used it? What do/did you think about it?

One of the guys is an artist, selling his paintings, and will want a very "artsy" looking store. Is the store design flexible enough to let me have pretty much full control over the page?

Button Maker.

You know those cute little 80×15 buttons? Well Bill Zeller made a php script that generates them, and then Kalsey made a front end for it. Nice and spiffy.

Bat 60.

I found a nice commercial UAV, too bad it's $35,000.

Helispy.

High on the list of cool things is this hovering, missile-like, vtol, Helispy. The vidoes are almost mindbending.

Homebuilt UAV.

"Hey, we could build a UAV." The thought suddenly crossed my mind as the family was lunching Satuday at Chili's. Just take a RC airplane, pop a miniture camera in it, get some stabilization, then tie a linux computer hooked to a GPS to drive the thing around the sky. When I can back from lunch, I looked around the web for a bit. Linux apparently is not the choice, special built chips are.

Edit this page.

So now I can conveniently use Movable Type as handy CMS thanks to Beth's Edit this page template snippet. Thanks!

Nayaa, Nayaa, at Spam.

John Grubber posts his results with SpamAssassin - .900 batting average for marking spam as spam.

Opening up Mail this morning, I see I received 101 spam emails since monday evening. Of those, only one was in my inbox this morning. That's a better batting average.

Nayaa! Nayaa! Spam has no power on me!

Never call it "Firebird".

Mozilla Firebird has been released, as if you have not heard. I was reading through the Mozilla Branding document that outlines the new names, the reasons, and the rules.

Rule Three: "When referring to Thunderbird or Firebird ... make sure to use the project name with Mozilla pre-pended as "Mozilla Thunderbird" or "Mozilla Firebird" instead of Mozilla alone or Firebird/Thunderbird alone."

The document does not keep its own rules.

On just the next line: "our primary development on the Firebird and Thunderbird projects"

Sorry, it seems funny to me at this hour of the night. :)

Unison Syncs.

Unison is cross platform file/directory syncing program. [Link via vsbabu] This will be a really handy tool to add to my bag of tricks.

In fact, this could even subsitute for the magic SFTP client that would let me edit files localy. Hmmm, I just need a shell script that checks for localy updated files and then starts Unison up when it finds one.

FTPeel.

Looks like there is a a new OS X FTP client on the block, FTPeel. [Link vla Clint, and a response to Clint from Eric]

Like Clint, I need SFTP support. If it had it, FTPeel would probably become my quicky uploading tool of choice.

To be my main FTP app, I need to be able to edit files in place. In an ideal world I would just drag that php file down to BBEdit in the dock, make my changes, and when I save they would be uploaded. I already get some of this functionality with Transmit and BBEdit, anthough in a clunky fashion. It would be great to be able to edit any remote file in any Mac application.

Otherwise, it looks very slick.

PyMeld.

Simon Wilson points out PyMeld, a templating system for Python that uses the ID attribute of tags for control of the template. It's similar one of my favorite templating engines, Amrita for Ruby. Using ID's is a great way to do things, since the template pages are normal html pages. The graphics guy can edit them in Dreamweaver, FrontPage, or whatever he likes and not wreck my template info - and he can work without having distracting {foreach} haunting his tables. I can't wait for something like this to come out for PHP.

CSS Tabs.

Great CSS tabs from Kalesy Group.

Web Stats by Sound.

Last week I was inspired to actualy do to the fun projects I've been thinking of. Now my room is full of whirring an clicking noises. Everytime someone visits a page on my server, I hear it. Here is a bit of sound (mp3) from an unusually busy minute.

It's all done with a little bit of Ruby goodness tailing an apache logfile on the server via ssh, and outputting into iHook.

Sounddogs.

http://www.sounddogs.com/ - Huge, huge, huge collection of sounds. It was fun poking around and making up a stories and plot lines to go with each one I tried.

Bad Gentoo with Apache and PHP.

Gentoo has just pulled a monumentally stupid trick on me. There I was installing mod_log_sql on my webserver. After adding the proper settings to my apache conf file, I ran apachectrl graceful to restart the server with the new settings. Apache restarted fine, but when I checked a site ALL MY PHP CODE WAS SHOWING IN THE CLEAR. Naturally this kicked in panic mode. I brought down the server, took out the config lines I had added, and started it back up again. The PHP pages were still not running, and everything was open to public view. An hour of worrying debugging later while begin to run way late for an event I was supposed to be at, I found the problem. If you run the apachectrl - that gentoo installs for you - it will start up apache without php. In order for things to work, you must use /etc/init.d/apache start.

Spam Filters for Ham.

Jon Udel is onto bayesian content filters now. I hope this is an idea whose time has come.

...and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks...

Smarty.

I've used smarty for several web projects. It is a great way of doing things. When combined with DB_DataObject, you can get some really clean php code.

My only gripe is that I have to chmod several directories every time I install a small project that uses it. So for tiny projects, I just use .php files as page templates instead of Smarty.

Traipse.

Drew Olbrich has done techie things that most of us don't even dream of. It makes me want to pull off at least one wild bit of hackery every so often. I'll probably start out by make up some kind of program to play soft whooshes every time braino.org gets a visit.

A Hosted Solution.

One thing that initially scared me about using silverorange intranet is that it is a subscription, not a one-time purchase. A few months ago, I would not have even considered using software on subscription basis. But my thinking changed when I was thinking of services I could offer over the internet to take advantage of the current ridiculously low prices for bandwidth, rack space, and computer hardware. Charging a monthly fee for a hosted "solution" began making much sense.

As a programmer:

• Constant money in
• Much, much easier to support a product running on your own servers.
• Much easier to do continuous development, and to be in tune to your customers

As a customer:

• Someone else is responsible for making sure the dang thing is working
• Always using the latest version
• Bugs get fixed much faster.

The biggest risk though, is if the company with the solution will to stay in business.

silverorange intranet is mine.

I'm giving the silverorange intranet a two month trial. I'm planning on getting addicted. It even turns out it was originally designed for exactly what I'm going to use it for.

My friends know I spurge on user interface. From working on a mac instead of a clunky, crashy PC, to the 20 inch Apple LCD, to the Touchstream keyboard, everything I "touch" while working has to be slick. The silverorange intranet is pervasively slick. Every corner I've poked my nose into just plain right.

So for tonight, I'm happy.

You know you are a geek when....

You know you are a geek when: You understanding the way your dog thinks and acts by comparing him to a bayesian spam filter, instead of understanding how a bayesian spam filter works by comparing it to your dog.

Water.

Water looks interesting. Unfortunately, they seem to charge for the documentation. That does not encourage widespread learning and mastery. Get a clue from the MySQL docs, please.

Laptop Batteries.

If I suddenly start jetting across the world, I may just have to get one of these long life batteries for the TiBook. (To answer your question: Yes, I am cleaning out my tabs this morning.)

silverorange Intranet.

The silverorange Intranet software is sweet. In fact, try the demo. Everything just works. I'm instantly filled with a burning desire to use it for managing LeanCoder's projects.

Storing Hierarchical Data in a Database.

I usually avoid learning algorithms. What ever language or database I'm using should be smart enough to be efficient. However, this article on Storing Hierarchical Data in a Database is very eye-opening. I'd never considered a "Modified Preorder Tree Traversal" before.

World Potato Congress.

There is a World Potato Congress. Fear humans. Their mission: 'The World Potato Congress Inc. is dedicated to support the global growth and development of the potato.'

When I first saw the link to World Potato Congress on the silverorange portfolio page, I thought it would be some kind of joke site. I was wrong. It's so serious, it's almost funny. '...the proud sponsor of the world's most diverse potato conference.' and '...by creating links of communication and information sharing throughout the world potato community'

Meme, Conter-Meme.

Mark Godwin left his mark on the internet with a well crafted meme - "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." Everyone has heard it.

I did not know it was a deliberate experiment though. He wrote his story about here in a wired article in 1994. Meme, Counter-meme.

It's fun to think that one person can change the internet society, "by accident". It's scary that one person can change the way we think and talk "on purpose".

Nigerian Scams.

I read a classic Nigerain scam email this morning while cleaning out my spam folder.

I am Mr. Vincent Kawa, a Credit Officer with Oceanic Bank of Nigeria. For the cause of this transaction, I am working in collaboration with Barrister, Ikimi Williams an attorney to a national of your country, Mr. Ailing Lazarus who was a ship Merchant and maintained a bogus account with my bank here. My cordial relationship with him afforded me to be the account supervisor.....

I found a treasure trove of good, hilarious, and occasionaly sad, email conversations with scammers. It definitly confirms the fact that the majority of criminals are stupid.

I am sorry that it has taken me so long to reply. Your original email
was sent to my business account. I was on a moose hunting trip to central
Iowa and of course there was no way for me check my email from that wilderness.
I am pleased to say I bagged several of the viscous beasts with the loss of
only two of my bearers (the moose hide quite effectively in the corn fields
and pounce upon one with bared fangs).

From reading your message I'm convinced this is a matter which requires
confidentiality, credulousness, and much sneaking about. Therefore I am
replying to you from a more private email account. I ask that all future
communcations be sent to me here.... Continued Here.

And the scammer is falling for it. Too funny!

Another good scam counting site.