04.24.06
Dungeons & Dragons Tomfoolery
Now I remember why I used to want to work at Omni. 
04.20.06
Contact Form
I probably should have done this a long time ago, but I finally googled and found a Wordpress plugin to make a contact form. It’s in the Pages list on the right. If you’d like to get a hold of me via email, use that.
There are more clever ways to figure out how to email me, but I know lots of non-clever people so this is just easier. (Hint, I have a page for my PGP key…)
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People Actually Use This?
I was pretty dumbfounded by my blog stats. I had never gotten around to setting anything like this up at the previous host. Dreamhost has the analog log file analyzer turned on by default.
As it turns out, people actually use this blog for information. I actually had someone at work ping me about my blog and how it answered his question. Very strange.
In particular my post about the weird subversion error message when two people have created a directory and the second one doesn’t remember to svn up before svn commit. Apparently that post gets a good amount of search engine love. Aside from the front page and the RSS feed, it’s the most popular page. Not bad for something that’s six months old.
Having this information has a strange side effect of making me want to write more. I’m going to have to get around to running analog on the old log files I have from the previous host.
Annoying Artifact
Why does this happen sometimes? I get what looks like a selection box that stays on my desktop. It comes and goes with equal mystery.
The only way I can guarantee it to go away is reboot (or probably log out, haven’t tried that). It seems like I made this particular one disappear last night by moving a QuickTime movie window over it. I can’t even get it to go away by changing the desktop picture, which is very strange.
Apple’s New Business Plan
I think it’s funny that every pundit out there is attributing all sorts of complex reasons to Apple releasing Boot Camp. They’re going to eat Microsoft’s lunch, they’re going to switch to Windows, blah, blah, blah.
What seems amazingly obvious to me is that the reason for Boot Camp is no different than the reason they have the iTunes Music Store. This is the business model:
- Find something illegal people do on the Internets.
- Make a product or service that makes said illegal thing, a) legal and b) way easier than doing it yourself.
- Set the pricing such that the majority of said criminals will decide that it’s worth trading the money for their time for new legal product and/or service.
- Profit.
Boot Camp just makes it easier to get Windows and MacOS X on the same computer. It also just happens to require a Mac to do it. You win, Apple wins. It doesn’t hurt that it makes it somewhat easier to convince your boss to buy you a Mac.
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Getting a MacBook Pro
It may be quite possibly the worst name ever, but it’s a good machine and I’m getting one. I even managed to get the company to pay for it. Now that takes effort. In theory I’ll order it tomorrow. Who knows how long it’ll take. With any luck it’ll be here sometime next week.
04.18.06
Google Mail + Calendar
I’m pretty sure this “Add event info” button wasn’t there in Gmail Friday. I wonder what it does. Time to play with it.
I have found out that Google Calendar doesn’t do anything with emailed accept/decline/tentative responses out of iCal, which is unfortunate. Maybe this button means they’re making changes quickly.
Update: from Google Calendar Help,
Why doesn’t my Gmail have Google Calendar related features?
It may take a few days before your Gmail account displays Google Calendar related features. We’re working hard to roll out these features to all Gmail users, and we appreciate your patience.
04.16.06
A Comments Expirement
After moving to Dreamhost and having the chance to look at the built-in web server log analyzer I’ve discovered that I have way more traffic than I thought. The stats seem to indicate that I actually get more traffic than Aoife’s blog, which I would have never expected. Especially since I hardly get any comments.
The current theory is that no one comments because they have to create an account. Truthfully, that’s probably a damn good reason. I know I wouldn’t bother creating an account on random other blog just to say hi.
So, I’m just about to uncheck the box that requires an account to comment here. If I get too much comment spam, back on it goes. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
Turd*uck*en
I think I might like a Bun-eep-bury (Turducken-inspired, as it might be) better than a real Turducken.
(Via Boing Boing.)
04.13.06
Google Calendar
Yes, a gazillion people are writing about it. If you haven’t seen Google Calendar, yet go check it out.
So the highlights, for me …
One. Finally I can exchange invites with non-Mac-nerd mere mortals. Well, almost. Gmail doesn’t seem to pick up ics attachments, yet. I’m sure it will. The docs for the calendar implies that Gmail will also pixie-dust-parse your mails for invite-like text. That’ll be slick when it works.
Two. RSS feeds of calendars. This is slick. PHP iCalendar does it, but in a very weird way. I’ll see how that ends up working. The only thing that disappoints me is that it doesn’t seem to let you subscribe to the RSS feed of subscribed calendars. Even though the XML badge is there for the subscribed calendar, I couldn’t get it subscribed in NetNewsWire. Maybe it’s because it’s set as “Anyone can see: nothing” with no way to change that setting, like on calendars you create inside Google Calendar.
The URL returns an HTTP 302 redirect to a URL that returns an HTTP 500 with a body that sets the title to “404 Not Found”. Whoops. If this works eventually, I’ll be a happy happy man. This will let me do RSS feeds of calendars I manage in iCal and publish via WebDAV without having to host it myself, i.e., my Workout calendar.
Three. Multiple editors/owners. I haven’t tried this, yet, but it seems you can have more than one person edit a calendar. Before now, I don’t believe there’s been an ics-standard-based tool to let you do that. I’m hoping this will take the burden of managing my soccer season calendars off of me and put it on the whole team. Yes, I am that lazy.
Four. Works with iCal. At least one event I sent did. They’re clearly working out the kinks in making their messages compatible with all mail readers and calendar systems. The gist is, they include the calendar data twice, one as a text/calendar in a multipart/alernative and one as an application/ical as a part of the main message. This is probably to work around Thunderbird weirdness, where it will always show the HTML part of an multipart/alternative. Mail.app lets you switch between the parts of a multipart/alternative. It’s strange because it defaults to the text/calendar part if there’s an attachment. So in this case Mail.app shows you two different attachments. I haven’t tried it with Outlook, yet, I imagine it works.
What’s missing (aside from sundry bug fixes)? No WebDAV publishing. This makes sense, Google doesn’t want you using them for storage, they want you using the tool itself. Maybe some of those issues go away when things like RSS feeds work properly with subscribed calendars. You’ll be able to publish it wherever and use Google Calendar to get it to the rest of the world.
Anyway, off to play with it some more.
Update: If you check the “Allow others to find this public calendar via Google Calendar search?” checkbox when subscribing, suddenly the RSS feed works. I’d like a way to have a “private” RSS feed, like you can with calendars you create there.