Truly awesome pics. Maximize your browser to get them to fit.
Best SpaceShipOne Pix. Awesome job.
Thanks to Sandy [Due Diligence]
Year: 2004
ANN: FeedDemon 1.11 – Security Update
For those of you using FeedDemon. I’m in the middle of switching over to it for my feed reading.
ANN: FeedDemon 1.11 – Security Update.
I’ve been watching the recent slew of Internet Explorer exploits with some concern since these vulnerabilities could affect FeedDemon users while browsing with IE. Even though Microsoft has attempted to address these problems by explaining how to increase your browser safety, I decided I needed to resolve them directly in FeedDemon to make sure my customers are protected.
To make a long story short, earlier today I uploaded FeedDemon 1.11. Starting with this release, FeedDemon no longer allows browsing URLs that use the ms-its, ms-itss, its, mk or mhtml protocols (here’s why this is necessary). In addition, I’ve improved the security of FeedDemon’s newspapers by removing all potentially unsafe HTML elements and attributes before displaying the contents of any feed.
Just install this release directly on top of version 1.0 or version 1.10 and your settings will be retained. Note that because this is a security-related update which I want all FeedDemon customers to use, I decided to reset the expiration date for users of the trial version – so if your trial version is set to expire soon, you get to start over with 20 more days of usage.
PS: If you want to stop using IE altogether, see this blog entry about using Mozilla inside FeedDemon.
IMPORTANT NOTE FOR THOSE USING SOFTWARE FIREWALLS: If after upgrading to version 1.11 you discover that FeedDemon no longer updates any feeds, it is almost certainly because your firewall is blocking the new version. If you experience this problem, you need to configure your firewall to allow the newer version of FeedDemon to access the Internet.
By Nick Bradbury. [Nick Bradbury]
iTunes Album Art Importer for Windows
Life is good. I’ll be downloading this shortly. This is the sort of useful tool I never would have found without weblogs and aggregators.
If ever there was a goodness…the iTunes Album Art Importer for Windows, written in .NET 1.1.
Thank you YVG Software Services as you have saved me time. The way to a programmer’s heart is by saving him/her time. You wrote the iTunes Art Importer, and it was your FIRST VB.NET Application. It uses the Amazon.com Web Service to find Album Covers for my iTunes collection – and it just works. Kudos to you, and God bless you. 🙂 And thank you iTunes for having a COM Automation interface. Ain’t that something, a little .NET, a little Web Services, a little OLE Automation and a hard problem is solved n times.
(See their importer, there below iTunes itself? Shiny, eh? I’ve set it off to find art for 4700+ songs. A few hundred in, and I’ve got a 90% hit rate.)
I’m now mostly back
I’m now mostly back. A week without any net or cellphone access at all was a very interesting experience. My spam filters caught 99% of the 1300 spam launched in my directions. I no longer look at my junk mail filters. I just delete the stuff.
I had also accumulated 4,500+ entries in my aggregator. No way I was ever going to make it through that all of that, so I did a bit of triage by date to get down to under a hundred recent items I want to look at.
Programming Languages
Just for fun
Kieran Healy provides a pointer to how to understand different programming languages, and warns against upgrading:
Crooked Timber: Don’t Upgrade : APL is a pithy language…. A full explanation is available, but not from me. I recommend this page which contains opinions about APL and better-known languages like C ( A language that combines all the elegance and power of assembly language with all the readability and maintainability of assembly language ), C++ ( an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog ) and FORTRAN ( Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the tenth century A.D., and lasted until about 1957, when FORTRAN abandoned the practice ).
No posting for a bit
I won’t have access to the net over the next week, so I won’t be posting. Scarier, I won’t be staying on top of the incoming information flow. As it is I’ve still got 150 items backed up in my aggregator that I want to think about and possibly comment on. More when I get back.
SpaceShipOne blog
I’ll be following this closely. In the long run this may be the most important news of 2004.
SpaceShipOne blog, part 4. Ground crew member Alan Radecki says:
Hi All, The FAA spaceport license came through today, and almost immediately, signs went up at the airport. Pics are now up on the Mojave Airport Weblog as well as a couple aerials showing the parking & RV areas that I shot this morning from our helo. For those who’ll be in the RV park, sounds like the NASA interns will be throwing a big party with a band and all.
Link to part 3, Link to part 2, Link to part 1. Handy overview photo that shows the Mojave Airport scene where the ship will launch on Monday: Link. (Thanks, Todd Lappin) [Boing Boing]
PDFs: not quite unlinkable
Nice to know, given how many organizations insist on using PDF files.
PDFs: not quite unlinkable. Turns out, you can link to a particular page in a PDF file, plus a whole lot more, including setting the zoom level and scrolling to a particular spot, all in a link. I still hate PDFs, but not quite as much as I did before. [phil ringnalda dot com]
Faith and Mathematics
I sure do miss Calvin and Hobbes. Always full of deep wisdom.
Calvin and Hobbes Struck Long Ago.
Anatol tells us that the Los Angeles Times’s op-ed page is way behind the curve in its attacks on “secular thought” as a religion. The definitive such attack was made by Calvin and Hobbes:
Calvin: “Math is not a science. It’s a religion. Here is a bunch of numbers, and by some magic they become another bunch of numbers. You either believe it, or you don’t. As a math atheist, I demand being freed of this”.
Hobbes: “In public school, no less. Call a lawyer”
My two cents on Winer
I suppose I’d feel a bit paranoid if every action I took elicited the response that “Dave” gets. For all I know, I might well have one of those supposed 3,000 weblogs that momentarily have gone away. I chose to move on to my own site once I had developed a better sense of what I wanted to do.
I haven’t been a programmer for a long time and I was never as talented at it as many. But I do create things and I know that it takes real emotional energy to create. Far more than it does to throw stones.
I’ve used products from “Userland” as a major component of the creative work I’ve done over the last several years and I’ve paid for them, because that’s what you do to ensure that you have and will have the tools you need to do your work. I have never had anything but cordial and helpful interactions with “Dave” over that time.
I also agree with AKMA’s observations this morning.
The world is full of creators and critics. Spend your time with the creators.
What’s Wrong With Winer? / Pointless Battles.
I wish people would just get a hold of themselves on the Winer / weblogs.com thing… I mean all this ranting is just a waste of energy… it was a free service – it ended – stop complaining and using this as a bashing opportunity.
It also pisses me off when people write about Winer and, so-bloody-often, put in this ‘but if you know what he’s like’ type comment. Why do people think he’s so bad? I’ve been in this sphere for ’bout a year and a half now… reading widely… and I just don’t get it…
Pershunally I agree with a lot of what he says today. I wish people would expend their energy on more worthy issues!