Spam Account Cleanup

Foolishly, I left the “allow anyone to register” option on for this blog after I got akismet’s WordPress plugin working. Which means that every few days, I’d get spammers signing up to see if I’d given users better access than people who were just posting. I had 147 accounts, of which 27 were legitimate. This post is to announce that we’re back down to those 27, and signing up for accounts has been disabled. If I’ve accidentally deleted you account, sorry, but I didn’t recognize your username or your email address, and I’m tired, so I’ve likely made at least one mistake.

If you really feel like you need one, let me know by email, and I’ll hook you up.

Mozilla Skywriter

Mozilla’s Bespin text editor has changed name – it’s now “Mozilla Skywriter”. I miss some of the imagery that Bespin evoked, but hey, that’s progress, and at some point the Lucasfilm lawyers would have taken them to court. One of the cool things I learned about today is the ability to use Skywriter as a bookmarklet and make any textarea HTML field turn itself into a Skywriter field. It doesn’t allow for word/line wrap natively (which makes writing prose harder), but that should be coming. It also supports native HTML markup and syntax coloring in these bookmarklet’ed areas, which is pretty cool for the kind of work I do. Once it supports Perl, I’m set.

On the downside, it removes the ability for the OSX-native spellchecker to dive in and check my spelling. I’ve come to rely on that service for a lot of what I do – I can just right-click the misspelled word and OSX suggests the correction for me. Maybe someone will extend Skywriter this way? I’d offer, but I don’t exactly have free time these days.

iTunes Ping

Quick post: my iTunes Ping link.

YouTube and Profit Models

There is speculation that YouTube may post a profit for the first time this year. I think I know how they are doing it, without having to resort to any sort of analytics or research: they do it by showing a 30 second commercial in front of a 10 second video. Now, I don’t mind the idea of YouTube showing ads. What irks me is the length of the ad is frequently longer then the video I’m about to watch. Just show ads that are shorter then the video being requested – and I’d guess since most videos are longer than 30 seconds, this wouldn’t be a problem.

Apple TV

I have to disagree with John Sircusa on the new AppleTV – I think it is a device that fits my needs perfectly right now, apart from one small flaw. It probably fits a lot of other people’s media needs as well. Right now, I have a laptop hooked up to our television. We use a web browser to get to Netflix, we use iTunes to listen to music and podcasts, and we use VLC or XBMC (depending on our mood) to watch movies and TV shows we’ve ripped from our DVD collection, and finally we use DVD player to watch the Netflix discs that come in the mail.

The AppleTV solves all those use cases, other than the DVDs that come in the mail, and puts a simple remote in our hands. I’m honestly not sure what we’ll do with the physical disks once I get an AppleTV (which, at some point, I will), but everything else gets easy. And it’s not a laptop or a Mac Mini or a linux box to patch, update or mess with. It’s really a device. And it’s small, and it’s quiet. So it gets the wife’s nod of approval.

I think Apple could have a real winner on their hands.