This is a nifty little tool, made in Flash, allowing you to browse your installed fonts: STC fontBrowser

[Via Quasimondo]

Have you heard about Cynthia McKinney, former U.S. Congresswoman?

According to those quoted on National Public Radio, McKinney "a loose cannon" (media expert) who "the people of Atlanta are embarrassed and disgusted" (politician) by, and she is also "loony" and "dangerous" (senator from her own party).

Yow! And why is McKinney dangerous/loony/disgusting? According to NPR, "McKinney implied that the [Bush] Administration knew in advance about September 11 and deliberately held back the information."

The New York Times' Lynette Clemetson revealed her comments went even further over the edge: "Ms. McKinney suggest[ed] that President Bush might have known about the September 11 attacks but did nothing so his supporters could make money in a war."

That's loony, all right. As an editor of the highly respected Atlanta Journal Constitution told NPR, McKinney "practically accused the President of murder!"

Problem is, McKinney never said it.

Denial and Deception is an editorial / op-ed in the New York Times. written by Paul Krugman.

Quote:

Politics is full of ironies. On the White House Web site, George W. Bush's speech from Oct. 7, 2002 in which he made the case for war with Iraq bears the headline "Denial and Deception." Indeed.
There is no longer any serious doubt that Bush administration officials deceived us into war. The key question now is why so many influential people are in denial, unwilling to admit the obvious.

This is great news. Although the patent has only expired in the US due to the 20 year rule, it will most certainly make it possible for Open Source products to start supporting GIF again without having to pay blood money to the patent holder.

Among the products that have already received patches are GD (Graphics library, used in PHP et. al).

[Via Pnut's Thoughts]

It might seem it isn't, based on my own experience and that of others, many times it can be a pain in the ass to deal with the many different implementations of RSS, it doesn't make it any easier that we have formats forumlated by different parties, and no real standard everyone agrees on.

As always, Virtuelvis has something wise to say about the whole process: Replacing RSS

As someone who simply wants to use some kind of syndication format, either for consumption or production, the neverending debate is confusing, and annoying. I don't give a rats ass about who invented or co-invented RSS. I don't want to read endless flamewars on whether someones RSS is funky or not, I just want something that works!

I would be happy if Userland (the makers of Radio), Six Apart (MovableType) and Google (Blogger) at least could sit down and pre-position a standard to W3C or IETF, or for that matter - any other standard body that would be acceptable to all parites. Everything is better than the chaos we have today.

And for the record. IMNSHO Dave Winer and Userland did not make it any easier when they decided to release RSS 2.0. In my eyes the release of RSS 2.0 was in part to satisfy someones ego, and in part to include support for new features in Radio. Nothing more, nothing less.

The Google Weblog has discovered that you can check out what ads would be shown on any given website. Interesting stuff: Try Before You Sell

Not everyone believe that Google Adsense is a good idea:

Pamela Parker at ClickZ Today writes about her initial response in her article Does Google's AdSense Make Sense?

Her point is that Google's advertising won't work as good when placed on web sites, as when it is displayed on their search pages, because people act differently when they are in search mode, as opposed to when they are in surf mode.

BTW: My weblog was rejected from the program. And I have to agree with Google about rejecting it. But I am afraid that they will have the headache of many grey cases, and a lot of noise where they admit one site and reject another similar one. Especially since site inclusion in the program is decided case-by-case and probably by different people.

Googles new advertisment service Google AdSense was launched this week, and I have had the chance to test it for a couple of days, and I must say I am very impressed.

It seems natural to asume that this new service from Google is based on technology they aquired when buying Applied Semantics and their AdSense software (among other technologies).

The system promises to do for advertisment what Google has done for web search, that is - revolutionize it! The technology for placing appropriate ads on web pages based on the content on the pages is really good, the system really manages to do its job placing highly targeted ads based on content on the pages.

I have been testing Google AdSense at Flashmagazine.com for a few days now, and there we see a click-through rate of 4%, which is really impressive. The only other text ads system I know of with simular results is Googles own ads placements on their search results. Something tells me AdSense will become a block-buster advertisement channel. I would love to see the total statistics for ads served and click-through rate of the whole system.

What is even more impressive with Google AdSense is that they have opened the program to small sites. Almost any site can participate. But as always, there are limitations, so take a look at their program policies to see if your site will be approved into the program.

Among the limitations are that no personal pages are allowed into the program, which makes it hard for bloggers to know if they are allowed into the program. SearchEngineWatch writes:

"In general, we're looking for at this stage web sites with more standardized content," Wojcicki said. "Blogs are an example of a gray area, and we will review them on a case-by-case basis to see if they fit our network."

This will be a difficult area for Google, because blogging tools aren't just used by those wishing to express personal views. Some use them simply because they are an easier way to publish a web site focused on a particular topic.

Personally I see that my site is in that exact grey area. While my blog is listed as a Flash blog in many circumstances, and is heavy on technology it is also filled with my own personal perspective on other un-related areas.

More information about AdSense:
Google AdSense FAQ
SearchEngineWatch: Google Expands Contextual Ad Placement Program To Small Sites
Daypop: Adsense
GoogleGuy Says also has a lot of info on AdSense

MT just killed an entry I had been working on for 30 minutes. Will try to re-write. And at the same time see if Opera is as forgetful as Internet Explorer.

[Update] Yes, it seems like Opera is the better browser for blogging. It does NOT forget postings if something goes wrong. Opera is as always highly recommended, just have to start remembering my own recommendations ;-)

BTW: Even got to work a little on implementing a spell checker in Opera. Found a spell checker that uses Spellchecker.net, works great, and utilizes the power of Opera's highly extendible and accessible interface. (Its really amazing how easy it is to add stuff to Opera!).

Well, OK. Maybe the fact that Spellcheck.net chokes on URLs is a considerable minus. Hm, any good ideas on good spell checkers or services for Opera welcome!

A cool Flash site for the soon-to-be-released Futurama Game (PS 2 and XBox)
Futurama the game

Nice looking site, but having to wait forever (on 4 Mbit/s) everytime I make click a link is not fun. Not sure if its the site that has maxed out its bandwidth, or just poor design/programming.

This is sick. But with the way the whole war has been marketed by the US government I guess we should expect things like this: Mirror.co.uk - US TROOPS ADMIT SHOOTING IRAQI CIVILIANS

"There's a picture of the World Trade Centre hanging up by my bed and I keep one in my flak jacket. Every time I feel sorry for these people I look at that. I think, 'They hit us at home and, now, it's our turn.' I don't want to say payback but, you know, it's pretty much payback."

This is a very nice writeup by Arve Bersvendsen on how to be read, and how to make a good weblog. What he writes I happen to agree with, but don't feel like it has to become THE absolute rules on how to make a good weblog:

Virtuelvis: So, you want to be read?

I especially like the part he has titled "Minimize idle talk":

Yes, a blog is personal, and one is entitled to write whatever one wants there, but writing when you really have nothing to say increases the chance of people missing the interesting entries because they simply disappear in the noise.

It's better to write something sensible once a week than posting daily about your rat's droppings.

I just have to try to live up to the good suggestions on how to make my blog better.

A couple of other bloggers are also writing about how to make blogs better:

Sam Ruby: Anatomy of a Well Formed Log Entry
Mark Pilgrim: The Ws of weblogging

This is a cool retro version of a blog I haven't been reading enough (it seems): Gizmodo 1983 - turn back the time 20 years and be impressed by the "new" gadgets.

Not all too original, Wired has run something simular - but it sure is a lot of fun remembering the former cool gadgets, and see how far we have come in 20 years. At the same time I can't help but notice how little some things have changed too, concidering it has been two decades!

[Via JD on MX]

1. Install Spamnix, this anti-spam tool comes as a free trial and doesn't cost much to buy
2. Make sure that images in spam e-mails are never shown, most of them are linked with information about who you are - if you open them, they will give you away and verify your e-mail address. You can fix this in a couple of ways:
   1. Disable preview of e-mails by going to Tools -> Options ->Viewing Mail -> Preview Pane and un checking "Show messages in preview pane" While you are in that window, I would also recommend un checking the "Use Microsoft's viewer" in the Message Window part of the screen. That will make you safer against viruses.
   2. Go to Tools -> Options -> Display and un check the "Automatically download HTML graphics" This is a move I highly recommend! - It will stop Eudora from downloading images included in formatted e-mail, thereby making it impossible for spammers to use images to verify e-mail addresses.

BTW: If you don't have it already, Eudora is available for download at Eudora.com, and comes as a light version (no ads, fewer functions), sponsored version (free with all functionality available, but with ads), and as a for-pay version with all the features and none of the ads. They even have an Internet Suite including e-mail and a lightweight browser for the Palm OS.

PS: No money changed hands for me to praise Eudora like this, I just feel that Qualcomm has made a great job with their tools and deserve some praise now and then. :-)

Eudora has always been my favorite mail application. It (almost) supports standard mailbox format (one mailbox = one file) so its easy to port mail from one platform to another, if configured right its virtually bulletproof against viruses, and it just works. My one gripe with it is that its only available for Windows and Mac.

I have written about how Eudora 6 will make it even easier to battle spam with Eudora, and I have to admit that when I saw in which direction Qualcomm is going with Eudora, I was also wondering how it would affect companies such as Spamnix that supplies anti-spam tools for Eudora.

While Eudora 6 is being designed to allow easy implementation of third party anti-spam applications and services, it is also taking a slice out of the market with a very simple anti-spam tool included in the mail application itself. One that should work for most people right out of the box. The little tests I've done shows that the anti-spam feature of Eudora 6.0 has a hit-rate of over 90% straight out the box - without any work needed. Pretty impressive if you ask me, and the added benefit of a tool that is hooked right into the mail application, makes it easy to white list everyone in your address book.

So how does Spamnix meet the future competition, by giving up? Not at all. Today, in an early beta/alpha release their new version sports more muscles than ever with the inclusion of a Bayesian
machine-learning system. (And I was just wondering when they would come around to that!). According to Spamnix software they have archived a 99% accurate spam filtering with this version already. That my friends are almost as good as a challenge-response system such as the one implemented by Earthlink earlier this week, but without all the disadvantages (with senders having to verify themselves before their mail goes through).

Look out for public betas of Spamnix for Eudora 1.2, coming for Windows and Mac OS X soon!

Psst: David Mertz has written a good article about spam filtering techniques, among them Bayesian filtering - if you are wondering what it is.

Good to see the spammers are taking time off from making all our lives miserable to actually have a convention. The DM Days New York Conference and Expo was held on the 2nd to the 4th of June, and gathered spammers from all over to discuss ways of reaching people through spam, and words that can no longer be used. (Including: limited-time, free, opportunity and only)

I think such events are excelent ideas. Next year I hope to be there to do some LARTing with 2 by 4s. ;-)

My favorite RSS aggregator is AmphetaDesk, its available for a whole range of platforms (including easy installs for Windows, Mac OS 7-9, Mac OS X etc). Its a really nice piece of software, but in making it they implemented the requests for RSS feeds wrong.

Instead of letting the users of Amphetadesk include themselves in the User Agent (which IMHO would be the right way to do it), they ask their users to include a URL that is sent with the request as a referer! Which, IMNSHO is wrong!

If you feel like fixing the problem, I have a quick fix for you. Hopefully they will fix it in future versions after the 0.93 which is the current version of Amphetadesk when writing this.

[Update: It has been fixed in the CVS repository for the AmphetaDesk project, and the issue will be fixed in future versions. But at the moment there are no way of easily personalizing the Agent string without the fix I suggest here.]

[Update 6th of June 2003: I have changed the fix a little, it appears you have to remove one more line of code to get rid of the referer in Amphetadesk. Please also be aware that this fix is spesific to AmphetaDesk v. 0.93.1]

To fix this error, do the following:

Locate the WWW.pm module located in \lib\AmphetaDesk under your AmphetaDesk catalog.

IMPORTANT: Make a copy of WWW.pm for safe keeping, in case you should ruin it while editing.

Here is the modifications you need to make in WWW.pm:

On line 63 exchange "app_url" for "user_http_referer"

On line 106 AND 174 - Comment out the line:

  $req->referer( get_setting("user_http_referer") );

So you are left with

  #$req->referer( get_setting("user_http_referer") );

That is it, save and you will be requesting RSS feed with RFC compliant HTTP requests.

BTW: If you want to add your URL to the UserAgent string of AmphetaDesk after this, all you need to do is to go to my_settings.html and type in your url in the "Would You Like Servers To Know Who's Reading" form field.

I have been following anti-spam tools for a while, and in the latest year there has been a boom of services and programs to fight spam - for reasons obvious to anyone with an e-mail account. But what has become painfully obvious is that the e-mail programs themselves have to change in order for user-friendly solutions to spam fighting to appear. Apple was one of the first to launch such an e-mail program with their OS X mail application, supporting Bayesian filtering.

Eudora is about to take it to the next level, with Eudora 6.0 they are making it easy to integrate spam fighting tools directly into the mail program. Qualcomm claims that Eudora 6.0 will catch most junk mail and quarantine it with their SpamWatch, whose large dictionary of words can be simply added to by the user. Add to that Eudora's junk mail system that is open to third party developers, which allows other anti-spam tools, including those running at your site or ISP, to simply and smoothly be integrated.

Seems like a good start and a concept that is sure to be copied by others in the future.

Eudora 6.0 is still in early beta stages, but public betas for OS X and Win 32 are available on Qualcomms site.