Till now I have been using Remind for a simple daily reminder system. It relies on simple text files and sends me daily emails notifying me about stuff.
This works fine really and I didn’t think I will need much more. Then comes the news that Mozilla has released a standalone calendar app called Sunbird. It is early days for this project but it is already very usable. It uses iCal format files which is compatible with all sorts of other applications and most importantly supports storing its files on WebDAV servers.
A quick install of mod_dav on my Apache web server and a bit of setup using authentication to keep things private got me going. Sunbird has some strange things related to blank files on WebDAV servers so you need to put at least 1 entry into a local calendar then publish that calendar to the WebDAV server to create your new calendar. Once that is done you can just subscribe to it.
This was nice, and I was happy, but I got thinking that I would need to sometimes access this stuff without being near my desktop computers – another great thing about WebDAV, multiple desktops all sharing the same calendar – so I thought it would be nice to get this stuff visible on the web.
A quick search around found PHP iCalendar that can view multiple iCal files in a very sexy looking web interface. So I had remote access to the data all sorted.
The problem with all this is of course were notifications, Sunbird seems to have issues sending mail – for me any case – and I don’t fancy keeping it open forever just to get notifications. I then noticed that PHP iCalendar can export your iCal files as RSS! For each iCal file you can get a day, week or month feed. Pop this into your aggregator and you have a nice place to get notifications as well. This leaves Sunbird only to edit the entries really and keeps things nicely integrated into what is quickly becoming the killer app on my desktop, my Newzcrawler.
Once everything was iCal enabled I had a look at iCalShare.com where there are 100′s of iCal files that you can just subscribe to or copy onto your own server. I got UK and SA holidays from there and will be investigating some other stuff.
iCal, Mozilla Sunbird, PHP iCalendar and RSS
Blogcatalog and RSS stuff
Scoble blogged about Blog Catalog which is a kind of yahoo/DMOZ directory effort for blogs, very nice.
On the general usefulness of RSS, reading Scoble’s site again made me realize just how much RSS has changed the way we use the web. Scoble says he is subscribed to more than 900 feeds and has some ideas about information overkill.
I remember my life before RSS aggregators, I managed to read a small amount of sites regularly, perhaps 10 at most, simply because going to each one was just a pain in the behind. I never read peoples personal pages and I never knew half of what is going on there since my main source of information ended up being slashdot. These days it is different, I keep up with around 90 feeds during the day they offer a good 2 minute distraction from work every hour or so. I am also finding myself much better informed about general happening because I can subscribe to a wide variety of feeds.
The fact that one person can have 900 feeds shows you just how far aggregators and the whole RSS technology has progressed and what it has enabled us to do. Yes RSS has flaws that is being worked on, but so far it has done a great job. I think it also says something interesting about the mental stability of someone who wants to subscribe to that many feeds, but that is another discussion 
Hunting Malware on Windows
Via boingboing comes a link to a good article on places to look for malware on windows machines.
Search term highlighting
I am trying out a Google search term highlighter on my page. I noticed a lot of people coming to my server and finding category or date based indexes for their searches. They then go and use the Google Cache to come and view the page that does the search item highlighting in order to find the specific bit they are interested in.
To help those poor people find things easier I figured I will try highlighting all search referrals. I tried a PHP script that can do this for many search engines but I think it had issues with my existing PHP code on the site, now I am using a Javascript tool called Google Highlighter. It is only for Google searches but that is fine since that is the most used search engine these days.
To see how it works use the search box on my site to search for something, like “devco”, and click on one of the results you will see your terms highlighted in colors similar to those used by Google.
I think it may actually be best to only put it on pages where confusion is most likely, the front page and date based pages. The assumption is that if you get to a individual entry page it will be fairly obvious quickly if it applies to you or not.
a9.com
Slashdot carries the news that a9.com has finally launched. A9 is Amazon‘s search engine that uses Google for search results and image searches, IMDb for movie information and GuruNet for Reference lookups.
It features a nice DHTML interface complete with drag and drop facilities. The whole idea here is to combine useful search related stuff into one page. It remembers all your searches. It tracks everything you click on and it provides a Diary facility to let you annotate your searches and sites you visit. Using all this information it can provide you with recommendations for sites that will interest you etc. It links all of this with your amazon.com account and no doubt use this gathered information to suggest books for you to buy etc.
The history of sites you visited and searches you ran can be edited by you, and I tested this it does stop entries from appearing in your history, but I also noted that by deleting a specific topic from your search history it does not undo what it learnt from you, it still knows you are interested in what you searched for even if you deleted the historic record of those searches!
Some tasty bits from their T’c & C’s:
Use of Third Party Service Providers: We may, from time-to-time, employ other companies and individuals to perform functions on our behalf. Examples include sending e-mail and analyzing data. They have access to personal information needed to perform their functions, but may not use it for other purposes.
We work closely with some third parties. In some cases, we will include offerings from these businesses on A9.com. In other cases, we may include joint offerings from A9.com and these businesses on A9.com. Click here for examples of co-branded and joint offerings. You can tell when a third party is involved in the offering, and we share customer information related to those transactions with that third party.
For reasons such as improving personalization of our service, we might receive information about you from other sources and add it to our information.
On the point of what information they record as provided by you they say the following:
You provide most such information when you use A9.com to search or otherwise communicate with us. For example, you provide information when you enter search terms; set bookmarks; download and use our toolbar; communicate with us by phone, e-mail, or otherwise; and employ our other services. As a result of those actions, you might supply us with personally identifiable information or information about things that interest you.
So if you are still considering using a9.com at this point, they also offer the following advice to you:
If you would prefer not to be recognized on our site, we recommend that you use our alternate service located at generic.A9.com. On generic.A9.com, we will not recognize your A9.com or Amazon.com cookie. Information we gather on generic.A9.com will not be used in our data analysis (other than to detect abuse) and will not be used to personalize the services we offer you.
While I like what they have done, I think I will stick to generic.a9.com for now.
200 posts, 1 year, new design and blogging
Last night I posted my 200th entry. The blog as it is has been around since 6th September 2003, the older entries in the archives were added all at once with some back dates to the time they were written. I updated the theme of the site on the 1 year anniversary to what you see today. Some stats:
These stats exclude all my own machines, and only include browsers that supports javascript or loads the stats image, so this excludes spam bots, rss aggregators, search engines etc.
Number of unique visitors: 8201
Search Engines: Google 5439, Yahoo! 170, AOL 40, MSN 6, Virgilio 6
Top 5 keywords used in search strings: allofmp3 (726), devco (621), mutt smtp (336), openssl frontend (79), nikon d70 reviews (69)
Browsers used: IE6; WinXP 3436, IE6; Win 2000 1046, IE6; Win98 307, Moz 1.6; WinXP 301, Netscape 6; MacOSX 284
Browsers Total: IE 5591, Mozilla 1683, Netscape 610, Opera 242, Konqueror 35
Operating Systems: WinXP 4222, Win 2000 1576, Linux 726, Win 98 539, Mac OS X 351
I started the blog to have a place to put stuff where I can find it again and also to experiment with the blogging revolution and some of the technologies it employes such as personal CMS systems and RSS/Atom. I also wanted to discover the workings of the new wave of personal sites that interact with each other, where people comment on the same topics and know about each others posts using sites like Feedster and Technorati.
It has been interesting to see the positive growth and improvements made in this regard mostly by a grassroots movement but it has also been interesting to note the success and failures of businesses trying to capitalize on this new media.
Feedster is the leader in weblog searching and while being useful often suffers under its own success with slow response, downtime or other issues. And still I have to wonder about its place in the market given that I almost never see referrers from it – which may be an indication that only a small % of web browsers use it – and also to see it suffer under the growing pains of RSS such as inclusion of paid for ads that appear in the RSS feeds in their search results. Google now at least fetches my RSS feeds often – they may be checking for updates on weblogs.com since they are quite quick off the mark once I posted something. New articles appear in the Google search results very quickly after publishing.
For me, Google is still king and I hardly ever use Feedster for anything, and usually once I used it, I go and do a Google query in any case since it tends to be more relevant and useful results. Often I do the Google query while waiting for feedster to produce results and find what I wanted by the time feedster managed to render a page. I know the Feedster team has added some new machines and stuff recently and indeed it is a bit faster now.
Other useful sites like Technorati has a great idea and good software but it is often unusable due to load and so forth, hopefully the recent cash injection they received will allow them to upgrade their service and be a useful resource again, for now it is just too irritating to sit and wait for their progress indicator that never gets anywhere most of the time.
Photoshop Color Toning
It has been a long time since I posted a tutorial in my Photography Tutorials section so I thought I will add one that shows a new feature and combine some of the older ones to produce a final result.
I will use Photoshop to change the overall color of an image by applying a color tone to it. This effect only works on a small amount of images but used correctly it can be valuable technique.
The sample image is one I took on Trafalgar Square in London recently and features the well known fountains. These fountains are made from a bronze material and has the typical green cast due to oxidation. I wanted to create a special photo by showing these fountains as they may have looked without the oxidation.
Lockergnome RSS spammers
As before [1, 2] I will mention feeds that I unsubscribe from not because I find them boring but because they annoyed me to the point of unsubscribing.
Lockergnome is usually a pretty good resource for lots of things, in particular I read their RSS & Atom Tips in my aggregator but I am now unsubscribing from this useful resource due to spam.
(edited to remove the name of the company advertising)
I can understand the need for advertising in RSS feeds and will tolerate it in full text feeds, I will however not tolerate it in feeds that only show you a snippet of the story forcing you to open their page and view their banner ads. They are already seeing revenue from me when I click on their RSS item – when it is interesting enough – so why should I also see the ads in my RSS reader. If they want to see ad revenue from me, then they should feel an incentive to get me to open the full article in my browser by posting interesting content. As it stands, they just annoy me.
IOL RSS Feeds
Via MJ whose blog I discovered by a referer entry in my logs I notice that IOL has RSS Feeds for their news, this is excellent news since I always liked their news but could never be bothered using an actual browser to read their site regularly.
TCP Header Analysis
I have been spending a lot of time looking at network dumps of SMPP traffic to assist in debugging some network issues. I was a bit rusty on some of the finer details of all the various TCP packet headers and my reference was at home. Google found an amazing resource on firewall.cx titled Anylising the TCP header.
The document spans 7 sections covering the following:
Section 1: Source & Destination Port Number
Section 2: Sequence & Acknowledgement Numbers
Section 3: Header Length
Section 4: TCP Flag Options
Section 5: Window Size, Checksum & Urgent Pointer
Section 6: TCP Options
Section 7: Data
It is beautifully colorful and well written. Something that can easily be passed on to someone who does not know a lot about networking or as a simple resource to just catch up on forgotten knowledge.
Firewall.cx has huge amounts of very good documentation on it, well worth poking around in for networking people.
Licence
