Sci-Fi Hi-Fi

The other day I finally got around to deleting all of the comment spam my weblog has accreted over the past few months, only to discover that the numerous attacks I’ve suffered have had the unfortunate side effect of deleting a lot of my existing comments! I’m not sure how this could have happened, but I think it has something to do with the weird, hacked-up version of the standalone Moveable Type comments script I’m using. Suffice to say, I no longer trust my Blosxom setup.

This, combined with the fact that I attended the WordPress 100,000 party the other night, and the fact that Jonas Luster (one of the first people I got to know in California) is now employee #1 of WordPress, Incorporated, and the fact that I like MarsEdit and want weblog software that allows me to use it with a minimum of fuss, has finally convinced me to switch to WordPress.

(Update: The above statement is no reflection on Allen Hutchison’s XML-RPC implementation for Blosxom, BXR. In fact, the existence of BXR was one of the only things that kept me from switching a long time ago. My switch had a lot more to do with the other factors I mentioned, while WordPress’ out-of-box XML-RPC support was merely a nice perk.)

I mention this to you, the reader, because it means things are going to be a bit messy around here for awhile. I managed, for example, to get all of my old posts imported into my new WordPress rig, but not their associated comments. I also have a difficult task ahead of me in getting links from my posts to other posts pointing at the correct WordPress permalinks (and setting up an .htaccess file that maps my old Blosxom permalinks to their new Wordpress equivalents). Since I don’t have a lot of spare time on my hands, it might take me awhile to set all of this right.

Hopefully in the end it will all be worth it, though. WordPress 1.5’s admin interface already feels incredibly refined and easy to use compared to the rickety collection of Perl variables I used to negotiate to configure my Blosxom setup. And the fact that I can now approve comments before they’re posted on the site should more or less solve my spam problem.

I just can’t resist pointing it out: in this ETech photo (by the multi-talented James Duncan Davidson), Jeff Bezos looks an awful like a televangelist performing a faith healing. And people say Apple is a cult!

If you happen to be where I wish I was right now (in San Diego at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference), you might want to stop by the Apple Booth and say hello to my co-worker (and the Cocoalicious project’s minister of search) Andrew Wooster, who will be there tomorrow morning. He’s an agreeable fellow and will be glad to chat about anything from OS X to the web to the superiority of California’s weather.

I suppose we all knew it was only a matter of time, but when I checked my mail from the floor of MacWorld today, I discovered that I had received ill tidings from none other than the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (which, incidentally, sounds like it should be headed my C. Montgomery Burns). Actually, it was from Dreamhost, but I don’t hold it against them:

Hello Laurence,

We have received a formal DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notice
regarding allegedly infringing content hosted on your site. The specific
items in question are as follows:

Contents of: http://www.scifihifi.com/beatles/audio/

The party making the complaint (International Federation of the
Phonographic Industry), claims under penalty of perjury to be or
represent the copyright owner of these works. Pursuant to 17 U.S.C.
512(c), we have removed access to the files in question.

So, I hope everyone got them while they could, because I’ll no longer be able to host my Beatles Christmas Records site. I eagerly await the digitally remastered CD that must surely be coming out in its place, and which would necessitate its removal.

Many thanks to all of the people who have emailed advice about my comment spam problem. In particular, I’d like to thank co-worker and fellow Blosxom user Stuart Morgan, who sent me the .htaccess file he uses to block common spam offenders, along with other advice. I think I’ve got the situation well enough in hand to re-enable comments—we’ll see how it goes.

I’ve always somehow managed to avoid the comment spam that seems to plague so many other webloggers, but I guess the golden age is over, because I’ve been under attack for the past few days now. I’m going to have to temporarily (and crudely) disable comments until I can figure out how to deal with the problem. Guess I might have to move up the schedule on my Wordpress transition…

I realize that this is only taunting those of you non-CVS people waiting for the next release, but I thought I’d point out that Armin Briegel has posted some sample scripts demonstrating his Cocoalicious AppleScript support. From the looks of it, querying your del.icio.us bookmarks through AppleScript should now be quite simple, thanks to Armin’s pervasive support for the “where” clause. Bulk imports should also be child’s play thanks to the “make new post with properties” command. Once again, three cheers for Armin: top notch work, old boy!

One of the best things about living in the Bay Area is the unusual amount of exposure it gives you to people from other countries. Yesterday evening, for example, I went to a German acquaintance’s house in the Mission for a holiday get-together centered on a drink known as feuerzangenbowle—a flaming concotion which, if I understand correctly, comes from a movie of the same name. We also had a good time watching said movie, despite the fact that only about half the people present spoke German. The movie is essentially a farce—a college comedy not unlike Animal House or Back to School—and it’s amazing to see just how much of the humor and information about peoples’ relationships is conveyed though simple things like body language and intonation.

Hmm—no grand thesis there, I guess. I just haven’t “journaled” for awhile and felt like talking about feuerzangenbowle.

Every once in awhile, someone asks me to add a toolbar to Cocoalicious. As much as I appreciate the fine art of the OS X toolbar icon, however, I’ve always balked at this request. The main reason is that I’m very keen on keeping the Cocoalicious interface minimalist, and the standard Cocoa toolbar is, well, anything but. Cocoalicious also happens to use a metal textured window (yes, I know, boo hiss—cry me a river), and I have come to feel that the average OS X toolbar icon looks kind of lame on metal (see Adam Betts on this).

I definitely recognize the need for more intuitive access to some of the app’s more common functions, though, so I asked my brother to design a standard set of those little, plastic-looking buttons used in Safari. Always one to rise to the challenge, Bobby produced a lovely set of 100 icons (50 in the off state, 50 in the on state), which he calls “Expedition.” It’s now available from his site for $75. I’ve already bought a set for use in Cocoalicious, so look for them to appear in a future build.

I don’t think I really took enough away from Bloggercon III to muster any sort of coherent essay, so I thought I’d just write up a few random observations:

• Dave Winer’s “unconference” concept isn’t a bad idea, but I think it was executed poorly. The “free discussion” model that Dave is trying to promote isn’t new—in fact it has actually been done successfully in college classrooms for years. The key is that the moderators need not abdicate their roles as discussion leaders, but rather should actively structure the conversation and guide it toward some conclusions. The problem with the Bloggercon sessions was that any speaker could steer the discussion into complete tangents, based purely on whatever nits they had to pick. The people who run next year’s Bloggercon sessions should try taking a literature class to see how class discussion is properly managed.
• The idea of Bloggercon as a “user conference” was confusing, and left many of the “techies” and vendors in the audience unclear whether or not they were allowed to speak up at all. It didn’t help that Dave Winer, true to form, shut down Bob Wyman in the most pointed way possible during Robert Scoble’s “Overload” session, alleging (I think unfairly) that he was promoting commercial interests. This, of course, ensured that “meta-discussions” about the rules of the conference regularly distracted from the matters at hand.
• As is usually the case with conferences, the best part was hanging out with people. I particularly enjoyed talking to Dan Wood about what I’m doing with Cocoal.icio.us and what he’s up to these days (an enigmatic secret project), Scott Knaster about a super cool upcoming project of his, Dori Smith about an equally cool upcoming project of hers (sorry I can’t give more details on these things), Min Jung Kim about working on her roommate’s campaign for San Francisco schoolboard, Courtney Patubo about all the blog meetups I’m missing these days, and Tantek Çelik about his, shall we say, pointed criticisms of OS X and his experiments with hCard and hCal.
• At any given time, I think only about half the audience was paying attention to the sessions. I personally was ready to commit a whole bunch of Cocoal.icio.us changes to CVS by the closing session. In that sense, at least, I suppose the conference was highly productive.
• Stanford Law School’s lecture rooms have Aeron chairs. If my university experience had included Aeron chairs, I think I probably would have spent a lot more time in class!