Google Chrome; Hello Advertising
September 04, 2008

So, I seriously gave Google Chrome a try last night while browsing the intarwebs and concluded that there's one serious barrier to adoption of Chrome by FireFox users: annoying advertising. FireFox itself is superb at blocking popups and when combined with the Adblock extension and disabling of Flash, annoying advertising blocking reaches almost 100%. While browsing with Chrome last night I was incredibly annoyed by having to step backwards in time to a day when you actually had to *view* annoying advertising. I keep saying annoying advertising, because I don't mean things like Google text ads or Yahoo Content Match. I mean, jumping dancing poodles dancing across your browser window to lower mortgage rates.

Chrome's interesting, and it certainly blends into Vista nicely - but until there's ad blocking I think its going to be incredibly difficult to get FireFox users to seriously consider it. Internet Explorer users are a different story since IE doesn't really know too much about ad blocking and still displays epileptic fit inducing banner ads.

Can We Stop Reposting Digg and Reddit Entries?
January 05, 2007

So, I'm starting to get really bored with blogs and the internet as a whole. Why? I'm getting bored because of sites like Digg and Reddit. Don't get me wrong, they're great sites and I love their content. My problem is that a large portion of the good blogs are starting to discover them and are no longer writing their own content. If I see a post on Digg or Reddit, I can be assured that my favorite blogs will be reposting about it tomorrow. I just really wish that I could weed out all of the reposts and only see real new content.

A plea then... Stop reposting Digg and Reddit articles. We don't care, because we've already seen them ourselves before you did. Go out there and make or find some original content already!

That is all.

37Signals' Campfire; Grade-A Consulting Software
November 10, 2006

So I've been doing a bit of contracted web design lately and have been loving it. What I don't love however, is trying to convey and be conveyed to exactly what a client wants. One can quickly find themselves deep in a nest of 17 e-mails all saying different things - like I did last night.

Enter 37 Signals' Campfire. Basically, a nice slick web-based IM system that allows you and a client to quickly and easily converse and convey your ideas to one another. You can quickly post screenshots, word documents and the like. In true 37signals fashion, it's a joy to use with a simple "upload file" button that pops a file right into the middle of your conversation to be viewed by any other parties you've chosen. It even automatically logs your conversation, so it's all laid out for later.

It's a quick, painless and free signup for the most simple plan - and can really help you out if you're in a pinch and need to talk with a client.

Trend Watching - Increasing Size
September 24, 2006

I've noticed an odd trend in a lot of websites lately. While most monitor resolutions seem to have stabilized at 1280x1024, newer websites are increasingly demanding more and more real estate. Specifically, they keep on getting wider. I'm noticing that more and more - I'm having to make my browser far wider than I wish, just to be able to see all of the content and avoid a horizontal scrollbar. One perfect example is Lifehacker. I used to be able to maintain a nicely sized browser with this site, yet their recent redesign (even after I remove the advertising) forces me to resize my browser. Evil.

FireFox Beta 2.0, A Little Better
July 10, 2006

I downloaded the latest beta launch candidate for Mozilla FireFox 2.0 today. The new features are pretty nice but still minor. I certainly wouldn't say it counts as an entire major release number.

New Features

• Each tab has its own close button - you can now close any tab from anywhere.
• Better incorporation of RSS feeds - you can select a feed reader to feed a newly found RSS feed to. This is still not as nice as Flock's built-in feed reader that happily displays updates to you while you're browsing.
• Spell checking in app - A nice addition for us bloggers who spend a lot of time typing in little textareas.

All in all, these are some nice improvements. The close buttons on the tabs are much appreciated. I've frequently closed the wrong window while trying to rid myself of a different one, so this will be a definite plus.

I definitely wouldn't say that these improvements should warrant a version increase. Maybe there's more in the background that's been updated, so I probably should read the release notes before complaining. I'll keep you guys updated as I use it more.

Flock - The Coolest Browser on the Street
June 21, 2006

I've been running Flock for the last couple days - and have fallen totally in love with it. Their latest browser release, built on the FireFox engine brings home some kick-ass Web 2.0 style features and a wonderful user experience to boot!

I've been looking out for a nice RSS feed reader for awhile and have used the Sage extension for FireFox to get the job done in the meantime. While it works, it doesn't really look that great - and it's hard to get an overview. Flock's (by contrast) built-in feed reader looks gorgeous and behaves like a doll to boot! It has options for marking all feeds read once you've visited their "feed" page, sorting into collections, and a main page for viewing summaries of all of your feeds. It's really quite nice.

I also enjoy Flock's bookmark handling. Rather than a nested collection of folders, it breaks everything down into individual "collections" or categories. You can access all of your bookmarks on a central "library" list, so if you know you've got the link to Whowhatsit's Widget Farm somewhere - you can find it.

Flock also has a wonderful "livesearch" function. When you begin typing in the search bar, it begins suggesting results from Yahoo. While I don't like Yahoo, it's really keen to get results instantly. Everything is configurable, of course - so while you may have to use Yahoo's livesearch - you can still submit your search to google.

aDid I mention the UI? Flock's theme is one of the best I've seen in awhile. It's clean, modern, and has just the right amount of color. It's great. Among the UI changes instituted, are individual close buttons for each of the tabs. I really got spoiled in Safari, and hate that Firefox hasn't added them yet. It makes being sure you're closing the right Window a cinch.

So if you've got a moment, and want to try some cool new software - check out Flock. Don't be scared by the "beta" warning. I haven't had one crash or unexpected behavior.

As a side note, I really need to cleanup my image code. It's terrible. I apologize that these don't look that great.

RSS Is Back
June 20, 2006

I've started using Flock's newest beta, and have fallen in love with it. The builtin feed reader is absolutely superb - so I've gone and fixed my own RSS feed. Hopefully everything still works OK in my RSS conversion code.

Best Quote of All Time
April 26, 2006

<compubomb> html works similar to C

Oh Really?
April 17, 2006

I love the internets. One would never find these sorts of things in traditional print or broadcast media. Also, SRL has a BBS up. Sexy!

Kickin' It With the New Style
April 08, 2006

So, there's been yet another redesign. This time I'm going against the pastel colors of Web 2.0, and bringing up some nice monochromatic roots. I've been working on this design for about two weeks now, and I'm happy to say that it's finally releasable. Where did most of that time go? Towards getting it to work in IE6.0. I stumbled across some wonderful bugs in IE, where depending on the size of the window (I mean, down to the pixel. One pixel to big worked, one pixel too small didn't, one pixel smaller than to small did) the layout would just go insane with the divider bars taking over the screen, and the left columns encroaching on the text.

I think all of that's behind me though. I made some modifications to the size, and while IE can't handle centering the main div - it doesn't fuck up the way it used to.

Anyway, this is why there haven't really been any updates to the site. I'm happy to introduce to you my new design!

Astound (Now Charter) Filters BitTorrent
February 25, 2006

So, since Astound was recently eaten by Charter I've noticed a lot of bad things happening on their network. Firt they screwed up their SMTP servers. How exactly do you screw up an SMTP server? It's one of the easiest things to configure, especially since I'm supposing that Charter runs Windows. Now comes the final evil, which will probably cause me to switch to Qwest DSL.

Charter filters BitTorrent. At first, I thought I was just getting screwed up torrents - or that my client wasn't working correctly. But no, after my latest download of Kubuntu being at about 650k after three days; I called Astound. They confirmed that Charter (who owns Astound's network now) filters P2P-style traffic. I'm completely annoyed. I'm paying 35$/m for a slow connection (1.5Mps) , and I can't even download the latest Linux distro via my desired protocol. Video game demos included, I now must "wait in line" at FilePlanet, and the like, since Charter's network won't allow the venerable BitTorrent protocol.

I'm hoping that Qwest's DSL isn't too terribly expensive, since St. Cloud, MN now has but two ISPs (No, I'm not counting ClearWire since they service such a small portion of the area). Go go gadget duopoly! On the flip side, I could move to a town down the road containing but a bar, a church, and a grocery store - yet still experience the same quality of internet access as St. Cloud!

Why Big Is In
February 01, 2006

So, everyone thinks that 37Signals and the great big Web 2.0 is responsible for the rise in legibly sized fonts - I don't believe it. I was looking at 37signals.com the other day on my bosses' machine. My boss stilll runs Windows 2000, and consequently is one of the last bastions of non-anti-aliasing that I've been exposed to. The web looks like shit on his machine, and I know why. That fancy anti-aliasing that every major operating system now supports is necessary for "big" to be "good". It makes the text look so incredibly sexy, and I felt like patting it on the back today. Good job anti-aliasing!

New Design!
January 15, 2006

Well, David redesigned his page (props btw, lovely design) - and I couldn't be upstaged! I'm still refining this one, but I don't have the massive quantities of time in one sitting that I used to. It's very Web 2.0, this is the first really white theme that I've done in a long time; I also used graphics! *gasp* It's been forever since I've used them, as I always try to make my pages as tiny and fast loading as possible. I just... really love gradients. :)

I haven't tested the page on anything but my machine, but it's running FireFox - so I can't imagine anything else will render it too badly. Oh, I ignore IE 6.0. Flarking piece of shit it is. People willing to use it just don't register on my radar of individuals I care for. :) Even James switched to FireFox, and he's a diehard Microsoft fan.

On a related note, why do ordinary people refer to FireFox as Mozilla?

Why You Should Always Authenticate
December 30, 2005

Some more astute readers of my site may have noticed it go down last night, and then this morning that all but one of my categories had disappeared. I'm making an admission now, I'm a bad person. When I program personally, I sometimes let security walk out the window - this is an instance where I made such a mistake, and won't let it happen again.

See, I locked up all of the blog creation, deletion, and updating portions of the site - as that's really important to me; but I left scaffolding in place for the categories. Completely unpassword protected. Now, I didn't really care about reading about hacking into the scaffolding to add password protection because it doesn't really matter to me if my categories disappear, or suddenly turn pornographic.

Well, I made a small update to the code this weekend - and left in a bad link when you clicked on the category. The link led you to the category scaffolding, instead of to the category itself. Not a terrible mistake, but a mistake nonetheless. Well, Google cache came along last night and began gobbling up all of the destroy links. So, obviously all of my categories were gone. :(

I've recreated most of them, and might actually create a new one, video games, since I received both a Nintendo Gamecube and a DS for Christmas. I can now participate in the plethora of sexy console entertainment that I've so long admonished.

Anyway. Moral of the story, always use authentication. I'll post up my very simple Ruby on Rails authentication code later on this evening, keep an eye out if you're interested in that.

How Do You Access My Site?
December 01, 2005

Solarce introduced me to the wonders of RSS, and now I'm curious - how do you guys access my site? Do you go on the web, or do you just use RSS? If you use the web, do you guys access it via phantomdata.com, phantomdata.ath.cx/blog/list, or through a bookmark? I've never setup routes for phantomdata.ath.cx, to prevent scanning picking up a valid site; does anyone ever try to go directly to phantomdata.ath.cx?

Upgrading Rails
November 10, 2005

I'm upgrading Ruby on Rails as we speak. Hopefully everything will go OK. Don't be surprised if there's a little downtime.

Up and Down
October 11, 2005

The site will be up and down tonight. I'm setting up LVM2 as per Grelli's suggestion, and with JFS per solarce's suggestion. Wish me luck.

Another New Feature!
October 10, 2005

Ruby On Rails makes things a lot easier for content management than PHP. I'm up in the air as to if it would still be speedy for a web application (like the one I'm working on for my work, and that we're in the beta phase for) - but for content management it kicks ass.

The comments system now includes a URI field, so that you guys can post your web site URIs - if you choose. It's ... optional! Anyway, I need to add people to my "People I Like" section, but I always forget to until after I've lost the URI.

Oh, and PostgreSQL made this switch a lot easier. I'm not certain if mySql contains an "ALTER TABLE table ADD COLUMN" function, but PostgreSQL's documentation showed it right in front of me. I was always just dumping my mySql tables, and then importing them back into a brand new table.

I return!
October 09, 2005

It's finally back, and better than ever. I'm no longer running the frontend for the site on my old 133, I've finally upgraded my server to a whopping 700Mhz! I know, you're all jealous. I have to pay for power now, so I had to consolidate. On the plus side, I'll be working on a RAID-0 array (software, of course) for it - so I'll be able to easily find all of my files - instead of searching across the myriad of disks that I have.

Phantomdata.com's sporting a new design, and some of the underlying code has been rewritten. The category listing (on the nav bar) now displays the number of items in the category, and the individual category nav no longer uses ajax - for accessibility purposes. I've also included a delicious feed, so that I won't clog up the posting area with all of my posts of interest. :) It's an actual RSS file that's mirrored on my hard disk with wget, so it's rarely actually putting a load on delicious' servers.

Let me know what you guys think!