MindlessCode.net

Sometimes I’ll take fairly random screenshots on my computer. Here’s my latest selection:

A Job Advertisment on The Daily WTF. A little ironic, in my opinion.

When Batteries Die:

taj@moria:~$ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info|grep mAh|head -n2
design capacity: 6000 mAh
last full capacity: 65157 mAh


taj@moria:~$ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state|grep m[AV]
remaining capacity: 65157 mAh
present voltage: 12600 mV


That’s on a Intel Pentium 4 2GHz processor w/ 1GB of memory. Nice. (If you can’t read it, Firefox is using 93.4% of my CPU and 12.2% of my RAM)

GMail shows the weirdest “related content” sometimes…

On a side note, I’ve finally gotten a Flickr Account. It’s got some of my favourite photos from 2006. Who knows, there might be one of you there. Actually not, because “you” don’t read this.

Oh, and I’ve lost 7 keys of my laptop keyboard now. 1 Ctrl, 1 Alt, 4 Arrow Keys, and End. A new keyboard (if you can find it) costs at least $100. I’ll suffer.

I recently had to export a photo gallery running Gallery 2 to Flickr. I guess Gallery 2 was pretty good, but it took A LOT of CPU power and my hosting account was disabled a few too many times because of it. So, I broke down, downloaded all of Gallery 2’s files off the website, setup the database, and started groking the code. Finally I got a very ugly script that sorta worked. phpFlickr saved me a lot of time! Thanks!

For the Googlebot, and people coming from Google who are interested: Go here

More Googlebot indexing: Firefox 2.0 Autopackage

All I can say is that AAA totally rocks. AAA is a local theatre group made up of a bunch of teens who do all sorts of amazing acting in a basement theatre (which is also amazing, but that’s a different story). I just went to see Wicked: The Musical a few hours ago…it was totally awesome. You guys totally rock(ed) my world! (Although if you actually read this, then I’m a little worried–but leave a comment and say hi!. :))

Yeah, yeah, so you all already know, but Google released Google Checkout today. It doesn’t exactly seem like a “PayPal” killer, in that it’s an easy way to move cash around. Instead, it’s a way for people to buy stuff without creating a million account/password pairs and sending out their credit card info to everyone. Very Cool Stuff. It’s got what looks like a decent web API, which I’ve been toying with. I’m not sure if I’ll make www.wildgardenseed.com use it yet… Maybe yes, maybe no. Probably yes, though.

It seems like it might require some serious osCommerce hacking, as Google Checkout isn’t just a way of paying…it’s more a way for users to keep track of their web orders, view info about them, etc, all in one place. This means that the merchent needs to send the order data to Checkout in the form of a base64 encoded XML file. This means that the user isn’t entering all their info into osC, which means the order never shows up in the osCommerce admin section. I guess with a lot of hacking, it could be made to show up, but it would be hard. So…I’m leaning toward just having the product show up in Google Checkout and manually dealing with it there. We’ll see…

Need new music? Go check out Jonathan Coulton. You’ve probably already heard of him–his song Code Monkey was posted up on Slashdot a few months ago. Anyway, go check his music out! Chiron Beta Prime, Till the Money Comes, Madelaine, When You Go, The Presidents, Furry Old Lobster, Curl, and That Spells DNA…check them out! And the other too, of course.

Sleeeppp…iissss…gettttiinng…meeeeeeeee.

Dammit, Google is always "stealing" "my" ideas! When you go to http://www.google.com, they must use some fancy AJAX scripting to suck the contents of your brain out through your fingertips and into a secret government database somewhere. And they get to take a look at it too.

Whatever, that probably looks really stupid.

But yes, I did have an idea very similar (almost exactly the same?) as Google’s Browser Sync Firefox extention a few months ago. Right down to encrypting/decrypting the info client-side. Let’s call my idea “OpenProfile” for now. My idea was to have a decentralized system where users are identified by their email address (e.g., tajmorton@gmail.com). The client would try to connect to gmail.com and log in with tajmorton. If it failed because Google wasn’t running an OpenProfile server, then the client would go and ask a centralized OpenProfile server who is responsible for providing service to tajmorton@gmail.com. The client would then connect to that server like normal.

Although this makes the system somewhat centralized, the entire network would not fall over if the centralized box went offline. It does encourage use of a universally unique identifier (no two people can have the same email address), which I think is really needed. It would be so nice to be able to go to any forum, blog, website (slashdot, digg, kuro5hin, etc), and webservice and not have to go through the same hassle of registering, choosing an username, filling out your email address, name, etc, etc, etc. [1]

OpenProfile wouldn’t just be for your Firefox profile. My idea was that many applications could store their configuration in your OpenProfile account, and you could go from computer to computer carrying around your config info. Apps that could use OpenProfile off the top of my head:

• Web Browsers (bookmarks, saved passwords, etc)
• Email clients (account info)
• IM Clients (account info)
• RSS Feed Readers?
• Newsgroup readers?

Obviously other apps, too. For some applications, carrying around settings without data wouldn’t make too much sense (word processors, for example). OpenProfile would be for people on the road who just want to check their email and chat with their friends, not those who want to write their thesis/book/code at a cyber cafe computer. I guess OpenProfile could end up being a whole remote file system, but network file systems are always so terribly slow (unless a genius designs them).

That’s my rambling nothingness for the night…

[1] I guess this is what OpenID is trying to achieve, however they chose a website URL instead of an email address to identify people. I don’t fully understand the logic behind this, but it seems a bit weird to me, as not everyone has webpages, and some people have more than 1. Also, adoption currently sits at ~2 (LiveJournal and Blogger, TMK).

You probably already knew that, but I’ve been rereading Programming PHP while laying in bed being tired and sick :(. Nice reading material, I know, but I’m a geek, so go figure. I get to implement a photo gallery into osCommerce, fun! Maybe more fun than printing by drawing on a canvas–just maybe. So that’s my random, pointless post of the day–sorry.

Oh, and Happy Birthday Mary (hmm, that capitalization doesn’t look right at all)

“Interesting” search strings for wildgardenseed.com/Taj/blog, number of hits in (parens). In no order at all:

1. decrypt fiddler on the roof (2)
2. why did edward kasner need the word googol (1)
3. nickel creek and jail (1)
4. hmmm (3)
5. friday the 13th wav die and die (1)
6. pictures of hurxthal (1) — What is that from? Does anyone actually know my middle name?
7. “how to talk to a liberal” (1)
8. sqlite constant corrupter (1)
9. sanity promotional code (1) — WTF?

And that’s just for February.

I’m sitting here waiting for a 263MB document to print, it’s taking forever.

We went to a house concert last night, Joe Craven was the performer. Totally awesome! He played music on lots of “interesting” instruments that he built, including a trash can, a petrol can that was turned into a fretted bass, a 3 string “candolin” made out of a can of hominy, as well as “normal” instruments like the fiddle and mandolin. And don’t forget all the other crazy “instruments”, such as the toothpick cans (with toothpicks inside), tea caddies, angle food cake pan, and other random things. Truly amazing, I wonder if there’s anything that he couldn’t make music on. Wow!

OK, got that over with, now onto the title of this post. Web Services isn’t exactly the right term, but it’s close. By web services, I really mean email, blogging tools, image hosting, etc. OK, so email isn’t exactly a web service, but webmail is all the rage now, so I threw it in.

The question/conflict in my mind is:

Is it better to run your own webservice for yourself, or let someone else (who knows what they’re doing) run it for you?

Example: Wordpress is a nice piece of blogging software, but with Blogger everything “just works” and it “maintains itself.”

Sure, Wordpress works great, but look at Blogger–you just need to register and you’re automatically given a pretty interface to write in and a pretty interface that shows your posts/thoughts/random rantings. And for free. And you don’t need to worry about your MySQL this and PHP that. And you don’t need to know what this weird FTP thing is. And it just works, all the time. You don’t need to worry about your web host getting broken into, or renewing your domain and hosting, etc.

On the other hand: When you use Blogger, you are basically at the mercy of Google. They could say “we’re taking Blogger offline as of NOW” and take all your posts with them. You now are totally out of luck, you have no way to get your posts back (well, not true, you could use IA, but that’s a hack).

Or look at GMail:
Why do most people use it? I can hardly say that it’s because of the >1GB of storage. You can get that from Yahoo, Hotmail (IRCC), and other webmail providers. GMail wasn’t even the first. But everybody thinks GMail is cool and awesome. I’m guessing that’s because of the interface and features. Let’s admit it, the interface is nice. Labels and conversations are very cool and useful, (I can’t go back to Thunderbird now, conversations are a necessity of life for me now), and the fact that I can access my email from practically anywhere with the same UI is great too.

Of course, if Google were to come out tomorrow and say “Pay us $10/month or we’ll delete all your mail mail and lock you out”, I would be very unhappy. I would probably pay $10 for the first month, download my email via POP, and go back to IMAP. Now, I don’t think it’s very likely that this would happen, but it is possible.

The other side of the coin: Buy hosting and have your own email address accessable through POP/IMAP and probably some crummy Webmail interface. Of course, your email is now in your hands. You are responsible for maintaining your DNS records, making sure that your SMTP server isn’t rejecting mail, and paying your bills to keep all this running. You can, of course, pay someone else to do this for you, but you still need to make sure it’s working. The person you are paying doesn’t really care when your email isn’t working, they don’t notice right away when you start getting no email. You do, so you tell them to fix it, and they do. It is still your responsibility. With something like Gmail or Yahoo Mail, they have people who are paid to detect when something is wrong–I wouldn’t be suprized if they have someone watching the log files for suspicious activity, i.e., no email being sent or received.

What happens if you let your domain expire and someone buys it? Or what if your website goes down because it got broken into? Or the server goes down? How will people get ahold of you? How will your hosting company get ahold of you? I think that is is vital to have an email address that you do not control.

Anyway, I think the Blogger argument if different that the GMail one, but similar. If I could get the GMail interface on my domain with the mail stored in files/DBs that I control, then I would do that. I would probably have a gmail account @gmail.com too, but I would use the one I controlled as my main email. Would you?

In summary, I think it’s kind of scary that I have to run my own “web services”, and that I could do something really stupid like rm -rf *, or forget to pay my hosting bill, or let my domain name expire. On the other hand, it’s also kind of scary that I’m relying on someone like Google or Yahoo to now drop the ball and leave me in a lurch. But they know what they’re doing, right? They pay people to now do stupid things, right?

Whatever–this is a lame post, but you’re probably really tired of “I hacked on QuickI last night” and “The seed catalog still isn’t done” posts, I am too.

If someone wants to write an open source Gmail, please do, that would be great–save me from the big evil Google monster. Heh, um, yeah. I’d need to get my own dedicated machine then, that’d be, umm, expensive.

Now I get to write a photo gallery extention for www.wildgardenseed.com, what fun! osCommerce, MySQL, and PHP, here I come!

I just updated the Wild Garden Seed website to contain the 2006 catalog. Net increase of products: 5. Probably something like 10 new intros, and 5 dropped products, but I forget. Whatever.

I got an email from TrustCommerce, our credit card gateway provider–e.g., the guys who sit between us and our merchent account and take money. Heh, basically, when someone enters their credit card number into our website, TrustCommerce verifies that the info is correct and lets the order proceed (that’s what we pay them for, anyway, but this morning they were telling a customer that we didn’t take cards that started with the first 4 digits they had on their card. It was a MasterCard, which we do take. I ran the card through manually, and it worked fine).

Anyway, I got an email from them yesterday:

Valued Client -
In accordance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards of Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover, Please be advised of the following:

Effective February 14, TrustCommerce will initiate a new password security feature that will require Vault passwords to be changed every 90-days. This card association mandate applies to all Members, merchants, and service providers that store, process or transmit cardholder data.

We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause, however we are required to enforce this policy on behalf of the card association.

First, they didn’t exactly make me happy by calling it “a new password security feature”.

Basically, instead of using the 1 strong (very!) password which protects the interface now, I need to change it to a new password every three months. Or they lock our account and we can’t accept cards. Ugg, another thing for my TODO list.

Now, what is the rational behind forcing people to change their password every 90 days (or 30 days, as it is in some places). From how I see it, it can’t possibly make your account any more secure–in fact, it probably makes your account less secure (people writing down their passwords, making them simple words, etc).

I guess the idea is that if evildude cracks your password, he only can mess around with your account for 90 days or whatever before he’s locked out. Not that that makes any sense. If someone gets access to your account; a) They’re likely to do all the damage they can right away, and b) they can change your password to lock you out. Great!

Oh well, I guess I’ll have to live in a world where I don’t get to set the password rules. *sigh*

Woah, it’s 11:30PM, maybe I should GOTO bed (laugh, it’s a joke, I don’t actually use GOTO).

…but I don’t know it. That is, for “Typing the name of someone you know into Google”. Have you ever done that? Yeah, I have. It gets kind of interesting when you type your own name in:

MindlessCode.net
Yes, I can see all of you who know me going “Taj looking nice and wearing a bow
tie? … All content copyright © 2005 by Taj Morton. All Rights Reserved. …
www.wildgardenseed.com/Taj/blog/ - 53k - Jan 29, 2006 - Cached - Similar pages

Umm…interesting.

Anybody know of any good how tos on printing with Qt? Send em my way!

XML-RPC seems to be pretty cool. I’ve been playing around with it a little bit, using PHP on the server, and QuteXR as a client. I’m finally getting the hang of it, and maybe I’ll put some XML-RPC stuff into QuickI. Maybe something to pull web orders out of the osCommerce DB and send it down to QuickI to create an invoice from.

Or maybe not, QuickI is taking shape, but very slowly. Qt rocks, C++ doesn’t exactly rock.

The Gaston Fiddle Contest is coming up February 4, yay!

Grrr, here I am rambling again, when I should be coding. Oh well, I’ll be eating dinner in a few minutes, so I guess I’m not going to write any more code…

I was singing “Where have all my files gone?” to the tune of “Where have all the flowers gone?” by Pete Seeger (I think). Kit suggested I shut up and start a geek band. Interesting idea, given I know about 3 Linux geeks who play the kind of music I play, one lives in Washington, and the other 2 in California–I’m in Oregon.

Night guys, this song rocks: