Slacy’s Blog

ScribeFire is a plugin for Firefox that allows in-browser blogging of links.  It looks pretty cool, and did a great job of automatically detecting my WordPress XMLRPC interface.  Check it out!

Powered by ScribeFire.

Ok, Update: ScribeFire adds a cheezy “Powered by ScribeFire” text that you can see above (I’m editing from WordPress now so that it won’t re-add the footer.) This is really cheezy, low class, and crap-tastic. Forget ScribeFire. Don’t use it. I’m uninstalling now. Sad…

This reminds me of old-skool “Shareware” that lets you use it for free but is really annoying, and asks you to pay for it to get rid of annoyingness. Thats really not acceptable when WordPress itself is free and easy to use. I’ll just have to find something like this thats better…

I’ve updated my solar stats pages with 30-day and 90-day reports. Take a look!

So, if you need something to make you smile (and you’re a cat lover) then check out I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER. I’m not sure what it is, but these make me chuckle every time!

I’ve been doing some work on a baby name explorer web app, and I needed a good C++ implementation of the double metaphone algorithm. There are several C and C++ implementations mentioned on the web site, but most of them are chock full of usage-specific junk, like Perl strings, Microsoft Visual Studio cruft, etc. So, I took the C implementation from the Perl module, removed all the perl string code, and replaced in with STL strings.

It works great, and I’m on my way to a proper baby name explorer web app. Here’s the derivative C++ double-metaphone implementation.

U.S. residents are the second least likely people to believe in evolution. Only Turkey has a lower rate of belief in evolution.

Too bad I’m gonna be “under the knife” today, otherwise I’d go to Yuri’s Night ‘07 thats happening at NASA Ames research center this year!

Well, I’ve finally found an easy way to use last.fm with the way I listen to music — which is all from my personal server.

It turns out that ampache has a builtin last.fm client support. So, anything that anyone plays using my ampache server automatically gets “scrobbled” to last.fm. I’ve currently set it up so all ampache users filter through the same last.fm user, but this can be changed.

So, you can see my user profile on last.fm. To see what I’m listening to, and my recommendations and stuff. Cool! Unfortunately, It took 5+ years (since the inception of audioscrobbler and last.fm) for there to be a workable solution to my flow. Thats kinda scary, but I’m happy that its finally working. Ampache rocks!

Learn more at http://mvsolar.blogspot.com

Well, I’ve finally become a convert. After using GMail for a while at work, I’ve become addicted enough to want to use it on my personal accounts. I looked into Google Apps For Your Domain, created an account, but decided not to go that way. Here’s how I saw things:

• Good: It totally takes over your e-mail.
• Bad: You have to change your MX record — no way to keep a copy of the e-mails yourself.
• Good: Its easy to use, and branded to “my domain” (like that really matters)
• ???: Can I unify my old GMail account with my Google Apps account? How?

Anyway, since I was really intent on keeping a copy of all my e-mail on my own server, I decided that I shouldn’t use Google Apps, and that I should just have postfix send an extra copy to my exsiting gmail account. That way, I get to keep the originals, as well as have the nice web interface that I’ve become addicted to. Its seeming to work out really well so far, and I’ve set it up to set the “reply-to” as my old account name, so unless people are really paying a lot of attention, they shouldn’t even be able to tell I’m using gmail.

Hooray!

(I’ll post here if there are any other problems in the future…)

So, I saw this post on technocrat about “A Million Penguins” which is a self-proclaimed “Wikinovel.” So, my first thought was that its a curiosity. The text seems a bit stilted, simple, disjointed. I’m not sure. I haven’t read the whole thing.

But, being familiar with the MediaWiki software, I decided to check out the Special:RecentChanges page, which shows all recent edits in reverse chronological order. Wow. Its awesome. Clicking on each diff and seeing people fix spelling mistakes, capitalization, subtle small changes to dialogue. Its all there. Its live and updating right now. Its sort of a bizarry voyeuristic look into collaborative novel writing. I’m totally fascinated.

Check it out.