Mischievous Ramblings II

iDisemvowelU

In order to assist Sara with managing comments, I have created a disemvoweling utility application for Mac OS X.  I call it iDisemvowelU (control-click to download).  It was remarkably easy to create now that I seem to have finally wrapped my head around the basic Mac programming environment.

It works very simply.  Once you have started iDisemvowelU, just:

1. Get the text you want to disemvowel into your clipboard.  This would typically be done by using Cut (Command X) or Copy (Command C).
2. Click on the 'i Disemvowel U!' button.  The original text will be displayed in the left hand view, the disemvoweled text in the right hand view, and the disemvoweled text is also put into your clipboard in place of the original text.
3. Now you just Paste (Command V) the disemvoweled text wherever you want it.  Typically that might be wherever the original text was :-).

Yes, Comments are broken…

it's because of some of the anti-comment-spam stuff. I'm trying to decide whether I should fix it or just move over to TypePad or something where I don't have to worry about it.

Thanks for trying, though.

The Game Manager

The Game Manager is live!

I've started a new blog dedicated to the subjects of software development and managing software development. Many of my posts on those subjects have been copied from this blog to there, and I'm officially declaring it live as of today.

I expect to do most of my posting on those subjects over there from now on, and I hope to create at least one substantial post weekly.

Hope you'll come by and visit.

Upgrade!

As you can see, there has been a change. I've upgraded from Wordpress 1.2 to 1.5. There will be further work to get my own look and feel back and to see if I can get the hacked functionality back. In the meantime, let me know if you find anything that's not working.

Update (2005.02.23 3:39 pm local time):

I'm just about there. I've got a theme "evan" set up for my old look & feel, and the things that are missing are: 2 plugins which show recent entries and recent comments; and my message-of-the-day code, which has moved into part of the theme and isn't working right yet.

Soon....

Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam

First it was comment spam. Switching to WordPress seems to have largely fixed that, although I've had to do a bit of modification here and there.

Then along came trackback spam. Since I'm not big on trackbacks anyway, simple disabling them was enough, except that I kept getting notified about spammy porn trackbacks that wouldn't show up but clogged up my admin UI. So I've done a bit of modification here and there and perhaps this is now a thing of the past.

Perhaps not.

Tragedy of the Commons, Internet style.

New Technology!

OK, so it's not new to other sites. But it's new here.

Check out my update of this old post. Now we have MOVies!

New Look!

What do you think?

Comment Spam

No sooner did I post to a mailing list that I was having much less trouble with comment spam using WordPress than I'd had with MT, I find myself getting comment spammed.

You're not seeing most of it because the automatic moderation tools are better now than they were in the old version of MT I was using. But I've still deleted a couple of hundred spams in the last couple of days.

So I'm making a change that might help. This post and some comments I'll add to it are my testbed to see if I lost any functionality.

Feel free to ignore.....

Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project

I have a long-standing interest in what is referred to as "the Japanese internment" during World War II, sparked largely by a friend who's mother was in a camp as a young child and repeated trips from Bishop, CA south past Manzanar.

Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project is a good site for material on the events.

There's been a lot of coverage in the blogosphere recently because Michelle Malkin has a book out claiming that the internment was a military necessity and that racism and economic opportunism had nothing to do with it. Google her and you'll find a lot of other references to her work and the debunking thereof.

Orcinus in particular is a good source for information on hate crimes in general and he points to some excellent rebuttals to Malkin.

Many-to-Many: Wikipedia Reputation and the Wemedia Project

Many-to-Many: Wikipedia Reputation and the Wemedia Project references a current discussion (and experiment) on the validity and reputation of the Wikipedia, the open source encyclopedia.

The experiment by Alex Halavais was to place 13 demonstrably wrong items into the Wikipedia, with the expection (on Alex's part, at least) that they would last 2 weeks and then he would remove them.

Apparently, none of them lasted more than a couple of hours.

Joi Ito on the subject