Hummer Drivers Get More Tickets. A Lot More

WriteRoom for the iPhone quick review #apple

Just a quick update; I recently picked up WriteRoom for the iPhone, since I wanted a really, really, really basic notepad that could transfer notes back and forth between my iPod Touch and my Desktop. Turns out this was a very cool purchase. It's minimal, which I love, but it also has the ability to (among other ways to export) display your documents in a browser on your Desktop. This is by far not the most secure way to share documents, but on my closed little fortress it's no big deal.

So you turn on the temporary share in WriteRoom for the iPhone, you point your browser at the specified address, and you are presented with this..





Pretty frickin' suave. It will allow you to read documents and write documents from the browser window, so importing isn't a problem. An improvement (perhaps too much to ask) would be to have a drag and drop interface via a tiny Java applet. That could get complex though. Actually on second thought forget it, I like this app as simple as it is!

Technorati Tags: apple, iphone

Watchmen - Journal

Watchmen - Journal:

Watchmen - Journal A complex, multi-layered mystery adventure, the film is set in an alternate 1985 America in which costumed superheroes are part of the fabric of everyday society, and the “Doomsday Clock” – which charts the USA’s tension with the Soviet Union – is permanently set at five minutes to midnight. When one of his former colleagues is murdered, the washed-up but no less determined masked vigilante Rorschach sets out to uncover a plot to kill and discredit all past and present superheroes. As he reconnects with his former crime-fighting legion – a ragtag group of retired superheroes, only one of whom has true powers – Rorschach glimpses a wide-ranging and disturbing conspiracy with links to their shared past and catastrophic consequences for the future. Their mission is to watch over humanity…but who is watching the Watchmen? Directed by: Zack Snyder Starring: Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Carla Gugino, Jackie Earle Haley

Technorati Tags: movies, watchmen

Quick'n'Dirty: Create your own local podcast in iTunes

I wrote a Quick'n'Dirty script tonight so that I could import a bunch of assorted mp3 audio files on to my iPod in the form of a Podcast.

Why?

Imagine you have a bunch of lectures by a guy at Google recorded at a university. They are available as randomly assorted mp3 audio files. Rather than suffer through trying to listen to them one by one on your iPod, you use this script to create an XML file that fakes a podcast. By creating my own fake podcast in iTunes, I can take a series of mp3 audio files, set them in a specific order, listen to each one, and have the iPod automatically discard the file when I am done.

So here's what you do under Mac OS X 10.5, with this fugly script.. dir2pod.pl

Warning: This script comes with no warranties or licenses. :)

1. Go to Apple -> System Preferences -> Sharing


2. Enable Web Sharing


3. In your Sites directory, create Podcasts


4. Make sure Podcasts has read-only permissions for everyone (use APPL-I if you need to change the permissions)


5. Move dir2pod.pl into Podcasts, make sure it is executable (APPL-I again)


6. Copy your directory of mp3 audio files into Podcasts as a subdirectory (so for example, you'd have Podcasts/Myshow if your mp3 files were in a directory named Myshow)


7. Run the following command from The Shell
   

   $ cd ~/Sites/Podcasts && ./dir2pod.pl Myshow/ > Myshow.xml



8. In iTunes, go to Advanced -> Subscribe to Podcast... And enter;
   

   http://localhost/~YOURUSERNAME/Podcasts/Myshow.xml



9. If everything went well, iTunes will detect the podcast and will try and download the last file. Click on "Get All" to download all the files in that directory.

If you want to try this script out, but it's not working for you, pass me a comment and I'll see if I can tell you where it's going wrong.

RT @guykawasaki Music remixed by fish

No, not a DJ named Fish. Real fish.

Thanks to @guykawasaki for posting to Twitter. Via Make.

Submersed Songs | Canções Submersas from ?LEX on Vimeo.

Twitter attack wave; real site-cracking edition.

The latest round of Twitter attacks took place seemingly last night, and these new ones took advantage of a legitimate site security flaw in Twitter's interface to compromise accounts.

Quoting the Twitter blog:

The issue with these 33 accounts is different from the Phishing scam aimed at Twitter users this weekend. These accounts were compromised by an individual who hacked into some of the tools our support team uses to help people do things like edit the email address associated with their Twitter account when they can't remember or get stuck. We considered this a very serious breach of security and immediately took the support tools offline. We'll put them back only when they're safe and secure.

Blah, that's a pretty gloomy thing to come in to work on a Monday morning. I don't feel for the coders at Twitter...

But this highlights a bunch of points that normal people (non IT people!) don't yet appreciate;

Any computer connected to the Internet can be subject to a break in (especially the one you're reading this post from).

Big brand IT shops with big budgets aren't immune, even if they have been as diligent as they can with security.

Security is a cat and mouse game. As smart as security people are, the crooks are just as capable.

tl;dr .. We're back at That Password Thing... Change your twitter password as soon as you can. I doubt the public outside of Twitter will know how deep these guys got into the system before the compromise was noticed.

This blog isn't immune by any stretch of the imagination, so I'm not posting this from some mountaintop of smugness. It's only a matter of time before someone finds a hole in Wordpress, or a plugin I'm using, or in the base operating system of my server, and bam I'm pwnd.

Finally; we, being humans, need to move past our current methods of authentication. Not to some weird draconian Big Brother type system where one central command corporation has the full rights to this data, but an open system based on tried and true methods of cryptography and digital signatures.

Making it easy and portable to prove who you are is the next leap in online communications. Literally establishing trust relationships with real people using digital keys to solidify the trust of others in what is being posted.

Map CAPS-LOCK to Control in Ubuntu and Mac OS X.

I dislike CAPS-LOCK. It is a key that has not made much sense to me since the Commodore 64. It's one of those odd legacy keys from lord knows when in antiquity. One of the most annoying things about CAPS-LOCK is that it has great placement on the keyboard.

One of the most useful keys for a *NIX geek is Control. It's the all purpose key on the command line.

So if you're into Linux or FreeBSD or anything in between, mapping CAPS-LOCK to Control can really speed you up and save your wrists a lot of strain. Your pinky can now reach Control without having to do that funny pivot down and left or right.

If you just dislike the CAPS-LOCK key, as in it gets in your way while you're trying to type, this is also a good option to 86 it as well.


One option you have is to buy a keyboard where CAPS-LOCK is already replaced by a hardware-mapped Control key, like the Happy Hacking series of keyboards (my personal favorite keyboard, just barely inches out the Model-M for best keyboard ever).

So here are two ways to map CAPS-LOCK to Control. One in Ubuntu Linux (7.10 and up) and one in Mac OS X.

Ubuntu Linux with Gnome

1. Click on System -> Preferences -> Keyboard
   
2. Click on the Layouts tab
   
3. Click on Layout Options...
   
   
   
4. Expand Ctrl key position
   
5. Select the Make CapsLock an additional Ctrl. radio button.
   
   
   
6. Close, boom done!
   

Apple Mac OS X 10.5

1. Click on Apple -> System Preferences
   
2. Go to Keyboard & Mouse
   
3. Click on Modifier Keys
   
   
   
4. Select the Caps-Lock Key pulldown
   
   
   
5. Set it to Control
   
   
   
6. Boom! Done.
   

And then if you're a total obsessive like I am, you can do this sort of thing...



A neat feature of FreeBSD 5; it gives you the option to map CAPS-LOCK globally to Control during the install process.

Unrelated Side Note:

THIS was so cool it actually made me a little angry.

C64 USB keyboard