Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Here’s another Mac link dump. They’ve been piling up on my desktop.

• 43 Folders- More Moleskine Hacks - this isn’t actually a Mac link, but I have a Moleskine now that serves as my mac-away-from-the-mac.
• I got 101 problems but Apple ain’t one: 90% Crud on the history of Saving the Mac from Itself
• A neat new way to launch QS
• A Cocoa del.icio.us Client for Mac OS X
• DeskDoodle 1.1 - I tried this, but it was a bit flaky for my tastes.
• Yasu system maintenance software from Jim Mitchell Designs - Software
• Replacing System Graphics [MacGeekery]
• PerversionTracker reviews Faith Converter 1.2 (home page) - offensively funny.
• Tutorial- DVD Ripping and Ripping Redux from the Cult of Mac: more on ripping, for the criminally—I mean, educationally inclined.
• The Cult of Mac on shutting up QuickTime
• Those crazy Newton folks strike again!
• The True Story of Audion
• Introduction to the Apple Human Interface Guidelines
• I’d never do this, but apparently you can use Finder labels to find stuff [macosxhints]
• Use Apple’s screen saver images as desktop pictures [macosxhints]
• StevenF puts CandyBar in a Box
• And one last link for crazy people who want to run both PHP4 and PHP5 on their macs.

I’m saddened to report that the hentai spammers have already bypassed the anti-spam checkbox. As a consequence, commenters will no longer be able to say “incest” with impunity. Dirty words will once again be moderated.

Here’s hoping the viagra folks aren’t as quick on the uptake.

/. of the day: What’s your favorite vaporware?

John McWhorter on the native tongue of the hobbits (which has of course been mostly lost in the mists of time since the Third Age of Middle Earth):

This year, researching the languages of Indonesia for an upcoming book, I happened to find out about a few very obscure languages spoken on one island that are much simpler than one would expect….
[…]
So isn’t it interesting that the island these languages is spoken on is none other than Flores…local legend recalls “little people” living alongside modern humans, ones who had some kind of language of their own and could “repeat back” in modern humans’ language.

Read more about it at GNXP.

Quote of the Day: “Bill Gates is a Persian cat and a monocle away from being a villain in a James Bond movie.” — Dennis Miller (via /.)

Slashdot confirms the LJ buyout rumors, and starts more about LJ banner ads for all. Here’s the official announcement from LJ.

And I have no WP spam yet! I was thinking of adding a second checkbox if the new one wasn’t enough, but it’s looking good so far.

I was considering This Chick’s anti-spam checkbox solution to fight my continuing spam problems, but I decided to go with Gene Shepherd’s step-by-step solution. Jeff Barr has a similar approach.

They all work the same way: add a new required field to the comment form, and spambots designed for the average blog comment form can’t fill it in right. Manual spammers can still type in their spam, but they don’t send 100-200 spam comments a day. I also noticed that I hadn’t renamed wp-comments-popup.php, so I changed that, too.

I’ll be backing down on my moderation requirements to see how well the new despamination works, so you can say “incest” in my comments again (for the time being). Now to post a test comment…

[Update] The test worked, but I think the spam is still coming in. I wonder if they’re scraping each HTML form. I may need to use This Chick’s trick after all, since it has the added human-interaction barrier.

[Update II] Note the snazzy new checkbox.

Slashdot fosters rumors that SixApart is buying out LiveJournal. SixApart makes MovableType and TypePad.

[Update] My favorite comment comes from Pentomino:

[Slashdot] has many features similar to Livejournal, most notably the friends list, and the view of friends’ journals.

Slashdot even goes one better — you can also define a foes list. If LJ had that, it would be World War III.

Pentomino himself has no foes.

Quote of the day: a /. commenter says The BSD license is free as in “Working for Apple for free”

The management apologizes for the recent blog outage. I’m not sure exactly what happened or how it got fixed, but it wasn’t the spammers. I suspect it was a problem with the host’s upgrade to PHP 4.3.10. As an added bonus, the 406 error also seems to be better now.

On the other hand, the Tech categories missing from the category list in the sidebar were entirely my (and WordPress’s) fault. I had no posts in the parent Tech category, so WordPress and company were bumped off the list. I added an arbitrary post to the Tech category and now all is well in WP 1.2-land.

We await WP 1.3 eagerly, or maybe they’ve upped the next release to 1.5.

The management apologizes to anyone who stumbled across some particularly nasty comment spam in the blog recently. I’ve deleted it all and banned the obvious words, but I think I may be in for a new round of comment spamming. I could install all sorts of anti-spam plugins, but instead I’ll wait and see how much my recent changes help.

And wait impatiently for WordPress 1.3.

I read a couple of books that sounded like sci-fi on the flap, but turned out to be something else. A Hole in Texas by Herman Wouk sounded like an exciting tale of the Superconducting Supercollider and a sub-atomic space race with the Chinese, but it ended up being mainstream fiction. Is it just me, or are all mainstream novels about adultery at bottom?

It started out so well, too. Wouk does a great job of showing the business end of science–the funding, the rivalries, the power-plays, the government shutting down the SSC halfway through. It could have been sci-fi, but then the hunt for the Higgs boson decays into a mid-life crisis tour of Hollywood and Washington. Even though Our Hero is married to a gorgeous, intelligent woman, he has to attract the attentions of at least two other gorgeous, intelligent women. It’s a bit of overkill if you ask me; I’m assuming that mainstream readers identify with such handsome, successful adulterer-protagonists, but I didn’t.

But I knew Wouk was a mainstream writer. I was prepared to forgive the usual real-life filler. I was less willing to overlook the off-stage, hands-off solution of the scientific mystery. The resolution of the science plot just fell out of a satellite at the end of the book. There was no buildup, no pieces to put together, nothing. It was black-box science, as if the boson were just a prop for Our Hero to push around in between encounters with his women. It was believable, but it wasn’t science fiction.

Dead Lines by Greg Bear also failed to be sci-fi. A mysterious company comes out with a new kind of cell phone that transmits instantaneously, with no noise and no energy. It may sound like a sunny transhumanist tale, but the dark and scary tone lets you know right off that the second law of thermodynamics is not to be flaunted without dire spiritual consequences. The dead are restless, the businessman is soulless, and things go from bad to worse to Evil with a capital E.

It works fine as a horror story, but the science is never adequately explained. Some genius stuck a plug into the afterlife and all we see are effects, never the cause. I think Passage by Connie Willis is a far better mix of the supernatural and the scientific–it has all the spookiness, but with a believable explanation (at least before it jumps the shark). But if you like your horror with a veneer of sci-fi, give Dead Lines a try.