I’m getting ready to entirely rebuild my Powerbook, so I’ve been looking around at my choices for the software I use. I’ll shortly be writing about the software that ends up on my fresh Powerbook. One of my goals is to use Open Source Software, then free software, then commercial software.

I found an open source feed reader, Vienna. I was getting a bit frustrated with Net News Wire Lite, so I didn’t mind jumping ship. Today, not 18 hours after getting Vienna installed, a new version of NNW was released. Another evaluation coming up.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. This allows you to read my newer articles without having to visit the site again. Thanks for visiting! Mike

At work yesterday I received a glossy advertisement from Microsoft touting their new adCenter. Beyond the irony of using postal junk mail to advertise an online advertising platform is the irony of the opt-out method for stopping this junk in the future.

If you prefer not to receive future promotional mailings of this type from Microsoft, please send this mailing back to the sender with the following text visible to the recipient: “return to sender” and “unsubscribe me from your list.” We will promptly update your contact preferences; however, please be aware you may still receive previously initiated promotional communications.

The sender? That would be “Microsoft adCenter.” The nice letter was signed by a Corporate Vice President, Joanne Bradford, should I mail my note to her?

Why can’t they simply set up a web page somewhere at microsoft.com to allow me to opt-out? There is already a unique code on the inside of the mailing, which is also on my address label printed on the envelope. I’m so sure that MS has a staff of people waiting to go through dozens of opt-out requests. Or they could hire one programmer (I’m sure they have some out there somewhere that aren’t busy screwing up Vista and Office 200x) to spend a couple days to integrate their address label system with an opt-out system.

It’s not illegal (or shouldn’t be if the coffee shop didn’t try to protect itself) It’s not even rude, that’s the way the ball bounces. All he had to do was go in and buy the smallest cup of coffee or a cough drop or bagel or something and he’d be ok. Did the shop have a Terms of Service on their signal? That’s fairly easy to do with open source software.

Original Article: The Internet Patrol: Man Charged with Theft of Services for Using Free Wifi at Coffee Shop in for a Brewed Awakening

The 9 Rules network posted a question about google results returning a wildly varying number of results. I read yesterday that Google was attempting to get rid of all of the millions of spam blogs in their index, so it makes perfect sense that other search results might be jumbled for a bit. Of course, I can’t find the reference now.

It does seem to be giving consistent results for searches for Michael Clark right now. I am third when you search for “Michael Clark” without quotes, and fourth with the quotes. I guess changing my page’s title (see Doh! Page title is important! for details on when I changed my home page’s title.)

Another huge issue to keep in mind is that the people who are buying the $300 Dells are probably the ones who will need the most technical support. So if Apple suddenly had a zillion new users buying $300 Mac Pamphlets instead of the $1,100 Mac Book, Apple would have a lot more tech support calls to deal with. And those calls would quickly cause the few dollars made on the sale to evaporate.

Original article: The Truth about the “Apple Tax” at AppleMatters.com

You can customize the text that appears in front of the text you are quoting in a reply. Simply open a new message and paste in the command in the body of the blank message. <x-eudora-setting:7818> Then double click that link. In the box that appears, simply use these codes to create the text you want to appear:

^0 The name of the original sender
^1 The date of the original message
^2 The original subject
^3 The time of the original message

I use this set of codes: At ^3 ^1, ^0 wrote: which ends up showing up as “At 8:03 AM -0500 6/19/06, (person) wrote:

Giles Turnbull asks what I want in a new email client for the Mac. http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2006/06/what_would_you_like_from_a_new.html

I use Eudora for a lot of email management. Eudora’s limits needs to be fixed: (1) More than 32,000 messages in a mailbox. (2) Personalities should be able to be renamed safely. (3) better handling of filter rules that include the moving of attachments to another folder. If you move the Eudora Folder location, all the filter rules break, and your attachments all end up in the Attachments folder. Boo! And the mail client must save mail in mbox format. I occasionally use various command line tools to get stats on my mail.

I’ve finally completed moving away from using Blosxom for my blog, and using WordPress. I started out on Saturday morning by installing WordPress 2.03, looking at the options and methods for reading the data from Blosxom, designing a template, and then writing some scripts to manage requests that come in looking for my old blog to point to my new blog. I changed the directory from /blog/ to /journal/. I’ll be watching my error logs for the next few weeks to make sure that everything is working well. Let me know if you see anything that is not quite right.

While looking through my web server logs, I see a fair number of web spiders that are making a very bad assumption: only the http is linked from a web page. The obvious counter example is https:. A web spider needs to only follow links that are http://. You can’t simply assume if the first 5 characters of a link aren’t http: it is a page link. I see lots of errors in my server log asking for pages like /blog/2004/https://www.annualcreditreport.com.

Earlier this week I had to buy a product from eBay. Setting aside the joy of bidding against someone for an old clicky IBM keyboard (luckily I later found one that I could Buy Now), I started receiving “helpful” newslettery things from eBay. I didn’t want them, so I went to the web site, and unsubbed from all of them. eBay helpfully told me it would take up to ten days to honor my request. And yes, I just got another one of their stupid newsletters (”Get what you want NOW, no bidding”). Why is it they can add me to their mailing list within hours of signing up with them, but it takes ten days to get off the list? Ridiculous. Maybe they’re simply following the letter of the law, the CAN-SPAM law. Allowed-to-Spam gives spammers, er, businesses, 10 days to honor the opt-out demand/request/order.