Building simplicidade.org: notes, projects, and occasional rants

Notes

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Quick del.icio.us & QuickSilver tip

Before you say anything, yes I know that Quicksilver has a plugin for del.icio.us, but this is different. Quicksilver can be configured to do web searches. You can use that feature to jump directly to a tag-filtered URL like this. To do that, follow this steps: bookmark in Safari the following URL: http://del.icio.us/melo/***. Change melo to your username or to tag if you want to search globally. Give a short name to the bookmark (I use del).

It took me some time to figure this out, so to those of you who are as dumb as me, here is how you do it: First, go to your blog setup, and make sure Markdown is the default formatting option. In Moveable Type, you need to select Edit Configuration > Preferences > Default Text Formatting for New Entries; go back to ecto, and choose Window > Accounts, select the blog you want, and click Update cache in the toolbar.

Dilbert

I think that this Dilbert strip is the best one I’ve seen in a long time. Anyway, Dilbert and bash.org are my morning kicks to start coding.

Ecto2 is comming

There is a new version of ecto ready to be released. I’ve been using the betas for some weeks now, and I’m very happy with it. Check out the latest features. The main one seems to be WYSIWYSG editing, but I started using Markdown a couple of days ago so I cannot say if it works or not. For me, having multiple posts at the same time, and a improved entries & drafts window are welcome additions.

Another band-aid solution

The latest band-aid solution for the increase bandwidth taken with syndication feeds seems to be mod_speedyfeed. Although a Atom-only solution, I’m sure someone will adapt it to RSS in no time. Client-side support will follow, I suppose. Yet, it still is another attempt to improve a broken model and ignore the real problem (syndication is still pooling), and this keeps us from having a decent solution (IMHO pubsub of some sort, with near-by nodes).

Evil though of the day

Now that the JPEG bug has a public exploit, the last step is to crack a widely used site and replace a JPEG image. Imagine what you could do if you where able to replace the Windows Update site logo :)

Quote of the day

In 43 folders, ... calling Quicksilver “just an application launcher” is a little like calling the Ten Commandments “two stones some dude found on a hill.”

Flickr tips

Flickr is really great. I joined a couple of weeks ago, but I only got a chance of doing some serious setup with it. I'm using the following tools: iPhoto plugin for flicker: really really simple way of uploading you photos directly from iPhoto. It lets you choose the title, tags and even resizes the photo before uploading. The current version (0.7) has a small bug: it strips the EXIF information, so it's not really ready yet, but the author is looking into it; Flickr Screensaver: really nice, but could be better: I would like to be able to choose to see all my contacts photos instead of my own only.

One blog to rule them all

If you to choose a single blog to follow, what would be your choice? My choice varies with time. During august I would probably had chosen a XMPP-related blog, before that anything perl related, but the blog of the month must be 43 Folders. It’s without a doubt the most signal-to-noise ratio blog I’m currently following (out of 150 RSS subscriptions, probably half of those are blogs, the others news sources).

Using your iSight

I have a iSight camera for some months now, and except for the occasional video chat, it pretty much stays there at the top of my TiBook. Today I came across this article talking about a software that's been developed by Delicious Monster Software (great site, btw) called Delicious Library 3.0. The software is in close beta right now, but you can check the ThinkSecret review of a beta, and it looks very very good.