Subscription Harmonizer

As Dave has been thinking aloud on his Subscription Harmonizer for aggregators, so will I. Brian Cantoni saved me some effort by commenting about his "save the OPML to FTP" hack he did for AmphetaDesk, and I'm a fan of leaning in that direction:

  • I don't like centralized server solutions. Yes, any aggregator company could set up their own server to host the Harmonizer (as Dave suggested he would, in a very minor testbed sorta way), but that's still a central authority, regardless of how many servers there actually will be. I'd much rather see a bootstrap on vanilla FTP with OPML. Vanilla FTP 'cause hey, most everyone has, or can get, one. OPML 'cause most of the aggregators that matter can import and export the same flavor of OPML that Radio standardized on, AmphetaDesk followed, and NNW tagged along.
  • OPML is easily reformatted. Regardless of how your feelings are about REST, XML-RPC, SOAP, etc., a single, easy-to-read (and parse) OPML file sitting on the server is a lot easier to work with than requiring XML-RPC interaction. I think some people have even written OPML parsers in javascript.
  • Vanilla OPML can be imported over the web. Although I don't know if any other aggregator can do so, you can import OPML files, over the web, directly into AmphetaDesk. Upload your OPML file to a certain location with a Harmonizer, then include a link on your blog: "Import my subscriptions". One click later, your shared blogroll is imported into AmphetaDesk. For instance, Dave's OPML is online, and with one click, you can import them into your AmphetaDesk, ready for downloading on your next refresh. This just focuses on the aggregator possibilities, and doesn't consider OPML sniffers that could create blog "six-degree" communities (based on XML, as opposed to scraping blogroll HTML).

Acts of Gord

Just read all of the Acts of Gord. Great stuff.

Portfolio Snafu's

I believe in a hierarchal filesystem. Thus, I use Portfolio's FolderSync feature to scan my "Movies" directory for new crap. Said "Movies" directory is also filled with subdirectories, like "Animation", "Animation/Love Hina", and so forth. Hierarchal organization. I love it. It works for me. This hierarchy is brought over into the video files list as headers.

Welp, if you're planning on doing removable media (ie. I burn 4 gigs to a DVD to reclaim some hard drive space), Portfolio isn't ideal in that regard. It's really my fault - I had incorrect expectations. Say I burn "Animation/Love Hina" to a DVD, and remove that folder from my hard drive. Said folder disappears from Portfolio's FolderSync listing, as you'd expect. The records, however, which contain my one sentence descriptions, stay in the database, as you'd also expect. What I didn't expect, however, was that there's no longer any way I can display those matching "Love Hina" records, UNLESS I make a dummy blank folder on the drive at "Animation/Love Hina". Even though the literal folder is empty, the database says there should be something in that location, so it shows the matching 20 or so episodes. Not ideal - I'd have lots of blank floating nibs around, just to make the database display it's data.

So, the next logical step was to use Portfolio's "Categories" feature. Unfortunately, the "Category" data can't be exported, either through Applescript or manually. That pretty much kills my automated list creation, so that's out.

Next, I'll try "Keywords", another Portfolio built-in. That can be exported (yes!), but the display of them in "Record" view is utterly horrific. Even when I tell Portfolio that I only want to see 1 row of keywords, it still displays 1 input row, and 5 "keywords you've chosen for this record" rows beneath it. 4 of those rows will never, ever be used, so it's just wasted space, shrinking my screen real estate and making me feel dirty. "Keywords" are out.

I ended up making my own custom field called "Hierarchy", that was a "pop-up list" of "predefined values". I can export it, I can show just one row (since I chose no "multiple values"), and I'll get a little drag and drop floating palette. Seems like a lot of work for what I wanted (keep a hierarchal list of files, regardless of where they may be located on HD, DVD-R, CD-R, etc.)

Why didn't Keywords only show one row when specified?
Why can't Categories be exported?
Why did I have to create a new field for this?

One Game to Rule Them All

From Gamegrene.com:

A very long time ago back in the mid 1980s I discovered role-playing. Not surprisingly the game that introduced me was Dungeons and Dragons. I was in my first few years of grade school, and although some of the concepts in the red boxed basic D&D set were difficult for my friends and I to puzzle out, there was still a giddy sense of fascination. (arkelias) Read more from this post.

I Support The RoadMap

I wish I had more time to interject, but I fully support a vendor neutral log format to replace the chaotic and satanic RSS wasteland. We need it NOW, really, because too many outsiders are listening to the wrong people (on both sides of the camp). I hope a mailing list comes of this - if the discussion is fully web-based, I'll have to take the sidelines.

SchizoSpam

Well, this is funny. Less than a week after I publically announce my mental illness, I start getting spam for schizophrenia. Funny. Not funny enough to republish though.

Make Mine MacTech!

If you're at the WWDC, be sure to stop by the MacTech booth and say "hi" from me. Likewise, pick up the latest issue - it heralds the first column of my new monthly piece, Untangling the Web:

MacTech Magazine announced today that it has remade the magazine from top to bottom, keeping the nuts and bolts, in-depth articles the magazine is known for ... but better! And the editorial staff is adding new, even more relevant content including articles for Enterprise, IT professionals, QuickTime content creators and Internet developers.

If you're not at the WWDC, be sure to pick up an issue anyways, or steal one, or something. My first column rules <g>. See my original announcement here.

Mailsmith 2.0, The First

Partly because I'm disgusted with "OSX SUX" comments of the immature Eudora developer, and partly because I love trying new things, I've been experimented with the newly released Mailsmith 2.0 email program, from the same people who bring you BBEdit (my favoritest piece of software in the whole blasted WOorllldD!). I can't say I'm ready (or remotely near willing) to make it my default client. My running notes:

  • The "Import" dialogue says it works for Eudora 4.0 to 5.1, but it had no problem importing with the beta 6.0. The import itself took nearly half an hour, averaging about three minutes for a mailbox with 2700 messages. Near the end of the import, whilst it was sucking in address book entries, it crashed (yes, I reported it and they've already responded, suspecting it's related to my Eudora Filters).
  • Mailsmith uses a single data store under ~/Mail/Mailsmith User Data/ which is the primary reason I never used the (superior to Eudora, IMO) Microsoft Entourage. I'm not fond of single points of failures (ok, actually, its a bunch of mailboxes encapsulated under that one large file [see your shell], but the files themselves are in a binary format, making them more difficult to work with [or recover from if they're corrupted]).
  • Mailsmith has a handy per-email "Notes" feature, which is nice when you want to save meta data. Eudora has a similar feature (open up a message window, and you'll have a bar at the top which you can add your own notes too, which will superseding the subject line in mailbox display).
  • The default behavior is to compress all email attachments (dubbed "enclosures") with Stuffit, which seems like the most misguided AOL-like behavior I've ever seen. I don't email just Mac users, and automatically compressing them with a Mac-specific compression format is silly. (Yes, Stuffit exists for Windows, but it's not a format supported by WinZip, the defacto and expected standard.) UPDATE: Yes, this can be turned off, but I'm arguing for its exclusion as a default setting.
  • For some odd reason, there's an infinite horizontal scrollbar on each message window. That's costing me 10 pixels, roughly two lines of text, in screen real estate. Why is it there?!
  • I hate preview windows with a passion. Thankfully, you can shut that off and open each message in its own window, but this seems awfully, awfully slow - you can count blips as you wait for an email to open, switch to the next one in the list, or to close the window. Those blips will eat up a lot of time.
  • Keycommands are customizable, which is nice, since I could bring over my most used Eudora features quickly and easily: "Move to next message", "Move to previous message", and "Delete current message, and move to next".
  • Brand new, just received, emails show a BCC in the header. Why? BCC's are blind, meaning I'll never ever see 'em. Why waste 7 more pixels with a useless header that should theoretically never contain data?
  • Multiple email addresses, in the To: or CC:, are hidden (like "Morbus Iff, and two others"). This drives me absolutely batty (why hide such valuable information?) Sure, I can click an expander triangle to see them, but this preference DOESN'T STICK from message to message, meaning each and every time, I'm either going to lose some valuable visual information about the email, or I'm going to waste my time moving the mouse. I hate the mouse. UPDATE: Can be automated with key commands but three unnecessary keypresses for every message is not good enough.
  • Scrolling in large mailbox views (with 2500+ messages) is very very slow. Page down, wait, page down, wait, slow. Not good. Likewise, searching for the word "crap" in the body and headers of 14,000 Eudora messages took 30 seconds. Searching for the same word in 11,000 messages in Mailsmith, with the same criteria, took more than 2 minutes, and it had only found 400 entries of the 1100 Eudora did (I didn't wait for Mailsmith to finish).
  • I use label colors to classify emails much more visually than stuffing them away in different mailboxes. In Eudora, the entire message display line becomes colored, meaning I've got 500 pixels of color to quickly scan. In Mailsmith, only the "Label" column becomes colorized, meaning a) I've got to have that column turned on (less screen real-estate), b) and I've got to focus on a small portion of the display window (roughly 75 pixels) to get the visual indication I expected. Less useful. UPDATE: Strike this. I can duplicate Eudora's behavior by setting "Use Label Color for Entire Row" in the "Mail Lists" preferences.

So far, Mailsmith isn't holding any chance of replacing Eudora, but I've got 29 more days of my free demo, so I'll fiddle some more and see what else I can find.

25 Dumbest Moments In Gaming

A wonderful article from GameSpy.com entitied The 25 Dumbest Moments In Gaming (plus five more reader contributed entries). Lots of good stuff here, with commentary:

... it's no wonder that video gaming's otherwise fine history is pockmarked with moments of ineptness so extreme, so pointless, so unnecessary that we couldn't help but compile them into an article to dissect and poke fun at them some more. What exactly will you find here? We're talking bad business deals, egregious ego trips, lame lawsuits, unmarketable consoles, puerile propaganda and everything in between. So, sit back, turn off your brain, and take a dive into the 25 Dumbest Moments in Gaming.

True Story

From #disobey:

<jcgregorio> hey morbus!
<@Morbus> joe!
<@Morbus> its been forever
<jcgregorio> yeah, been busy Buried is more like it
<@Morbus> i hear ya
<jcgregorio> you been busy too I see
<@Morbus> naaah
<@Morbus> i've been slacking off as usual
<@Morbus> the other Morbus, now he's been busy
<@Morbus> oh wait, you don't know
<@Morbus> last month, I went to get my head examined
<@Morbus> apparently, i'm schizophrenic
<@Morbus> both personalities know of the other
<@Morbus> but, I am, indeed, split in two
<jcgregorio> probably can't fix that with sticky tape, eh?
<@Morbus> unfortunately, not
<quasi> Morbus: pretty cool - two people to share the workload ;)
<@Morbus> quasi: yeah, that's what I thought
<@Morbus> We even tried sleeping on offshifts
<@Morbus> so, the other personality would be sleeping now, right?
<@Morbus> we had hopes that we'd never have to sleep again
<@Morbus> but, sadly, its a mental disorder, not a physical one
<@Morbus> so the body still needs rest and all that crap
<@Morbus> our experiment failed rather rudely after 4 days
<@Morbus> I still have the gash from when I collapsed :(

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