I’ve mentioned several times how fond I am of wikis these days. We’ve run several successfuly at work, including my favorite, the romantic audiences project, and I’ve been promising for at least a year to get one up and running here on daves-place (which I still promise…actually there are three running at present, I just haven’t decided which one to go with). Anyway for work I’ve been investigating wiki engines again and in the course of doing so stumbled upon several desktop wiki software packages. In a word, they’re brilliant. I encourage all you pc users to go check out wikipad. Mac users, give voodoopad. In either case what you’ll get is a very easy to use, infinitely flexible desktop database/to do list/documentation system/place to store all the crap that you need to remember that you can never seem to actually remember.

These suffer in comparison to actual server-based wikis in that they’re tied to your desktop of course, so the information doesn’t follow you around the way it does in a real wiki, and niter of them has a complete feature set when compared to some of the best wiki engines. But give them a try, it’s a fantastic way to get an introduction to the concept and play around with one.

The newly forged ‘Firefox (the browser formerly known as firebird) is out. Go get yourself a copy, or even better, use bit torrent to get it faster as the mirrors are all saturated while everyone tries to score a copy.
Thunderbird has alse been upgraded. I’ve been using the last release for a couple of months and am generally pretty happy with it; it’s worth a look if you’re not digging your current email client.

…and releases a patch for IE to address the glaring security issues I’ve been ranting about for a several weeks. You can read about it here, and use Windows update to install it. Anyone using windows should run windows update poste haste.

Despite the fix, I still think no one in their right mind should use Internet Explorer. The Mozilla engine was partially susceptible to the same security issue and they had an update out within 24 hours. It took Microsoft weeks to address it, while they hid behind ridiculous excuses and surreal workarounds. Plus, as mentioned repeatedly, the IE css support is markedly inferior to Mozilla’s. In non geek speak, that means web pages will look better 😉

This is beautiful. A few months ago I posted on the tech report about how I thought ultimately the RIAA’s tactics would be overcome with better software from the p2p software community – ie that their tactics, rather than reducing piracy, would simply encourage another round of innovation in the software that would make for enhanced security. That day has come. Or at least MUTE is the first example of a software package that solves this problem. Want to share your huge pop music mp3 archive? You can again do so with a relatively high degree of security and anonymity. Check out the link for details, there are actually some good diagrams and a lengthy explanation of the hows and whys. I can’t wait for this sort of technology to make its way out into the other p2p apps, particularly bit torrent and DC++.

Oh, and, um, hello, RIAA? Once again, you reap the harvest you sow.

I’m happy to report on another example of a P2P app being used for something besides pirating music and porn. Check out snackster, a P2P recipe sharing app. Got a craving for a new taste sensation, or feel like it’s finally time to reveal dear old Granny’s secret cookie recipe to the world? Get right on it!

A common theme for me the past month or so has been the evils of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Mostly I’ve been ranting about the security holes. If you want to risk your bank balance or your paypal account password, fine, keep using IE. But there’s another angle to this I haven’t mentioned in a while – IE has serious problems rendering properly formed CSS. I struggle with this on an almost daily basis. Because they have a greater than 90% share of the browser market there’s not much one can do aside from complain. Microsoft won the browser war and now they can’t be bothered to maintain their fricking product. Anyway, you can read a more articulate version of this rant over on stopdesign.com if the subject interests you.

As I’ve mentioned before, I run a teamspeak server. Last night Andrew dinged me and told me to log in. I had recently changed the ‘push to talk’ key in the preferences for the app to the F1 key, which I failed to remember is the key that launches the windows help center. So Andrew and I begin to chat. After a few minutes I start to notice the machine is getting sluggish, like REALLY sluggish, and I can hear the disk churning. WTF I think, I never noticed a memory leak in Teamspeak before. I manage to invoke the windows process manager and notice I have hundreds and hundreds of processes and cpu utilization is pegged? WTF? Turns out I had been spawning an infinite number of help center sessions as I held down the F1 key to talk – by the time I had recognized the problem the machine was already overwhelmed. I spent the next 15 minutes in a race against the cpu – could I cancel help session spawns faster than it was managing to launch them? It was like an annoying videogame – ‘kill the help center, woot!’

Long story short, I managed to. I didn’t want to cycle the power because I had downloads going. At first I was really pissed, ‘fucking windows,’ I am thinking. Then I remembered an incident from about 10 years ago on a mac. I was in a meeting when the sales manager burst in in a frenzy – ‘my printer is replicating like…like tribbles!’ Whu? Who wouldn’t go investigate such a claim. I get to his machine and sure enough, the little desktop icon for his printer is spawning a copy of itself every half second or so. By the time I got to the machine his entire desktop was already completely covered with a thick layer of printer icons. After some fiddling I decided to cycle the power on it. When it came up the printer had stopped cloning itself, but his desktop was still completely covered in icons, thousands and thousands of icons. I left him burrowing in the bottom right hand corner of the screen, laboriously moving icons out of the way in a search for the trash can so that he could begin throwing all these cloned printers out (this was before the days of CMD-delete, unfortunately for him). Later when I had time to research it I discovered it was a rare but known bug in the first implementation of Desktop Printing. This left me leery of desktop printing for years afterwords, even though it was the sales manager and not me who spent half a day shuffling printer icons around.

I guess my point is I shouldn’t be hard on windows. Why it is capable of spawning more than one help center I don’t know, it seems to me it shouldn’t be able to, but whatever. Computers, all OS’s, are full of niggling little issues like this. They’re still annoying when they occur but in the end for the most part as with the help center videogame from hell, what I end up taking away from it is amusement more than anything else.

Check out Kandid, a java-based generative art tool based on genetic principles. Feed it some genetic algorithms, spend some cpu cycles, and you occasionally get cool looking art you can use as a desktop pic. Royalty and copyright free as a bonus 😉

It’s been well established that I’m a geek, so it is without shame or embarrasment that I present another exercise device that I’m tempted to get. I already run on a treadmill and play games – having the option to use the bike some nights would be excellent. The only issue is how accurate the thing would be. I have trouble with games that require a lot of finesse when I’m on the treadmill already and mostly play RPG’s as a result. It seems to me this would be even worse, and I might be better off going for one of those DDR dance mats. Still, this thing is tempting, especially since I’m not sure I can really bring myself to play the dance games.

I’ve mentioned RSS readers and FeedDemon specifically several times here. It’s gone gold and is now commercially available. If you’re running windows this is the by far the best RSS reader at present – go grab yourself a copy. It’s well worth the $30 price. There’s also a 30 day demo so you can get a feel for how it works before comitting to the purchase. As usual, for mac users I’ll point out that Ranchero’s Netwire news is superb. And for everyone I’ll once again chant: get with the program, RSS is a just vastly superior way to conduct your daily net surf. Once you’ve gotten used to it you”’ never switch back 😉