Category: Geek Love

I’ve had it up to *here* (waving my hand high over my head) with spam. Spam, spam, spam. I went an entire weekend without checking my e-mail, and the following Monday I was greeted with over 300 spam e-mails. Augh! Enough.

Matt has been talking about how he is almost spam free, and he has the perfect system set up to rescue me from my spam. “Save me!,” I cried, over and over again. Step 1 was that I needed to finally set up Spam Assassin. (As soon as I know the rest of the steps, I’ll write up the whole process and share.)

I had to do something before I started getting e-mail from people that supposedly saw me at work like Jennifer. I’ve never used Spam Assassin before. I guess I was afraid it would kill all of my good e-mail too. Somethinig like that, doesn’t matter now. What matters now is that my spam is being “Assassinated”. Well, ok. That and the points.

Each spam e-mail is assigned points basied on the contents of that spam message. The higher the points, the more spammy that spam content is. So now, as I delete them, I keep track of which one is the highest point spam message. Right now we’re sitting at 40.20 points, but that could be beat out any day now! What’s your highest spam points? Do I get a prize for this if I win?

Palm to acquire rival Handspring

I think I’m going to cry. I’ve always loved my Handspring, and I think part if it was because they weren’t owned by Palm. I guess now that Handspring is only developing phones anyways, and I already have Visor, this won’t really affect me personally – but I’m still sad to see them go. [via Evan]

Remember the days when everything digital was so new?

When I was in 4th grade, my school (St. Patrick’s, Kankakee, IL.) received a gift of two Apple II computers. Back then, no one had personal computers in their homes yet – they were new to the market. One of the teachers started offering a Saturday morning computer club, and we could come in and learn how to program cool things. The main thing I remember doing was creating a pixel-based image of a rainbow on the computer, which required that I plot each pixel of color based on the coordinates and the color I wanted it to be. I would spend hours with graph paper, drawing out pictures that I could later program on the computer.

My Mom was a teacher’s aide for the gifted program at the public school at the time, and they had a TRS-80 computer at school. I remember when they sent it off to have it upgraded from 2mb of RAM to 4mb. (Or was it 2k to 4k? Wow, it’s been a long time. I don’t remember.) We got a TRS-80 for our house for Christmas that year. (The Commodore 64 came out right afterwards, but she went with the brand we knew.) It didn’t have a monitor of it’s own, we hooked it up to an A/B switch on the back of the color TV. The “disk drive” was a cassette tape player which was always pretty tempermental about what it wanted to record. I remember entering a program in from one of the books that came with it – it displayed one of Robert Frost’s poems, and then the screen would fill up with snow.

My junior and senior year in high school (Cypress Creek, Houston, TX), I took Computer Science and Computer Math. We still used floppy 5 1/4″ diskettes. I learned things like C, Fortran, Pascal, and a variety of other things I can’t remember today. All of my friends were taking the word processing class – I was more interested in programming games or ways to improve my gaming skills that’s why I used services as Elo Boost to help me with this. When I started playing, I found this new game called CS:GO and honestly I was like addicted to it for months!! I would always be playing to get a higher rank and then I finally found out about Counter-Strike: Global Offensive boost where I could boost my ranking.. without playing!! Plus I had Blogomania to keep me busy after hours), but computers are still a constant part of my life, whether it is for research, for work, for fun, for blogging. All of it is something I never would have imagined back when we had that TRS-80 with the cassette tape drive.

This post inspired initially by Ste, along with Chris Pirillo and Andre Torrez, who wrote theirs as a part of Adam Kalsey’s Newly Digital Project.

As I mentioned earlier this week, WordPress is now available – have you checked out this features list? Many, many cool things built in – including the ability to manage your blogroll within the software and still have it display the recently updated blogs.

Has anyone downloaded it and tested it yet? What did you think? I’m going to try setting up a test blog using all of my posts from this site to see how it handles a huge blog with a ton of archived posts. I would love to hear what other people think about it.

More importantly – if you haven’t tried it out, why not? What would it take to get you to look at a different blog system? What features is WordPress lacking that you must, must, must have? What keeps you tied to the blog system you currently use?

Get the latest release! MovableType has released version 2.64, with many good things:

This is a maintenance release, fixing various CSS, XML-RPC, UI, and Creative Commons errors. This release also plugs a number of cross-site-scripting (script injection) holes for search queries, comments, TrackBacks, and notifications, and is recommended for anyone using any of these features. We have also improved the options for available RSS templates–in addition to the RSS 1.0 template that we have always provided, the default templates now include an RSS 2.0 template instead of a 0.91 template. Also in the default templates, this release fixes the rendering of the default stylesheet (“Clean”) on Windows Internet Explorer.

First of all, I should note that if you’re using an older version of MT, you are at risk to security holes. There is a reason that updates come out – and why it’s important that you do them.

Now on to the most important thing for me… Whoo hoo! RSS 2.0 is now a default template! Yum, yum! Tasty RSS feeds for everyone! You do have an RSS feed, right? You know why you want RSS, don’t you?

I’ve been thinking about this recently – how many people read this site through RSS feeds instead of online? If you’re one of them, could you drop by and leave me a comment so I know? There isn’t a good way to track who is feed reading a site, so I thought I should just ask!