End the War on Freedom

Anarplex.net "is the operator of GammaDX and a provider of darknet services for various crypto-tribes and Phyles. Our mission is to create a home for tribes-people, their affiliates and associates by providing superior communications and processing services." I've been chatting on their IRC server for quite a while now, but there was no web home page until now. I wish them success in their business! [grabbe]

Flattr is a new service being developed by Peter Sunde, the founder of The Pirate Bay. The site is currently in closed beta, but you can sign up to be invited for testing. The idea is that you pay a small monthly fee, then you click on the Flattr icon next to content you like, and your fee is split up at the end of the month between all your clicks, likely with part of it going to pay for Flattr. Google News about Flattr. Nicholas Deleon at CrunchGear.

From The Daily Bendiken:

NoMachine NX is a remote GUI for Linux. There are free and paid versions. I'm using it for a Gnome desktop on a remote Gentoo/Debian machine. It's almost like my desktop, only with much faster internet, since the remote has high bandwidth. Totally amazing! Client runs on Linux, Mac, or Windows. Not sure about server.

When I lose my internet connection to the remote machine, my session keeps its state. Just reconnect, and I'm back where I was. Yow!

iTablet? iSlate? iPad? We'll find out at 10am California time today (1pm Eastern). And there are lots of places doing liveblogs to follow the action:

Wired
Gizmodo
Engadget
Gdgt
@MacRumors
The Unofficial Apple Weblog
The Apple Blog
Slashgear
The Street
Gearlog
IT Pro
Technologizer
San Francisco Chronicle
Financial Times
iSmashPhone
Washington Post
Digital Daily
Gaming Angels
Kotaku
Mobile Entertainment
Huffington Post (Tanja Aitamurto)

When I mail-order something, I usually get a tracking number, for UPS, FedEx, or the US Postal Service from the vendor (often Amazon). I have always faithfully gone to the respective web site, pasted in the tracking number, and pushed the "track" button. This works, but it has two problems. I have to wait for their often slow web site twice, once to display the form, and once to show me what I want to see. And I have to do it again every time I want to check. So I have always figured out how to get a bookmarkable URL that I can put in my bookmarks bar, and click when I want to check the progress of my package.

I have automated that process. I built a web site that takes your tracking number and forwards to a bookmarkable page. My form is very simple and quick-loading, so you can do your business and be done, instead of waiting for their form to load. Give it a try!

billstclair.com/track

I recently had a problem with a web site when viewed in Safari 4.0.3 in Mac OS X 10.6.2. All the body text appeared as a sequence of capital "A" characters, surrounded by square boxes, as pictured below.

I discovered that it was due to "Bitstream Vera Sans" being mentioned as a font-family in the CSS file. I fixed it by downloading the font via the "Download" button at www.dafont.com/bitstream_vera_sans.font, decompressing the downloaded zip file, selecting the four ".ttf" files in the Finder, right-clicking and choosing "Open With.../Font Book.app", clicking "Install Font" on the resulting window. Then, in order to clear the font cache, I did the following in a Terminal window:

sudo atsutil databases -remove
sudo atsutil databases -removeUser
sudo atsutil server -shutdown
sudo atsutil server -ping

Bookase.com is a book price comparison service, based in Delhi, India. Enter a book title, select the one you want from the results, and it shows prices, including shipping, for a large number of online book sellers. Worked well for the couple of samples I tried, though there was a layout problem in the results page, causing the result table to be offset to the right. Includes coupon codes to use for discounts, when applicable. No ads, except a couple of popular books listed on the home page. Appears that they make money with affiliate fees.

Just watched the video about Google Wave. Trés cool! Me want'm. For some ideas about expediting your own invitation, see How to get a Google Wave Invitation at the waverz.com blog.

Jeff Moser has drawn a cartoon guide to the Rijndael block cipher. He has also provided a sample implementation, in C#. [gsc]

My new Mac OS X Snow Leopard disk was delivered today by FedEx. After my work day, and the completion of a backup, I rushed to install it. The icon for my boot disk had an exclamation mark on it, and when I clicked on it, it said "Mac OS X cannot be installed on ..., because this disk cannot be used to start up your computer."

I almost went to the store to buy another disk, but some time with Google found the solution in this post from William Maxwell:

He clarifies with:

Some people also had success with uninstalling PGP Desktop. That didn't work for me, but the fix above did.

(I was able to successfully reinstall PGP Desktop after my Snow Leopard install, but I'll refrain from using PGP Disk until they ship a certified-Snow-Leopard-compatible update).

Paul Graham - I can vouch for the veracity of this. Wish more managers understood it. A phone call that a programmer's manager thinks takes 5 minutes can easily cost him most of the rest of the morning. Getting your brain around a hard problem is hard. Once you've done it, you need uninterrupted time to convert it into code.

Factor is a Concatenative language, a descendent of Forth, but higher level. The Factor wiki, and web server, including SSL, were written in Factor. Looks cool. [twitter]

Sundar Pichai at Google - Google is getting into the operating systems business, building a lean, mean, browsing machine. I'll definitely give it a try in a VM ASAP. Might even buy a netbook with it. [everybody]

David Kravets at Wired - Jon Lech Johansen, the guy who broke DVD encryption, at the tender age of 16, has a new company, doubleTwist, which is distributing an application of the same name that allows you to copy your music, photos, and videos to a wide range of portable devices, and share them with your friends. The App appears to work on my Mac, though I haven't played with it much, and is available for Windows, too. It's pretty. I see no business plan, though there's a hint of it in the app. The "My Profile" page says, "Account level: free", as if there will be non-free account levels available in the future.

doubleTwist bought an ad, displayed on the windows of the BART station underneath the San Francisco Apple Store. It was up on the Friday before WWDC, but somebody tore it down because it "did not allow enough light through the subway station window." So they missed the Keynote. It was up again Wednesday, though, with a transparent background.

Vala is a high-level language for making Gnome applications. It compiles to C, and uses the standard Gnome libraries. It appears to make GUI apps incredibly simple to create, and, since that C gets compiled to machine code, probably has very few performance problems. Haven't tried it, and won't until I ship Trubanc, but looks highly cool. [Barry]

I've been using Firefox for a long time, since I stopped using Opera 2, or something like that. I've tried other browsers over the last couple of years, but I've always come back to Firefox. Well, it's just been too slow of late. And Safari is snappy. The other differences are minor, I think, so I'm switching, at least for a while. And Safari 4 is in beta. Think I'll give it a try.

Steve Lohr at The New York Times - Oracle has agreed to buy Sun, for $7.4 billion, $9.50 a share, a net cost of $5.6 billion. I hope they do a good job with Java, and Solaris.

Tom Knapp uses Puppy Linux. Cool. I haven't booted my Puppy VM in a long time, but I remember it fondly. Knapp had no problem updating to version 4.2.

Id Software's John Carmack has created an iPhone version of one of the earliest first person shooters, Wolfenstein 3D. I remember playing it on my Mac with my four-year-old son on my lap back in 1995. He loved it. My wife did not. It works quite well. I downloaded it direct to my iPhone during my daughter's piano lesson yesterday evening. $4.99. Carmack wrote a screed on its development, at the end of which he promises Classic Doom for the iPhone soon.