Waggle Dance

Microsoft doesn’t really hate software pirates… when they might count toward market share for their latest Internet Explorer release. In the face of slipping numbers, Microsoft has reversed thier earlier requirement that users have a legal copy of Microsoft Windows XP or greater in order to download and install Internet Explorer 7. M$ has done their best stem the defection of users to the more secure and more standards compliant Firefox browser, but failed to prevent it’s steady climb in market share to 15% among average users, as high as 35% among some segments, such as the tech savvy and non-US users.

It seems a little desperate to me to rail against software pirates, spend millions hunting them down across the globe, then turn a blind it to them when it suits them. While I often convince people to make the switch to Firefox on it’s technical merits, I find it hard to understand why people continue to use products from a company with such a complete lack of moral and ethical backbone.

All I can say is:

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After searching for a suitable worship slide system for our church, I decided to write my own using the S5 presentation software and Ruby on Rails. Check it out at the OpenWorship project site. It’s still early, but I can build a presentation (using rails scaffolding) and display it, so thats a start.

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I’ve realized I’ve gotten into a bit of a rut when it comes to web surfing lately. I could probably count on my fingers and toes the number of sites I regularly visit to keep up on events, technology, coding, linux… Luckily, one of those places I check off and on is mozilla.org to keep up with firefox. I recently decided to give the 1.5 beta of Firefox a spin, and while attempting to updated some of my favorite extensions, I ran across one for StumbleUpon a collaborative site review and grouping system that includes a button to randomly pick a site based on your preferences and sites you’ve recommended. Unlike other “random” link systems, this one tends to take you to a quality site you will actually be interested in.
Well, I was hooked, so I installed it at work and at home, but while my bookmarks lists grew in both places, I felt it might be more useful put my bookmarks online so I can share them - enter another website and cool extension Del.icio.us and Foxylicious, an extension that make it easy to add and maintain my Del.icio.us social bookmarks. Del.icio.us makes keeping and sharing bookmarks easy, but it also ranks and list new links and most popular links, as well as popular tags. I can see another time sink-hole opening…

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It didn’t take long after Google released their new mapping tool for folks to find clever ways to bend it to their will. After digging around, I came across MyGMaps for drawing the maps and the perl moduleGeo::Coder::US to turn addresses from the Augusta PD offender list into longitude and latitude locations and took a second shot at mapping out the results. The folks at MyGMaps are kind enough to give away thier code, so I need to do some work to get it to host locally instead of abusing thier good graces, then I’ll start work on linking to the full Maine Sex Offender Registry so we can map places besides Augusta.

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I’ve always said (to myself, anyway) that it didn’t matter if anyone read my blog or even visited my site. So, why was I so happy when a couple of folks posted comments to some old entries?! Of course, they were people who know me personally, so knew where to find my site, but hey, it’s a hit. I didn’t think much about it until today when I was playing with a Gnome applet/toy called Blogfish - a little eye-candy applet that puts your blog and comments out into an ocean of memes, where other users vote to keep or cull your “fish” from the school.

Anyway, I was screening my access logs to see what effect it was having (well… none, really) when I got into searching the whole log for hits, before you know it I was out vanity searching for backlinks on Google! (Also, none) I was a little frustrated, until I noticed I had put a robots.txt file in my site root requesting no search engines index my site. Yes, that’s right, at some point, I must have meant what I said about hits not mattering and decided to proved it by effectively pulling the plug.

At lease I got up the motivation to make a new post, so I guess digital vanity isn’t all bad.

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