Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I really ought to check my web stats more often. In the past month I’ve gotten over 5,000 hits on an obscure and uninformative blog entry from 2002—just a quiz post, and the quiz results there all have broken images.

Somehow this entry has been climbing up in the results for “Quizilla” in Yahoo’s and therefore MSN’s search engines for at least six months now. Why my silly quiz results and not someone else’s? Why that particular entry and not any of the others in my extensive quiz category?

I’d suspect one of the new trends in comment spam and referral spam, but there’s no spam on that particular entry to explain it . I can only conclude that something is amiss in Yahoo’s search technology. I use Google, so I don’t see this kind of result weirdness, but maybe Yahoo/MS people are used to it.

Get a real search engine, people.

Political link of the day: Major Geeks has a list of what Kerry has done for the space program.

Both Quicksilver and Calenderclock have been updated again since my previous entry. You can read more about Calendarclock at macosxhints.

Quicksilver now requires plug-ins for pretty much anything beyond simple Finder actions. I couldn’t find the plug-ins anywhere on the site (which as I’ve noted before is specially designed to discourage people from using Quicksilver), so I figured I’d have to live without them. Then I noticed that not even my Safari bookmark for the WordPress admin page (where I’m currently typing this blog entry) showed up. I couldn’t live without that (Quicksilver is highly addictive), so I went on another hunt for the missing modules.

They turned out to be hidden on the front page of the site, well below the download and forum links where there used to be nothing at all. Since my screen is only 12″, the plug-ins were off the page. I don’t even know why I scrolled down, but there they were! And now I have the Safari, iTunes, and Dictionary plug-ins. Quicksilver uses a proprietary scheme, qsinstall:, to do the plugin install, so it’s really easy once you know where they are.

Some other Mac links:

• A macosxhints article on getting the URL out of a .webloc file.
• I’m planning to try out WebDesktop from ~stevenf. Making your browser your desktop sounds like Window-style overkill, but you never know.

I’m a huge M. Night Shyamalan fan, so I enjoyed “The Village,” but I also understand why it’s getting mixed reviews. I saw it with Dr. Deb, who loved it, but I was torn for most of the movie. I’ll try to keep the spoilers down, though I’ll need a few to make my point. Please see the movie before reading any further.

Read the rest of this entry »

Miscellaneous links:

• If you’ve been hanging on to β24 of Quicksilver like I have, it expired this weekend. You can pick up β26 [update: now β27] at Blacktree, Inc.
• DaringFireball has a Mac humor entry in which the Magic 8-Ball Answers Your Questions Regarding RealNetworks‚Äô Harmony.
• Belle Nuit HTMLBook will compile multiple HTML pages into a nice PDF book.
• Peter¬†Maurer’s Calendarclock is a nice combination of the menu bar clock and your iCal items. It’s already replaced Menu Calendar in my menu bar.
• Did I mention how to turn your iPod into a remote control?
• The Apple Developer Connection has an article on installing a local copy of the W3C HTML validator on your mac.

You speak eloquently and have seemingly read every book ever published. You are a fountain of endless (sometimes useless) knowledge, and never fail to impress at a party.
What people love: You can answer almost any question people ask, and have thus been nicknamed Jeeves. What people hate: You constantly correct their grammar and insult their paperbacks.

What Kind of Elitist Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

The party’s over, and it turns out no one showed. A blizzard of Democrats blocked the roads and derailed the T; all the actual residents of Massachusetts paid attention to the weather scare and stayed home. There weren’t enough Democrats to make up for the loss of regular business downtown—the restaurants were empty. This is a second-hand report based on the Metro (all the bias of the Globe in a fraction of the space!), because I didn’t venture any nearer downtown during the DNC than Coolidge Corner. Why risk a strip-search by riding the T?

In other local news, there will be a Lord of the Rings exhibit at the Museum of Science from Sunday through October 24th.

Tomorrow will be a blue moon—time to do those once-in-a-blue-moon things.

Thanks again to Nicolas Taffin for a new French translation of the color wheel. My next color wheel project will be making a miniature version. After that will come the Tiger gadget…

Also on the updates front, Jade won an award in the July Final Frontier contest. I also added a link to her latest Voyager stories.

It’s been a long time since I’ve used IRC; I think it’s time to download a new client. I used to use ShadowIRC, but it’s time to move on. Ircle and Snak are still the big shareware names, but I was looking for something that won’t give me guilt when I neglect the shareware fee.

On the free front, I found Colloquy and Fire. The latter also does AIM, MSN, and Yahoo chats, plus ICQ, but I’m trying out Colloquy first because it looked the prettiest.

[Time passes…]

I’d forgotten just how annoying IRC could be. After a long struggle, I got onto DALnet, but there was no one in the chat room. SearchIRC is a good place to find channels, and New IRC Users has a handy command list, marred only by the annoying floating menu. News flash: DHTML is no longer cool.

Thanks to Liz for this link to SecureMac.com, with (happily) no news since May.

It’s a link dump, but it’s a fresh one:

• Bitoogle, the Google of Bittorrent, looks great but is down for the count.
• A List Apart has a cool article on
  preventing bandwidth theft using mod_rewrite and PHP.
• Some fun free fonts from Letterhead Fonts.
• More spam amusement at spamusement—spam-based cartoons by stevenf, now with an RSS feed!

In other net news, yours truly is now a guest blogger at Gene Expression—today I blogged about creationist museums.