No really, I am. Despite what you might think as you sit here and read my blog…

Before blogging, I wouldn’t have thought to take the time to write, much less have the courage to apply for a writing job.

I knuckled down and did just that earlier this week on eLance and to my excitement was awarded my first writing job! I guess I always knew I had a penchant for the written word, but I had never thought enough about it to actually try to make money from doing it! I have started a series of e-book concepts and am half way through writing my first one, but am far from making money on them.

Given this boost of getting paid to write, I’m excited for the prospects of self-publishing these coming e-books. If this continues, look for me to post here on my advice for first time writers like myself.

It’s official! Nana (Kelsey’s name for my mom) is moving to Seattle. The mover’s picked up her stuff on Friday, she got on the train in Harrisburg, PA Saturday evening, and is currently just west of Glenview, IL (I love status finders!!)

Her train is set to arrive Tuesday morning when she’ll start life in her new home city! She’ll have a lot to do when she gets here considering she doesn’t have a place to live, a bank account, a driver’s license, etc (well, she has the PA equivalents, but needs to set up ones in WA)

It’s looking to be a very happy occasion for both her and Kelsey!

All praise the power of the Internet! (And curse everlasting the salespeople at Seattle’s U-Village Apple Store.)

This week’s utility of the week is getting posted today instead of Thursday night. There are several reasons for this: my mom is moving to town and I will be busier than usual and don’t want to miss posting it; this utility saved my skin like you wouldn’t believe and I want to get another reference to it into Google ASAP.

XPostFacto 3.0b1 by Other World Computing is this week’s utility of the week. It allows one to install MAC OS X.3 Panther on unsupported equipment. I have a beige G3 without built in USB. According to Apple, the highest I should be able to go on this box os MAC OS X.2 Jaguar. Ah, but with XPostFacto 3.0b1, I can install Panther on my old crusty PowerPC G3 with a 266 Mhz processor. HA!

There are support forums and troubleshooting tips at the product page.

I have two partitions, one for my old 9.2 install in case something went horribly wrong, and one for the new OS X.3 install. I popped the new Panther install disk in my G3, ran XPF, choose the install partition, clicked install and 30 minutes later the install was done.

I did run into a minor glitch, but it was easy to solve given the troubleshooting tips. After the install, my biege G3 restarted into OS x.3 and started playing the intro (I heard it, but didn’t see it.) I had to do a hard restart (cut the power) and booted back into OS 9.2 by holding down OPTION on reboot.

I specifically choose the input and output in XPF, told it to restart into OS X.3 again, and next thing I knew, I was looking at Panther!

Now why do you ask didn’t I just get Jaguar? Couple reasons.

1. I had a project this weekend that required my looking at several sites I’m building in Safari, so I needed OS X immediately.
2. Panther was teh only retail box version of OS X I could find (I’d have preferred to buy it on eBay on the cheap, but time constraints kick in at times…)
3. The dumb ass employees at Seattle’s U-Vilalge Apple Store told me it would work on my box. I was rather specific when I told them I was a PC user with an unused old PowerPC G3 with OS 9.2. I told them I was looking to get OS X for it so that I could verify my sites’ compatibility with Safari. I asked which version of OS X would work for my case. Without asking any other questions or warning I would need built-in USB, they said without hesitation: OS X.3 - Panther! I did notice on the box after the pre XPF install failed that this was a requirement. I had never bothered to look at that requirement, because as a PC user, that seems absolutely ludicrous. Granted, it’s caveat emptor, but these employees were given enough information that if they either knew their products, or gave a lick about me, they would have warned me.

So, praise XPostFacto, and curse Apple’s idicotic retail employees. Send them back to bootcamp Apple, they make you look like crap!

Already today I have gotten 27 identical e-mails about the SAME meetup!

They are on my eternal shitlist. Why, because not only is there a VERY big bad issue, but there is no way to get around it and make it stop.

1) Their support email address is bouncing my requests for help.
2) They have a bug right now whereby you can not remove yourself from groups. I’d try to remove myself to make it stop, but I can’t.
3) There is no support phone number. I tried calling the technical contact number in WHOIS, but no one answers. To protect their precious employees, all that are listed on the site in their “about us” section are convientiently missing from the spell by name voicemail directory.

I COULD set up an inbox rule and call it a day, but then no one gets to hear me bitch about this. Why should I change my settings because they can’t set their’s properly?

Why can’t companies do things right? It’s one thing to mess up, I’ll give everyone that, I’ve done it myself many a time. It’s the procedures you have in place to mop up during and after a mistake that show the true mettle of a GOOD company. This has been going on for EIGHT hours!

While they’re all asleep in their beds, I continue to get these dang messages! I’ll probably still get them tomorrow since I can’t get a hold of them to tell them they have a problem!

This deserves a public black eye.

And meetup.com, when you do see this, don’t just apologize. Anyone can do that, come up with something better for the stupidity you’ve exposed yourselves as having.

So we’ve done a bad thing. A very bad thing. We’ve gotten our daughter into a habit where she won’t go to bed until anywhere between 11PM and 1AM. She’ll then sleep about 12 hours until the next morning/early afternoon.

I don’t know if we’re too big of wusses to correct this, or if we even CAN correct it. See, we have a one bedroom condo, and my office is shoved into a corner of the bedroom. There’s no room to give Kelsey her own bed or to make it 100% quiet and pitch black.

I have a hard time working at night because Kelsey is bothering me while mommy trys to sleep, and I keep dropping her in bed on top of mommy to take care of her so I can work. Our deal was she works during the day, and I work at night.

It’s a horrendous circle of pain that goes no where but fights-ville. We keep agreeing it’s time to buckle down and force her gradually into a better schedule with routines, etc. Problem is, Aileen can’t do it, and I’m working, so neither can I. Until we come up with a compromise, I’ll continue to ask myself why the heck our daughter is still up at 12:30 in the morning…

Sigh…

Local PHP/MySQL development couldn’t get any easier than with Easy PHP.

Easy PHP is less of a utility and more of an application, but it’s free and increases your work potential, so it earns a hefty spot on my list of practical utilities that make my job easier.

This package includes EVERYTHING you need to do PHP/MySQL testbed/development on your local machine. In one easy to use and install package, you get Apache, PHP, MySQL, and PHPMyAdmin (a graphical interface into MySQL).

No need to go install and configure 4 separate applications. You can do it all from this one application. I had everything up and running in less than 15 minutes. Part of the reason it even took that long is that I had to tweak some of the PHP and Apache settings to my liking (e.g. having Apache run on port 8080 since I have IIS running on the default port 80).

Yeah, you can use your web host to do development, but I crave compartmentalization when approaching work. I like to be able to do anything I need from my location. With this on my laptop, I don’t need a live connection to do PHP/MySQL work anymore. Add that to IIS/SQL Developer, VS.Net, and HomeSite and I can do anything in any language I need without having to rely on my DSL or WiFi.

The only downside is that a lot of the application is in French. Fear not though, the interface is familiar enough and has enough visual cues that I have yet had to worry about not having a fully localized version.

If you do any PHP/MySQl development, get it now. If you want to, get it now. I’ve only had it for a day and it’s at the top of my reccomendation list already.

I just finished up the last of the big tasks I had for my implementation of my Blogroll. I may have been able to tweak the link sinterface in Wordpress to do this, but I had some specific reasons for implementing it separately; the biggest reason being that I use my .opml file for multiple purposes, and having to re-import it into any of those programs regularly is just a pain in the ass.

My Pocket PC reader uses my .opml dynamically, and my Wordpress install uses it dynamically as well (well, it does now…)

The next step is to make this a Wordpress plug-in. Shoot me your comments and I’ll use them before releasing to the Wordpress community at large.

First, you need an OPML file. Mine can be found in the list of links at the top right corner. I don’t use the text field, but it should work as a backup, although I have yet to test it that far. Feel free to use it as a base, but please download it first, don’t deep link it.

Next, you need the include file blogroll.php (linked here as a text file for download). I put it in a directory called bn-includes at the root of my wordpress install point. This file is the meat of it all. It reads your .opml file, parses it, sorts it, and then displays it with a separate link for the feed and the URL of the site. The feed is linked off of the xmlButton, and the site’s URL is linked off of either the title or the text for that specific entry.

Finally, you call the blogroll.php as such:

<li id="blogroll">Blogroll
 	<ul>
 		<?php
		 require("bn-includes/blogroll.php");
		 blogroll("/full-path-to-file-here/myChannels3.opml")
		 ?>
	</ul>
 </li>

It will display the text in your .opml as a blogroll like on mine, using your current .css

Caveats:
1) It’s not 100% done yet, so there are cases that are not covered, such as what happens if the xmlURL and or URL field are blank?
2) There are no comments
3) Sorting is weird and not fixed yet. It will sort capitalized and non-capitalized separately. This should be an easy fix, but for some reason, my install of PHP was not letting the other sort functions work properly, so I passed on it for now and just tweaked my titles to all be capitalized.

Feel free to try it out and give me feedback here as a comment. I’ll take all advice to heart and integrate most of it in as fixes, and then release it as a Wordpress plug-in.

Another very frequently used utility I employ in the process of web design and development is Coloristic.

It has a slew of features, but the main one I use it for is capturing the exact preformatted color values of a a specific pixel. You view the screen through a magnifier, and can set up the format of how it reurns the color value of the specified pixel. I generally have it setup to return HTML values in the form of “#ffffff”, but you can have it return in rgb octets, or even have it in HTML format, but with a snap to web safe option. Not that you really need to worry about the web safe pallette anymore, but for those obscure edge cases, it’s nice to have the option.

Ease of use and features make Coloristic this week’s utility of the week.

EDIT: Title corrected

My response to the canning of a federal Do Not Email list: In two words, “Thank goodness.”

The long version, well get a cup of coffee and sit down before you start…

The Do Not Call list has not decreased the amount of telemarketing calls we receive. The number we receive has actually increased since we put our number on it. Granted, there may be no causation there, but the promise of less calls has certainly never materialized.

Given that penalties are fairly small, and unlikely to be evenly applied, telemarketers have no real motivation to comply. Add that to the fact that this is a US law with no enforcement beyond our boundaries and we have a problem that can multiply as firms in say Canada start calling with no ramifications.

The reason this is not as big a problem as it could be is the prohibitive cost of long distance calling, even with VOIP and other similar solutions.

However, email is (essentially) free to send. A registry would just create a spammer’s dream. A live list of 100’s of millions of emails. Once a registry is created, international interests will get a hold of it, and given the protection of their international location will be able to use it for whatever nefarious purpose they wish with no risk of retribution.

People have to realize that a fairly good portion of the spam they receive is of their own doing by giving their email address out to any fool who asks for it online, at festival contest signup booths, by posting to discussion forums, clicking on virus ridden attachaments that pass their address book of live addresses on to more spammers, etc…

Internet users are never really educated that their email address is worth money. They should protect it like cash.

I could go on about throw away email address use increasing due to the increase in custom domains where users control their own mail, email filters as a fairly good stop gap, programs like Gmail and Outlook 2003 refusing to fetch and display web bugs, black lists at a router/server/sendmail level, FTC sanctioned phishing scams to catch and alert uninformed users, and on; but I won’t.

I think the ONE thing that can actually help decrease the amount of spam _most_ in the near future is the push to make RSS feeds more and more ubiquitous. If you subscribe to an email list, you don’t know how far and wide that list will be sold. So, even if you opt in, you may unknowingly opt in to dozens of lists you don’t care to be on.

With an RSS feed, you have essentially a 100% anonymous opt-in user list. Users get the feed (mailing list) and can turn you on and off on THEIR whim. Control of the flow of information gets turned on its head and given back to the user. Your typical RSS feed also does not allow custom tracking via web bugs or cookies, so even tracking a person anonymously becomes a non possbility for content providers.

I actively read ~50 feeds, and none of them know this unless I find something particularly compelling enough to link back to from my own blog which has its own RSS feed (whose readers I will never know unl;ess they choose to tell me.)

It’s easier for me to manage this amount of traffic through a news reader than by having my email inbox clogged with these messages, messages from family and friends, and work related task items. I just download the data to my PDA and read it here and there when I have spare time at night and in the morning.

This change will take time to take place as RSS feeds becomes easier for the typical Internet user to sign up for and read. Sites also need to jump on board and start offering content through RSS. Reuters, CBS Marketwatch, eBay, Amazon, and more are starting to throw content into RSS feeds to match the already existent feeds of entrepenuers (think folks like Seth Godin.)

A good mix of RSS type technologies and a good old fashioned boot to the butt type education will go a long way to slowing down spam. More than a registry of live addresses which will be a literal Fort Knox to Serbian spammers and Nigerians looking for help collecting their money.

I got a call from a telemarketer this afternoon. This in and of itself is not unusual, what happened in the middle of the call is unheard of and priceless.

He asked (I imagine to establish rapport) what I do. I decided to be honest and told him I’m a freelance web developer.

Immediately, the pitch was dropped and he started asking questions about web sites, ecommerce, and costs. He was upset that his company was still not on the web boat and that he couldn’t give people a URL to get info that might be crucial to closing the sale.

I started waxing poetic about tiered deployment options, online coupon code fraud protection, and the value add proposition that gets users to return to sites.

Before I knew what was happening, he was volunteering to contact the business to see their web plans and let them know he found a potential site builder. I’m supposed to expect a call over the next few days once he knows more.

Granted, this all may just be higwash, but I did notice one thing when he ended the call.

He never made his pitch nor asked me to buy anything!!

Did I out market the telemarketer?? We’ll see, but at the very least, I was able to fully avoid a pitch and have HIM end the call promising to call ME back with business. Priceless.