It'll Never Fly

Today’s spam brought to you by the word Rolex.

I’m fascinated by e-mail spam. I run my own mail server through my G4 at home, and have several layers of spam filtering installed on the system. Anyone who follows spam closely will recognize different styles or tell-tale keywords that will indicate a message is spam. A lot of these can be weeded out even before they make it into bayesian filtering systems such as Spamassassin.

5 new spam messages showed up in my Spam box this morning; all of them advertising Rolex watches. It looks like Rolex is the new Vicodin.

If you’re like me and are still stuck in the world of Jaguar (Mac OS X 10.2), but prefer Safari as your main browser, then you’re probably ticked off that Apple doesn’t provide all the latest Safari improvements that all those Panther people get. I could go out and buy Panther, but I’m waiting to coincide my O/S purchase with my next PC purchase (and so I know it nobody’s fault but my own for the predicament that I’m in). Plus, I’m waiting for Firefox 1.0 when the infamous middle click bug will supposedly finally be fixed.

Luckily, I no longer have to wait, or at least have something to keep me occupied while I wait. This morning, the Omni Group released OmniWeb 5.1 Beta 1 with an updated WebCore, seemingly making it as standards-compliant as Safari 1.2.3.

Find out more at The Mac Observer.

I’m not really sure this classifies as a gadget, but what the hey.

I bought a Black & Decker Leaf Hog BV2500 leaf blower for my Dad today as a Birthday present. Our 10 year old one finally broke down, and they have a new one, but I think it just blows (in the sense that its only function is as a blower). Assembly was a breeze; the pieces just slide together. Converting from blower to vacuum and back is literally done by the push of a button. Everything just screams ease-of-use compared with our old model.

Vacuum: Seems quite strong (at least as strong if not stronger than our old one). It made pretty short order of the leaves and pine cones on the patio. Sucked up some small stones, which had me worried, but the chamber of the blade seems designed to allow space around the blade to prevent such things from jamming the mechanism. With the other models I looked at, the blades were closer to the chamber wall, so I could see stones doing much more damage. The Leaf Hog seems built to just suck up debris and push it out the bottom, rather than mulch. It still mulched the leafs I picked up, but possibly not as much as others might. But, hey, if it doesn’t jam as much, the life expectancy of the Leaf Hog is probably much longer.

Blower: Haven’t tried it yet. The nozzle is flattened into a very thin oval shape, instead of a circular end like a hair dryer as on our old model. No idea, whether that’s just for aesthetics or if it actually has some practical value. One thing I do know: the nozzle end is small enough to fit in someone’s mouth. Just an observation.

Weight: The actual body of the blower is lighter than I would have expected. A little bit of extra weight is added when you add either nozzle. And of course, the weight will increase in vacuum mode as you suck stuff up. A strap is attached to the collection bag, but like all things with straps I’ve ever had in my lifetime, this one is no different. It’s too short, and I’m not freakishly tall, either.

So if the strap length is my only complaint, I’d say that’s pretty good. Apparently, there’s an accessory you can get (BV006) called the “Leaf Collection System” or something, that has an 8′ flexible hose attached to a draw-string top so you can put it over top of a garbage can or rubbermaid container. I’ll have to keep my eyes open for that one.

Update: After using for an entire evening, I have one more complaint. The collection bag is way too small and fills too quickly. Where can I get a BV006 in Canada?

Check the comments for an update to the story.

Now that I’ve got a new blog engine with more support, I thought I’d try out some swanky new software that works with it. MarsEdit by Ranchero Software is what’s called a weblog editor, a stand-alone desktop application for posting to weblogs. It’s a lot like an e-mail application or a Usenet news reader, but you’re posting to a blog service instead.

I guess the theory being it’s easier/more comfortable (arguably more natural?) for people to post using an app with a familiar GUI than using a form in a Web page. That remains to be seen, and I won’t know until I see my post frequency increase or plateau.

As for how well it works? Well, that depends. Have you just been reading this?

Update: I should also point out that I used it with Mac OS X 10.2.8, and it seems to work fine. However, I have only used the basic features.

As comfortable with Serendipity as I had become using it as my blog engine, there were still some things about it that I felt it lacked. The first little while, I had fun tweaking it just the way I liked, finding features it lacked and adding them by hand (pain-stakingly I might add, albeit enjoying it in a twisted sort of way). The more I used it, the more it seemed to lack, and the more tired it made me seem to feel, knowing I’d have to wait possibly months for someone to add a feature, or knowing I could add it myself if I just dedicated some time for it.

And therein laid the problem. I’ve got better things to do with my time than tinker with the backend of a blog engine, for a blog with a readership of maybe one person (two if I include my self).

I wanted to stick with all the features Serendipity already has, but wanted native cruft-free URLs, threaded categories, better administration, and better support. So after looking a some alternatives, I’ve decided to try out WordPress for a while. Importing my existing posts over to WordPress wasn’t impossible, but there was a slight problem. I used Serendipity’s export RSS feature, and imported the XML using WordPress’s Import RSS. However, all the entries had the tags HTML-encoded (i.e. <a href=”"> became &lt;a href=&quot;&quot;&gt;), which was obviously a pain. A couple hours later and all the entries were back to normal. There was probably a quick way to do it, but I’m a lazy programmer, so of course I grumbled through it the hard way.

Oh, and it looks like it lost the comments. I still have them in the database, so I can probably fabricate them somehow.

And of course, I plan on redesigning the look and feel of the site. Right now, it’s still using the default WordPress template.

Why the new domain name? It’s one I’ve had for a couple of years that I’ve been meaning to activate, so what better way than a new revision of my blog. Why wqoq, though? Rotate it 180° and you’ll see. Clever, ain’t it?

Anyway, we’ll see how this goes.