Spell Checker for Windows Live Messenger

Inspired by Aspell's integration in Pidgin, I have finally integrated Aspell into Windows Live Messenger. The script, using Messenger Live! Plus, can be download from the Messenger Plus website. I have "aptly" called this script aSpellChecker (more information here).

Enjoy!

By the way, this is the 400th post.

Flickr Photo of the Day: On the 1st of November

The Augur (pl: augures) was a priest and official in the classical world, especially ancient Rome. His main role was to interpret the will of the gods by studying the flight of the birds (flying in groups/alone, what noises they make as they fly, direction of flight and what kind of birds they are), known as "taking the auspices." The ceremony and function of the augur was central to any major undertaking in Roman society--public or private--including matters of war, commerce, and religion.

(from Wikipedia)

On the 1st of November, originally uploaded by xylonets is dead

Dreamhost Sucks?

It seems official - Dreamhost, the once popular web hosting service which offers relatively cheap hosting for a ton of features, sucks. Period. Indeed, a slew of articles on the blogosphere have confirmed this.

Sorry, guys, but your service is simply terrible.
Today, there were just 83.11% of uptime (3h23min offline until now!) - data obtained from Pingdom.com.
Since 4/9, there were just one day with 100% uptime.
In the sum of last ten days, I just had more than 9 hours of downtime (while my other servers had no more than 15 minutes).
Every day I see server problems in my server.
That is unacceptable!!!

Of course, it seems that their service has more or less reached tipping point. No doubt this is a quality vs quantity issue.


Going on to web server trends, it appears disturbing that the Apache market share is shrinking.

The newest Netcraft Web server survey shows again a shrinking of Apaches market share. It is now at 56%, followed by Microsoft with more then 30%.

A quick check at the Netcraft Web Server survey for May 2007 confirmed this:

Digging our Freedom

In a tour de force by the Digg community, the Digg team was forced to back down and stop deleting posts regarding to a possibly "illegal" decryption key for HD DVDs. When the Digg team deleted several stories regarding the decryption key and banned several users involved, a furore was created and what ensued was one of the most unprecedented in Internet history. The Digg community responded with overwhelming force and users took full control of the site by making sure that the enter Digg front page was posted with news of the decryption key.

Indeed, technology has democratised information.


Kevin Rose, Digg founder, gave his view on Digg the Blog:

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

In fact, what is even more interesting is that the supposed HD-DVD unlocking key is for Linux only.

Today's incident has shown the true power of the community. While the wisdom of the crowd may not be always right, at least freedom of speech was preserved. The particular act of making the decryption key free, perhaps 'free as in freedom', by a flourishing online community, has demonstrated the Internet as a platform for the plurality of diverse sentiments and is symbolic of a powerful pillar of liberal order.

This, is certainly a day to remember.

Pidgin

Pidgin 2.0.0beta7 (formerly Gaim) was released recently. An artist associated with the Tango project, Hylke Bons, was hired to do a complete graphical overhaul of the UI, and a logo designer was also hired to create a new Pidgin logo. This has resulted in a much better visual interface for Pidgin.

Desktop Tower Defense is highly addictive

Desktop Tower Defense is a highly addictive game I just stumbled upon. Rarely do I take an interest in games, but what seemed to be an innocent and unsuspecting click to the link turned out to be "time consuming".

Whatever it is, DO NOT click on this link to Desktop Tower Defense and start playing if you are very busy...

Its in the strategy...

Flickr Photo of the Day: This is becoming a habit

The lights began flashing and the bells started ringing just as I was driving past so I pulled off the road and took up my position again. This is my favourite of these bridge shots - it seems better from this side of the tracks ;-)
I'll soon be on waving terms with these train drivers, methinks...

It's a pity Jicin only has one decent railway bridge...

This is becoming a habit, originally uploaded by stevacek

Reflections on a Mote of Dust

Have you ever wondered what it looks like it we are to put the entire universe into proportion, from prodigiously small atomic particles to the deep infinite reaches of space? Nikon Universcale is a superb flash application that tries to give us that perspective.


Encapsulated in its pedagogy is the measure of sentient life. One cannot help, but be reminded of Carl Sagan's "Reflections on a Mote of Dust". Nikon Universcale holds immeasurable beauty -- the beauty of creation.

Gaim renamed to Pidgin

In a move that has shocked many loyal Gaim users and also the open source community, Gaim has announced that they are renaming Gaim, the popular instant messaging client used in many Linux variations, to Pidgin.

At the center of this controversy is the AOL issue. The name was changed to protect the developers and to ensure the long term survival of the project, in order to reach a settlement with AOL. All that being said, AOL is not doing any good to its reputation. To quote Digg user ackza:

The fact that AOL-time warner and entities like the RIAA and MPAA can't make any money anymore and are horrible business people doesn't excuse them from this BS they pull every second. They deserve to be counter sued for frivolous lawsuits.

Meanwhile, we will wait for Pidgin 2.0.0, which is expected end of this week or early next week.

RSSing The 5th Wave

Many of us have heard of The 5th Wave, a weekly comic strip by Rich Tennant which usually appears in the papers on Sunday. Naturally, I enjoyed it. However, a certain question struck me - where is the RSS feed where I can view the cartoon every week in Google Reader? Indeed, there wasn't a RSS feed which I could subscribe to!

With some help from Dapper (read more it here), I managed to extract the relevant parts of the webpage which I needed and generate an XML file which could be manipulated.

Since I was not satisfied with the RSS generated by Dapper, I went to Yahoo Pipes, another data masher of sorts, and pieced together a RSS feed that gets data from the XML file.

Still not fully satisfied, I decided to write a simple PHP script that gets data from the XML file and outputs it in the exact format that I wanted.

Every week, when a new cartoon is published, the content from the Dapper XML feed will change and so will the corresponding RSS feed. Google Reader will then rely on this RSS feed and "adds a new post" for your viewing pleasure.

Thus, I have come up with 2 viable options:
- Yahoo Pipes RSS Feed for The 5th Wave
- Host your own PHP script to extract the contents


I also hope that through this post, I have demonstrated the usefulness of Dapper.