Every once in a while, I go hunting for odd domains that are still available. For example, if you believe that junk e-mail is caused by the spirits of dead aliens, you might want to register spamintology.com. It's available (or was when I wrote this) and it's one of 25 I found while wasting some time today.

Just blogged about how a friend of mine not only got content taken off YouTube, but had his YouTube account completely shut down because of three different completely invalid DMCA complaints from three different complaining corporations. Not only did he get nailed by a bogus Viacom complaint, he got nailed with bogus Comedy Central and Universal Music Publishing group complaints. And after watching the "infringing" video podcasts, the only potential infringement I can find is that in one they say "Manic Monday" (the title of a Bangles song, who happen to be Sony artists, not Universal).

Sheesh.

I recently discovered that The New York Daily News sports columnist, the Mighty Quinn, used one of my online humor columns from 1996 ("Dating Don'ts") as his February 13th, 2007 column, crediting it to some bartender in New Jersey. I didn't register it way back when, so six-figure statutory damages are out, but I can prove it's mine and that it's carried a copyright notice since I first published it, so I am entitled to something.

What would a reasonable something be?

So, the moment I heard Microsoft's YouTube killer, Soapbox had opened to the public, I immediately had to try Soapbox and see how it compared.

I ran tests of Soapbox vs. YouTube and Soapbox vs. Google Video. All in all, Soapbox seemed to have better video quality and a better user interface than GV or YT. Surprising, but true, Microsoft may have gotten something right this time.

So, I've been looking for a job recently. After the SuperBowl ads, I thought I'd post a resume on CareerBuilder.com. Yeah.

Once you've signed up, they try to sell you up to $500 in additional services, ranging from visibility packages to proactive distribution to resume consultations. And then they let spammers for similar services search their job seeker database to find people to spam.

I blogged in more detail about the experience.

While looking for the video of the distraught bride cutting off her hair, which was recently revealed to be a hoax, I noticed YouTube had multiple copies of it, a couple with a URL overlaid that went to a site chock full of porn clips. Looking into this practice a little more, I wrote "Spam, Spim, Splogs... Spube?" exploring this particular method of spamming YouTube and some possible names for the practice.

Coherence is a feature in the recent release candidates for Parallels Desktop For Mac that allows you to run Windows applications directly on the Mac desktop, treating them much like they were Mac applications.

I recently tested Coherence and wrote a blog entry at BrainHandles.com about the process and results, plus a couple of tips on getting everything configured.

Recently, I switched from Windows to OSX. When thinking why I wouldn't recommend switching to my parents, I came to an understanding of why people stick with Windows. I reasoned that it's not so much whether alternate software can do the same things, but the fact that users often have to learn new ways to do the same things.

A quote from my blog post...

If you want an example, find someone who has never used a trackball mouse and isn't familiar with the concept, then swap the trackball for their regular mouse...

It will take hours, if not days, before they stop grabbing the trackball mouse like a regular mouse. They have spent years grabbing a mouse and moving it, and it has become almost reflexive. They have learned through extensive repetition that the desire to move the pointer on the screen is satisfied by grabbing and moving the brick of plastic beside the keyboard. And every time they do the wrong thing, it wastes time and makes them feel frustrated or stupid for getting it wrong. The first few times it may be a laugh. The 28th time, it's an irritant.

Following a "dream", I tried to get a very cool Flash-based drawing application built. After coders on Rent-A-Coder and E-Lance wasted weeks of my time before saying the app was impossible or would take a team of programmers months, I finally decided to do it myself even though I'd never even touched Flash before.

I recently blogged about the experience of building a complex application while learning the necessary programming skills as I went. Quite a journey and one that hit home the value of RTFM.

Just got the LaCie Rugged All-Terrain Hard Drive and put it through its paces on my MacBook Pro. I actually got speeds a bit faster than reported by cNet's review.

Hooked up via the FireWire 800 port, this bus-powered baby is plenty speedy for everyday use (not just backups), and at 120 gigabytes (111.78 available), it basically doubles the disk space on an off-the-shelf Mac Book Pro.

I've noticed both on my own pages and on the pages of others (like Yahoo) that sometimes a page will hang mid-render while waiting for a script-sourced ad to fill in a table cell or a div.

I thought this was only a problem on older browsers where the size of the ad/div wasn't specified, but I'm finding that this still happens on the newest browsers with divs and table cells.

As a site-builder and as a user, I'm interested in how to avoid this from both sides: making pages less prone to this when coding them, and finding ways to push the render through as a user when I find myself viewing someone else's page that is stalled halfway and waiting for a response from Google AdSense or another remotely-sourced ad.

Any advice that isn't "don't put ads on your pages", "use an ad blocker", or "only visit sites that don't carry ads"?

SEE UPDATE BELOW ORIGINAL POST:

Apparently Firefox 2.0 hangs for no apparent reason on OSX. You have to force a "quit", lose all your tabs, and then try to find the pages you were on.

Annoying as all get out. And people have been complaining about it.

Also, I wanted to get the new system set up with Apache, PHP, etc.

Of course, because Mac is the bastard stepchild of the world, Apache and PHP don't have binary installers. And though MySQL does, you still have to recompile portions of it from source, because it uses static libraries instead of shared libraries which means you can't compile PHP with MySQL support unless you compile MySQL from source, making the binary installer sort of useless.

So, while I'd have had this set up within 3-4 hours were it a Windows machine, I've been chasing down error messages, step-by-step instructions on how to install this stuff from source, and waiting for various things to compile (or barf up error messages so I can try to figure out why they won't compile).

So I think the Apple slogan needs to be changed from "Mac: It just works" to "Mac: It just works so long as you have really low expectations and don't mind pulling your hair out when you try to run any of the cool free Open Source stuff it's so easy to run on Windows."

AND NOW THE UPDATE:

Mac does come with Apache 1.33 and a 4.4.x version of PHP. Of course, the version of Apache isn't configured to actually work with PHP. You have to hack the httpd.conf file, and that's hidden from the average file search to prevent users from doing harm to themselves.

I figured it was a non-standard install and looked to install Apache 2.0 with PHP 5. That was where I ran into trouble. That was my downfall. That was the unmerry path that wasted half of my day.

Finally, after sharing this complaint with a friend, he pointed me at a step-by-step for getting WordPress working on OSX (which included the hidden location of the httpd.conf file). I followed the instructions and had everything working in a matter of minutes.

I'd actually seen a link for the WordPress instructions come up as I googled for an answer, but since I didn't want to run WordPress locally and I knew how to install WordPress on a machine where Apache/PHP/MySQL were already running, I ignored it.

Ticks me off that this would be the 10-minute answer to my question, while the other results were all WAY too complicated.

So, earlier in the Summer I got two "Ask Slashdot" submissions accepted.

The first was regarding PHP and Perl in one script. I asked because I wanted to use ImageMagick and because it would be processing user-generated text, there was no way I wanted to generate commandline code. Because the developer of MagickWand for PHP abandoned the project around the start of the year and it was still basically an alpha release, I wanted to use PerlMagick, but I wanted to program all the hard stuff (a lot of XML and math) in PHP, which I already knew.

Long story short... I'm using PHP to write the Perl scripts. The small amount of Perl that's needed is sort of "fill-in-the-blank", so I have PHP doing that, putting it all in a string, then PHP writes it to disk and then executes the perl script.

As for a good multi-format SVG converter. As long as you don't want to convert to a vector format, ImageMagick does a good job with that, rendering SVGs to a wide range of raster formats. Of course, I actually wanted to convert to both vector and raster formats, so I'm basically using 2-3 different programs, batch converting a collection of SVGs with each, then comparing the outputs and picking the best.

That is all.

Stopping by Apple's online store to check out the specs on the new Core2Duo MacBook Pros, I decided to price out my dream MacPro system and found they'd lowered prices... by a whole dollar.

Seems Apple got religion on pricing everything with 99s, not just the base systems. Upgrade to 2 gigs of RAM... was $300, now $299. Upgrade to 500 gig hard drive... was $200, now $199. My dream system came down in price a whole six dollars! Sigh.

One of my revenue streams looks poised to jump 500% this month from last month.

That's not amazing, since it was just slightly more than beer money last month. But, for the fun of it, I decided to do some factoring to see where it could go if every month it multiplied by 5.

So next month it would be 5x more than this month. The month after that 25x (5x * 5x). The month after that 125x (5x * 5x * 5x).

I figure that somewhere around my 39th birthday I'd have all the money that exists in the world, have every man woman and child on Earth indebted to me for 20 million dollars each, and officially own everything.

At that point, I believe 500% month-over-month growth would become unsustainable. :-)

- Greg