Folks, the Psi website is having issues at the moment. I’m aware of it and am trying to get it resolved.
–the management
#### Update:
Server ran out of disk space. I got it figured out.
TechProsaic
I write about great software, Internet technology, cool gadgets, and The Next Big Thing.
IM Idea - OFT
OFT - On the Fly Translation.
Ok here’s the idea. Trillian, an IM client, recently has tied itself into Wikipedia.org’s web services. So whenever any word is typed by anyone that exists in Wikipedia, a special underline marking appears under the word. If you mouse-over the word, a tool-tip pops up with the Wikipedia description of the word.
The idea is to do exactly the same thing - but tie it into a translation service. I guess there would be a little more to it, because you would want to translate entire phrases if you could, not just single words. In addition, you’d want to specifiy what language to translate TO/FROM for a particular user. For example, say you have a Spanish speaking friend - you would set it to that the web service would attempt to translate spanish words and phrases that yoru spanish friend sent to you into English.
Phase 2 of this would be to enable outbound translations - so you could type in english and have it translate before sending off to your friend.
Now, if anyone for any IM client builds this feature - you must name it BabelChat or something in respect to The Tower of Babel and of course the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Spam fighting 101
In response to Peter’s frustration with email (again), here’s my basic spam-fighting techniques in blog form. Hope this helps.
Peter,
Just read your blog about email and saw your 100+ spam a day figure. Let me enlighten you–there are better ways to deal with that, even beyond spamassassin. I recommend Spambayes or POPfile. I’d go with Spambayes if you are just interested in spam/not spam filing. POPfile can do a bit more, for example you can have spam/friends/jabber/commercial as your “buckets”, and it will learn how to classify across these multiple destinations. If you are a software geek like me, try both. 
Both of these run as proxies to POP3 or other mail fetching methods. I’m sure that if you look, you’ll find tighter-integrated OS/X stuff that uses Bayesian classification techniques. Thunderbird uses Bayesian filtering internally, for example. Both Spambayes and POPfile have plugins available for my favorite mailer, Outlook.
I can’t even tell you how much spam I get a day, because almost 100% of it is caught, and the ones that aren’t caught outright are moved to my ‘junk suspects’ folder. I swear by this stuff man. (Just checked, the spam that gets by SA is only about 10 a day, much lower than it has been in the past.)
Also, if your Spamassassin isn’t at version 3.0, upgrade now. It can now id spam by the URLs the spammer wants you to go to, which is checked against a realtime blacklist. Unlike the sender blacklists, which are infamous for pissing people off who happen to share the same ISP as a spammer, this method works the other way around and is much more precise.
Drupal hacking for fun and profit
(It’s late, my prose may not be up to my usual standards.)
Working on the new Psi website a bit tonight, aka “Psi Website 3.0″. I’m trying to wrap my brain around Drupal, the CMS I have chosen for the project. Anyway, this Drupal is some cool stuff. I’m really getting into it.
There is a module for Drupal called flexinode. It basically lets you create a new type of document (or node in Drupal-speak, and you get to specify the fields in this document. It’s very flexible. The first thing I have thought to do with this is to create a table of contributors to the Psi project, all laid out nice and storing the data in a database. Hand editing HTML is lame, I’m so over that. I ran into a problem pretty quickly though. While there is an email field type, there was no Jabber ID field! Luckily it didn’t prove too hard to whip one up, although I’m kinda slow-going when it comes to PHP.
Crap. I was going to give you a link to the results so that you could see what I’ve done, but then I realized that the new site design is a big secret. Heh. We’ll see how long that lasts.
Jabber Idea Two: bot-on-steroids
### bot-on-steroids
The inspiration for this idea was my favorite Jabber bot: Edgar. I was telling Kev he should use Edgar to remind himself of something we were discussing. To do so you just send Edgar a message like this:
remind +3 hours > Don’t forget to foo your bar!
This works well for me, and I do use it occasionally when I feel an instant message is the best way to be reminded of something. For example, if I’m at work and I want to be reminded the next time I’m at a computer, whether it’s my work laptop or my home desktop. It would make no sense to add a reminder on Friday afternoon to my PIM (Outlook) if I won’t be at that computer again till the following Monday.
Ok, that is the background. Where my idea comes in is that what works well for me does not necessarily work well for Aunt Tillie. So we need a GUI. Why not build an application that logs into a bot component on a jabber server? No instant messaging at all. We are talking about…oh I don’t know, a tray applet that consists of of a context menu and a configuration dialog.
* The context menu is built from a selection of methods passed to it by the server over a disco request.
* You’ll want a global keystroke catcher for shortcuts to your various bot functions.
* Ideally the server component would allow you to plug different bot programs into it. There are a ton of bots out there, some very well established on their own.
* The config dialog will let you choose from a list of bots on the server, and bind functions the bot(s) provide to (nesting) context menus and keystrokes.
* Each context menu may have its own GUI. You could make this flexible by using data forms, but I wouldn’t want that to be a limiting factor.
* It’s gotta be multi-platform. I’m that kinda guy. Maybe something like PyQT would serve well here. (What do I know, I’m not a developer!)
So…let me know when you’ve coded this for me thx.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Go ahead, make fun of me
Make fun of me. I’m getting a Gamecube (used ebay) for my birthday. it’s from the boys. figured it would be a gift they could understand and appreciate.
Thought of the superior Xbox of course, or even waiting for the new systems we’ll hear about in the upcoming E3. But some of you are well aware of how cheap I am. plus the auction does come with some cool games.
Ok 2nd thing to make fun of me about: my TV has died. It was 15 or 17 years old. It’s technically not dead really, but past the point at which I care to use it. The front panel controls died long ago. Well last night the remote control input stopped working. It’s a blind/deaf/mute TV now. Kinda like the guy in the Metallica - One music video. Except its a TV.
I’m sure the innards are working otherwise.
So…i’ll be looking over the Crutchfield catalog for ideas. Pray with me that I can be strong and get an HD-ready set. This is usually where I would wimp out and replace my 27″ with another 27″. Maybe even cable-ready.
Jabber Idea One: Jabber Bookmark Storage
### Preface
I’m not a developer. Ask my friends, they’ll readily confirm this. (They may ask in return what the heck I am good for as they haven’t figured that out yet.) Just because I can’t code, doesn’t mean I don’t have ideas that should be coded. I run into this problem rather often, usually when my brain is preparing for sleep. I’ll suddenly surface from near-sleep with an idea I have to write down. I rarely actually write them down, but perhaps I should get better about that. Anyway, I have these ideas, but not the time, nor the time to learn the skills that would make the time I would invest on development of an idea much less substantial. So…herein lies a post that perhaps I’ll remember to update when I have ideas on new Jabber-related ideas. Then you can code them for me, and let me know when you are done so that I can use it. Thanks in advance.
### Jabber Bookmark Storage ###
This idea is a little bit outdated now since the advent of del.icio.us and the advent of Firefox plugins to go along with it. But when I had the idea back in July of ‘03, your only option for a (free) server-side storage of bookmarks on Firefox/Mozilla was a mostly broken Yahoo toolbar hack. There wasn’t anything to do this with a Jabber server however, and there still isn’t today (although the last JJ mentioned a new project called Jabber Bookmark Directory that I’m watching).
My idea was this:
* Store bookmarks either in iq: private or pubsub nodes
* Use the XBEL format because it is more full featured than JEP-0048 Bookmark Storage (and/or create an XBEL JEP).
* Create a Firefox extension that acts as a single-purpose XMPP client. It will login to your account and manage add/remove/edit actions on bookmarks, and it will sync them to folder in your bookmarks.html for strong integration.
This was going to be version 1. Version 2 would involve the ability to share bookmarks over pubsub node subscriptions. It’d also be cool to have a server extension that would create webpages based on your bookmarks (like del.icio.us).
Anyway, you take it and run with it.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
More screen saver stuff
Thanks to Dougal, who pointed out some more screensavers and another hot-corner utility. He tried to comment on my earlier post, but apparently my spam-blocking plugin was borked.
I of course can’t make a new post out of that without adding stuff of my own, so for those of you who have not seen this before, you are in for a treat. Really Slick Screensavers has got some excellent OpenGL based 3D screensavers. They are very mesmerizing, and free of course. Here’s a clip of his new one called Hyperspace. I haven’t loaded it up yet.
