Rand Wacker

On this trip for work I got a chance to visit Sweden for the first time. I flew in early Sunday morning and had an opportunity to wander around the capital city, Stockholm. Beautiful place, very relaxed. I haven’t taken a tremendous number of photos because I didn’t want to duplicate the standard postcard shots that you can find in any travel book, but a few things caught my eye which I thought were interesting enough to share.

(Please excuse the glaring new blue background for my re-instated Gallery site, I need to work on making it look a little more like my blog at some point here)

Tonight I’m flying back to London to give a presentation at the InfoSecurity conference tomorrow morning and then working there the rest of the week. With a number of friends and acquaintances in the city I hope to have at least a couple of good adventures.

SpamLookup - Trac

SpamLookup is a new Movable Type plugin for identifying and eliminating weblog spam. Weblog spam has been becoming more and more of a problem.

I know I’m a bit behind on this one, but since I’m overseas right now with way too much bandwidth, I thought I’d finally give Skype a try. I’ve got to say that after playing around for a while I’m really impressed. Skype is an Internet telephony application that “just works”, and it lives up to its promise. While previous Internet chat systems like mBone, DialPad, and iChat A/V have all been too complex, too proprietary, or firewall/NAT-unfriendly, Skype seems handle everything I’ve thrown at it.

What’s really great is that it not only allows you to make computer-to-computer contact (for free), but also you can dial out to a landline from your computer for about 2 cents a minute to almost any (industrial) country in the world. Even better than that is that you can get an inbound number where people can call you. This of course has voicemail, and you can register something like 3 numbers, each in different area codes and even different countries. So this is a system that you can take advantage of without having to have your friends and family install any complicated software. But really, its a very simple system to set up. Very cool stuff, and the sound quality I’ve had so far is great.

I’m quickly getting sold on Internet Telephony, as much for the cheap prices as for the convenience of having your number and your voicemail follow you around. Before I left the country I forwarded both of my cell phones to my work number, because we have a phone system that I can check my voicemail on over the web. Now, I’ve forwarded that number to my Skype account, so if someone calls my cell phone it will get routed through a couple of different hops and then ring here on my computer, no matter where I am. Wow, this is just amazing. Its nice to see this obviously disruptive technology coming along and getting to be very very useful. Now I need to find a good headset to used to make calls with, or better yet, pair my Bluetooth Jabra with my PowerBook. Now that’s insane!

On a plane flying to London right now. It was a hectic week trying to get everything ready before I took off, so I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep last night. My plan was to force myself to stay awake through the remainder of the day, set my watch to GMT when we flew out, and then try to catch the early sunset to start getting my body on a somewhat local rhythm.

Unfortunately my plan didn’t account for our flight plan taking us over the northern tip of Greenland and fairly near the arctic circle. Here it is 3am adjusted local time and the sun is finally going down, and of course I’m just not that tired. We’re arriving about 6:30am on Saturday morning and I’m tubing over to one of my best friends’ flats for the weekend. Should be interesting to see how human I am. Oh well, he’s taken care of me when I’ve gotten deathly ill when visiting him in random countries before, so this should be a breeze.

I hate to get caught up in pre-release hype, be it for a movie, a piece of hardware, or heaven forbid an operating system. I have to admit though that Mac OSX 10.4 (Tiger) is starting to look really really cool, and since it’s actually shipping at the end of this month I feel like some amount of anticipation is OK (I’ll also be getting a new 15″ PowerBook from work to run it on, which will be sweet).

Apple has made some major tweaks to their website, but one of the best pages they have lists over 200 new features in even the smallest applications, several of which look like they will be extremely useful:

• Address Book Auto-Update LDAP Cards - Keep your server-based Address Book contacts synchronized with an LDAP based directory — perfect for mobile professionals. (This will be great for work)
• Birthday Calendar - Always know the birthdays of everyone in your Address Book with this automatic calendar in iCal. (Finally!)
• Bluetooth Headset Support -Use your Bluetooth headset as an input and output device, enabling hands-free audio conferences in iChat AV and more. (Going to be fantastic for Skype)
• Smart Folders - Take the results of a Spotlight search and save it as a Smart Folder that automatically updates as you add or remove documents from your Mac. (This is going to revolutionize my personal workflow)
• Secure WebDAV - Get support for the Kerberos and https protocol when accessing WebDAV volumes. (Yay I can safely mount my volumes remotely without having to tunnel through SSH!)

Wow, I would pay the price for Tiger for each one of these features individually, and they’re all coming in the same package, with at least 20 other things that I’m really excited about having integrated in to the base OS. Better yet, Amazon is currently offering a $35 rebate on a single-user license ($50 for the family pack). Accepting pre-orders now.

Very often the best nights are the ones that you don’t really plan. I was in Las Vegas for a belated birthday weekend with Alexis. Last night we had a standard Vegas entertainment night planned. We had a great dinner, went and saw the new Cirque du Soleil show Ka, then went out to have a couple of drinks and have some fun. By around midnight we were feeling like heading home, so I dropped in to a Walgreens to buy a couple of bottles of water. This is the conversation I had with the depressed-looking guy behind the counter:

Me: How are things?

Clerk: Bad…The best DJ in the world is playing tonight and they wouldn’t let me switch shifts to go see him.

Me: Oh really? Who is that?

Clerk: (Looks at me a little weird) Paul Oakenfold.

…pause…

Me: Really?! When?

Clerk: Oh, he should be going on right about now.

Me: Really!? Where?

Clerk: Club Ice, on Harmon right around the corner.

Me: Sweet!

…pause…

Me: Oh…sorry dude…that really sucks.

…pause…

Me: Ummm, do you guys sell ear plugs?

OH MAN WE WENT TO SEE PAUL OAKENFOLD AND IT WAS FRICKIN FANTASTIC!!!

Club Ice turned out to be a newish club in Vegas and while it was pretty full, the line wasn’t completely impacted and most everyone there was there for the same reason, so it was a good vibe and a total blast. Best clubbin’ I’ve done in recent memory (perhaps ever). By the end of the night we were completely dead and seeing Ka earlier in the evening barely registered in our memories.

Yeah, sometimes the best nights are the ones you just can’t plan. Fantastic birthday, just great. The Thirties are gonna be great.

Graphics and Web Design Based on Edward Tufte’s Principles

This is an outline of Edward Tufte’s pioneering work on the use of graphics to display quantitative information. It mainly consists of text and ideas taken from his three books on the subject along with some additional material of my own. This page is in text only format: in order to understand the concepts you need to read the books because the concepts cannot really be grasped without the illustrations, and current video monitor technology is too low in resolution to do them justice. His work has been described as “a visual Strunk and White” (here is a German translation of this article).

Blue Coconut:: Introduction

Ever found that your iTunes music library wasn’t quite as shared as you wanted? Annoyed that you can’t copy a song from your server to your laptop quickly and easily, from with everyone’s favourite music jukebox application? Want to make a playlist with shared tracks? Blue Coconut is for you.

Simply click one button while you’re listening to a favourite shared track and it’s copied to your machine, and added to the iTunes Music Library (and a playlist, so you can keep track of your downloads).

Frequently asked questions | Ourmedia

The idea is pretty simple: People who create video, music, photos, audio clips and other personal media can store their stuff for free on Ourmedia’s servers forever, as long as they’re willing to share their works with a global audience.

The only thing that I have missed with my PowerBook has been the lack of a DB9 serial port that I could use to hook up to the several headless Frankenstein FreeBSD boxes I have around my house. I bought a Keyspan USB Serial Adaptor a while ago to do a migration off of my old Palm V, but I could never find a terminal program that would recognize the strange USB port numbering (Minicom always expects something as /dev/ttycu). I’m sure its a tiny market, but I finally found a tool that would work: MacWise. Added the latest Keyspan drivers, installed the MacWise demo, hooked up an old null modem cable, and I am off and running. This laptop can do anything!