May

Armory Search Plugin updated for European Realms

Submitted by User ProfileRob on 8:13pm, Thursday, 2007-05-24
I've finally got the search plugin I made last month to work for European Realms. The idea is the same, so the info in the original release still applies but I'll recap here.

Background

This is an OpenSearch plugin, it only adds a search provider to the list at the top, not generic functionality for Firefox. Since it's done with OpenSearch, my understanding is that it might work in other browsers too. My instructions and experience are specific to Firefox though. If you still don't have Firefox, you can go get it from Mozilla or get . I've approached the search two different ways, one way is to search all realms for a character. The other looks for a character only on a specific realm. I think looking on a specific realm is a lot more useful since most of us only play on one realm or at most a few. You can install the realm-specific search for each of the realms you play on and the name shows up when you pick which you want from Firefox's search box.

Technology Day 2007 Notes

Submitted by User ProfileRob on 8:39pm, Wednesday, 2007-05-23
The conference went really well considering there was no electricity until 3pm. It wasn't their fault - the power was out in that whole part of the city apparently. Candace went ahead without the PowerPoint Slides she worked so hard to make and gave a great talk on Collaboration Nation. She gave an intro to a bunch of the different ways people collaborate and work together online. It can be a tough topic to approach when you're already using blogs, wikis and every Web 2.0 social site effortlessly. You have to go back to the spot you came in from and try to draw your audience in. I think Candace did a great job of it in the half hour she had. It sounds like U Windsor's got the Open Source bug. The new software they're deploying campus-wide is an open source Learning Management System called Sakai. The executive director of the Sakai foundation, Dr. Chuck, gave the keynote. It sounds like they follow a model a lot like Apache Foundation, in that there's a non-profit foundation which guides the project and a bunch of developers volunteering their time to get the actual work done.

Podcatching: For the Podcast Listener

Submitted by User ProfileRob on 12:17pm, Wednesday, 2007-05-23

Intro

I did a poster presentation on podcatching yesterday at the University of Windsor's Campus Technology Day. I liked the other presentations at the conference, but today I just wanted to post to make sure I remembered to share mine. I did some research on podcatching. That's right, not podcasting but podcatching. Subscribing to podcasts and automatically downloading new episodes of those podcasts, then getting those on to a media player. Considering all the copious talk there is out there about podcasting, there's surprisingly little help for the listeners. I've done a couple podcasts, but by and large I just listen, I was just downloading manually the episodes of podcasts I like until a few weeks ago when I started really getting in to the research for this presentation. I was pretty happy with what Amarok can do but for my fellow podcast listeners on Macs and Windows machines, you'll just have to wait. The most-referenced names I saw were iTunes and Juice (formerly iPodder). I was disappointed in iTunes in that it considers subscribing to any podcast not in there directory to be an "advanced" option. Then there's Juice, which claims to be open-source but I can't seem to find the source for it. So my choice is clear but at the conference I tried to give as much choice as I could for an interested user so I've included all three.

Twenty Days to Coffee

Submitted by User ProfileRob on 1:39am, Tuesday, 2007-05-22
I accidentally just had my first sip of coffee since the beginning of March. It was good. It's not any kind of self-torture or penance. It's not a cleansing diet. I just want to kick the habit for a bit then I'll go back to it. I told myself 3 months, no coffee. Nothing too formal, not a big deal and I have some caffeine from pop or chocolate, though I'm not having anything like a whole cup of any caffeinated anything. It was really easy after the first week. I hoped to try to move more towards being a morning person for a bit there. I've always been a night-owl and envied the way some people start the day and get stuff done for hours before I'm even conscious. Not so much at night, when they crash early and I keep moving until the wee hours. So I was getting the mornings in hand until I had to go to Germany for a week or so and the mornings haven't come back since.

Using SquirrelMail with 1and1

Submitted by User ProfileRob on 8:38pm, Wednesday, 2007-05-09
I can think of three things I really want from my email: it should be easy to use, fast, and private. SquirrelMail gets me pretty close to those goals. It just got better today with the release of version 1.4.10. Somewhere between the last version I last installed and this one they've added support for multiple identities - that is to say that you can have more than one return address. If you want to set it up on a site you host at 1and1, there's an FAQ at 1and1 on how to do exactly that. Unfortunately they haven't updated it since they changed their outgoing (SMTP) mailservers to require authentication. I got the hint because it's mentioned for other email clients. Since SquirrelMail is really just an IMAP email client written in PHP, the same rules apply. What worked for me was this change in SquirrelMail's config/config.php: $smtp_auth_mech = 'login'; The default was none. So overall all you need to change in the default config file to make SquirrelMail work with mail at 1and1 are the $domain, $smtpServerAddress (smtp.1and1.com) and $imapServerAddress (imap.1and1.com). The other interesting thing is that since SquirrelMail is just an email client, you don't have to run it on your 1and1 web server to get your 1and1 mail. If you have a home server or one hosted somewhere else, you could use the same configuration file and SquirrelMail will go get your mail just like any other client would. Depending on how you use your mail you might find this a little more convenient and possibly faster than using your web server.

The Tab One Timesaver

Submitted by User ProfileRob on 1:16pm, Wednesday, 2007-05-02
Firefox has a feature whereby you can press Ctrl with numbers from 1-8 to activate the corresponding tab in the browser. Put another way, Ctrl-1 activates the first tab (counting from the left) and Ctrl-8 activates the eighth tab from the left. I thought Ctrl-9 would do the ninth tab but it's actually the right-most tab. I'm a keyboard guy, but this feature never mattered to me much. I used Ctrl-Tab and Ctrl-Shift-Tab to cycle through my open browser tabs. Then I realized that there are a few pages, which some could describe as web-applications but that's less important, that I almost always have open. I mean things like webmail or Pandora. I made a simple change of always having those tabs on the first few spots and now I can always get to them easily.