Schinckel.net

I’m still using Panther - I’ll upgrade to Tiger when I’ve finished backing up everything. In the meantime, I noticed something quite weird the other day. If I attempt to view my web pages stored on this computer (ie, the one I’m typing this in from, ny iMac at home) then it only works some of the time. Specifically, if I try to use the real IP address, given to me by my ISP, or the domain name (again given to me by my ISP, dialup0-1213.optusnet.com.au, or whatever it is at that moment), then it times out. If I use 192.168.1.2, or the local hostname, then it works fine. I wonder if there’s a setting somewhere which only allows http access from those addresses. I can’t figure it out - with no firewall there shouldn’t be a reason this doesn’t work, unless Optus is blocking incoming traffic to addresses within it’s domain. Update: This would seem to be it. I can ssh into my machine, but not http in.

I’ve got some stuff to do that will be easier with python, so I’m wondering if it’s possible to package a python script up, and use it from within an AppleScript, without having to have it in the path. It may not be, since AppleScript’s

do shell script “pwd”

returns "/", indicating it is running at the root directory. Well, back to pipes and awk/sed. (Actually, I think I’d just used awk & sed inside the python script).

New Scientist News - Baby comes with brain repair kit for mum Excellent. Does it fix ‘Mummy Mind’, or the tendency of new mothers to make inane comments?

SimpleBits | Electronic Mail is Not For Everyone Funny post over at SimpleBits. But the thing I like is the effect when you hover over the commenter links: the site appears. Cool! (Now I just need to figure out how to implement this!)

WackGet - A minimalist download manager for Windows based on wget Hmm. Should be easier to write one of these for Mac.

• Can download all links in a page that point to files that might be interesting (.zip, .sit, .mp3, .aac, .mov, etc).
• Can just download all links within the selection.

Actually, writing a Service to do this would be great.

I’ve added an IM contact link up the top of the page: if the light is green, I’m online, if it’s red, I’m not. <img border="0" align="absmiddle" src="http://big.oscar.aol.com/SCREENNAME?on_url=http://path.to/AVAILABLE.PNG&off;_url=http://path.to/AWAY.PNG" /> Note that the paths to the images must be full paths, /images/available.png will not work. AIM: IM Me!

Boing Boing: Torn posters of Sydney I like the graffiti that Jason talks about sometimes, in response to the “Bill Posters will be Prosecuted” notices that appeared on many Adelaide buildings in the 80s and 90s:

Bill Posters Is Innocent.

I came across an Adsense Ad for a new search engine: ipselon, and thought I might try it out. Typing Schinckel into the box brought up the usual results: interestingly my old blog, which has not been updated since April 9th, was the top hit, followed by this site, on Blogsome. Then a news story about Simon Schinckel (and his blubber pot. Ironic since the last time I saw Simon he was blubbering! - at our cousin Nick’s funeral.), and some other links, mainly mine. Then, I happened to notice the Sponsored Links section on the right. A whole lot of these were links to my Blogger blog. I think that means Google pays other Ad revenue sites to link to blogs on Blogger! Because I certainly don’t. And these links are through click.search123.com. And the irony of this is that the ipselon search engine is in breach of Google’s Terms Of Service. Actually, they might link to http://schinckel.net in some form, as clicking on some of them brought up this site. Bizarre.

I wrote a quick AdiumScript to rate the currently playing song in iTunes. Trivial. The only downside? Arguments to AdiumScripts need to be typed in using {} rather than (). I’m much faster at typing in () without looking at the keyboard than {}. I guess I’ll have to learn. There are also scripts for quick-rating a track as 0-5 stars: /rate3 will rate a track as ★★★. (That’s three stars if you don’t have Unicode!) /rate{44} will set a rating of two-and-a-bit stars. The AdiumScript bundle includes all of the scripts, and can be downloaded Adium Xtras: Rate Current iTunes Track.

The Muppets Personality Test