I was actually pretty happy with the previous design, so I stuck with the same main layout and color scheme. The main problem I had it was that the one pixel borders and arrows were simply not breaking things up enough well enough; it was really difficult to distinguish between posts on the homepage, and viewing the site on a mobile device was an effort in frustration (since the borders were virtually invisible and the headings were longer than the text, which made zooming in difficult).

Both of these issues should now be fixed, and I also introduced some fun little features here and there like threaded comments, a search button in the header to jump straight to the footer, and so forth. Additionally, the site should look beautiful on the iPhone 4 (I haven’t had a chance to test it on other mobile devices yet).

I’ve tested things on the major non-IE browsers, but please let me know if you run into any problems! I always love getting feedback.

-- Script Name: hello
-- Version: 1.0
-- Description: Say "hello" in various interesting ways
-- Author: Ian Beck <http://beckism.com>

-- Usage: /hello folks!
-- Output: [Greeting] folks!
-- (can also use alone for just the greeting)

on linkinuscmd(name)
	-- Get a random item from the list of greetings
	set response to some item of {"Aloha", "Bonjour", "Ciào", "G'day", "Guten tag", "Hallo", "Hello", "Hey", "Hola", "Salaam", "Shalom"}

	-- Add the name, if we are using one
	if name is not equal to "" then
		set response to response & " " & name
	end if

	return response
end linkinuscmd

-- Changelog:
-- 1.0:
-- - Initial release

To install the command, pop open your favorite Applescript editor (like the free AppleScript Editor that comes with your computer, or Script Debugger if you’re all fancy-shmancy), paste in the code above, and save it as hello.scpt at this path:

~/Library/Application Support/Linkinus 2/Scripts/hello.scpt

The next time you launch Linkinus, you will be able to enter /hello with an optional name or similar, and it will output a random greeting followed by whatever you typed. So for instance, you type /hello folks! and what shows up in the chat room is “Aloha folks!” Or maybe “Hola folks!” Or possibly “Guten tag folks!” Or any number of other greetings.

If you want to use a different selection of greetings, you can modify the list on line 12 of the script.

Granted, figuring out a random greeting in Linkinus is probably not a problem most people have (“IRC? What on earth is that?”), but for those of you who are also annoyed by this repetitive task, enjoy!

Moments later, I receive an email:

Dear ianbeck

We have found that your email is shared in tweets. We advise you to hide your email from spammers by sharing email address as an image or hide it behind a url.

Visit us at : [REDACTED] to find how you can do this.

Happy Twitting !!!
“2 million emails are sent every second. About 70% to 72% of them might be spam and viruses.”

(I’m a little sad that the web doesn’t let you see all the lovely extra spaces in the message, too. It is truly a work of negative-space-leveraging art.)

I was curious how you would classify this email, and Wikipedia provided a concise definition:

E-mail spam, also known as junk e-mail or unsolicited bulk e-mail (UBE), is a subset of spam that involves nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by e-mail

This message is unsolicited email. Based on the format of the email, it is apparent that they are sending this nearly identical message to numerous recipients.

So why would I trust a spammer to protect me from spammers?

Oh, right, I wouldn’t. Blocked and reported for spam.

The ways that people find to abuse Twitter never cease to amaze me.

Incidentally, I have just finished twitting the fools who sent this email. Had I posted to Twitter instead, I would be “tweeting”. Words matter, people. Even if you’re a sleazy spammer.

var lines = text.match(/^.*([\n\r]+|$)/gm);

Or the alternate version if you want to ensure that each line ends with a single linebreak rather than potentially have lines with multiple line breaks at their end (for my purposes this didn’t matter, but it might for yours):

var lines = text.match(/^.*((\r\n|\n|\r)|$)/gm);

The code assumes that text is a multiline string, and it utilizes the built-in Javascript String.match() method, which when performed with a regex with the global flag enabled will return an array of matches. The multiline flag makes sure that the regex matches at the beginning of every line, and the alternatives at the end of the regex match one or more linebreaks or the end of the line (if we are on the last line). The ultimate result of which is you split the string into a Javascript array with one line per index with the linebreaks preserved.

Although some people have apparently had luck using the automatic setup (where you just enter an email address and your password), I needed to use the manual setup in order to get it to use IMAP rather than POP. I think recent MobileMe accounts don’t even have POP activated by default, so maybe the age of my account is the problem. In any case, if the automatic setup booted you into POP3 rather than IMAP, delete the account and recreate it. From the screen where it asks for your username and password, open the menu and choose “Manual Setup” (why they didn’t just stick a Manual Setup button on the main screen where anybody could find it is beyond me, but I digress).

Here’s all the settings you’ll need to get rolling:

• Incoming mail server: mail.me.com
• Username: [your username, without @me.com or @mac.com]
• Password: [your password]
• Encryption: SSL
• Port #: 993 (this should be automatically selected when you choose SSL)

• Outgoing mail server: smtp.me.com
• User Authentication: On
• (Username and password will be auto-filled)
• Encryption: TLS (this is what was probably screwing you up if you tried manual setup already)
• Port #: 587

These settings work perfectly for me; hopefully they’ll save other Pre users with MobileMe the headache of “SMTP setup failed” errors.

One Crayon now looks several orders of magnitude better than its original design; offers information and documentation for TEA for Espresso, TEA for Coda, and my other projects in a single unified location; and offers numerous other improvements like a news feed for keeping up to date with general One Crayon news and updates to my various software projects.

I’m not actively seeking freelance work thanks to a busy full time schedule, but I’ve been wanting to revitalize One Crayon for a while, not least because I wanted to start migrating some of my sites over to ExpressionEngine and One Crayon seemed like a good place to start.

There are still some rough edges (I’m looking at you, IE 6) and I haven’t added my website or writing portfolios, but I hope you’ll enjoy it anyway!

My other favorite time estimator is Stuffit, which back when I still used it would tell me that files would be completely unstuffed anywhere from -16,000 to 1,000,000,000 minutes. I never was sure how a file could have been unstuffed in negative minutes. Possibly Stuffit was trying to tell me that it had been unstuffed once before in the past, so why the hell was I opening it again?

Pete Joison’s artwork, in all its forms, makes me so very, very happy.

Along with the update to Coda, I’ve updated the TEA for Coda bundle (find the most recent version on the dedicated TEA for Coda page); all of the scripts will now perform their actions in the active document even if multiple windows are open. Additionally Indent New Line should be significantly improved performance-wise. The scripts do now require Coda 1.6, though; if you’re running an old version of Coda expect buggy behavior.

I am unlikely to improve the TEA for Coda scripts anymore; my new goal will be to get the Textmate bundle items that I know and love into Coda using the plugin interface. This will necessitate learning some Cocoa, though (since some of the key actions require user input), so it may be a little bit of time before I’m able to get a working plugin up and running. In the interim (or until someone else does it), TEA for Coda is still the best way that I know to get Coda to behave like a full-blooded HTML editor.

• The HTML Tidy script is now a universal binary! At long last, our PPC friends can run it just as easily as those with newer hardware.
• The Format with Em and Format with Strong scripts now keep your text highlighted rather than moving the cursor to the end. This is not only more congruent with Textmate’s behavior, but I think it makes better sense, particularly if you ever need to wrap the text in more than one tag (or wish to add a class name, or…).

You can get the update from the dedicated TEA for Coda page. Unless you use PathFinder or have some other way of viewing invisible files, you’ll need to replace the entire HTML directory (if you’ve made changes to the scripts, you should copy them into the new directory before replacing the old one). If you are comfortable with invisible files, then you’ll just need to replace the .lib directory and the Format directory.

The most recent release (2008-09-25) adds Insert BR, a script that inserts a <br /> element at the cursor (warning: will replace any selected text), fixes an annoying cursor position bug for anything that positions the cursor (cursor was previously overshooting by a character), and vastly improves on the behavior of Insert Open/Close Tag by allowing it to intelligently handle self-closing XHTML tags like img and link.

If you’re already using the scripts, you can update by replacing the HTML folder in your Coda scripts folder with the one in the download. Newcomers should follow the installation instructions in the Read Me.

For those who missed my previous hating on StuffIt, I’ll recap: do not buy it, and you probably shouldn’t update if you already own it. It is redundant, outdated, buggy, and a sad excuse for professional software whose company makes money by bumping the version number for every minor update. Back in the day, StuffIt was a must-have tool. Now it is an example of why giving complete control over a product to a marketing team is a terrible idea.

If you need a file compression and archiving solution, do yourself a favor and try something like Springy or BetterZip instead.

I’m always so glad when I can spend $8.00 rather than $0.75.

Whoever at Amazon approved that section is an idiot. Plus at least one of those books is available from Feedbooks for free (always check for a free version before you buy a classic).

Sometimes I wonder why more publishers aren’t gunning to get their author’s books onto the Kindle. And sometimes I don’t.

That said, I did a vanity search for “beckism” (though I sometimes am tempted to vanity search my name, it’s always useless thanks to another, rather more famous Ian Beck; the fame doesn’t bother me, but what really pisses me off is that he’s an author and writes fantasy, which means if and when I’m able to get published I won’t even be able to use my own name). In any case, it turned up an interesting result:

Aside from the fact that the link (and as a result their index) is woefully out of date (I redesigned the blog back in February, which was when I changed my link structure), I’m curious how that image got associated with Dirt Man. It’s clearly some sort of clothing accessory, but aside from the fact that it’s an image that has never been on my servers, why on earth would it be associated with my site? I don’t sell clothing. I don’t even like clothing. Well. It’s nice when it keeps off the rain, I suppose.

I want to love Cuil, but it definitely has some kinks to work out.

In other news, the last time I updated Dirt Man was February 2006. Jesus. No wonder no one ever reads it.

MacUpdate often continues their sales past the “expiration date” of the MacUpdate Promo, so here’s a direct link to Jets’n'Guns at MUPRomo if you want to check if there’s still a deal available for it.

The only downside is that this appears to be the original Jets’n'Guns, and not the extended Gold copy. If you want the Gold version, you still save $10 by buying it at MacUpdate Promo and then upgrading at Rake in Grass’s website. A bit disappointing they didn’t just put the Gold version itself on sale, though.

I have to say, though, the short sequence where Batman waxes poetic on the appeal of guns is like hearing commentary for some gun enthusiast’s wet dream. No, Batman. Having a gun, no matter how sleek and well-oiled, does not make you God. It makes you someone who can very easily kill or maim someone else. That is all. Go get laid.

Tastes the same (aside from being very slightly colder and harder), but without the disgusting greasiness on the wrapper and outside that otherwise mars a perfectly decent candy. Brilliant.

Thanks to my girlfriend for introducing me to frozen Reese’s. Definitely the way to go. The only downside is that the inner wrapper is slightly more difficult to remove, but I’m willing to live with that.

Open up Versions beta. Connect to Beanstalk. Right-click folder and choose Rename option. Rename folder quickly and easily. Hooray!

Have a thought. Switch to Cornerstone. Click folder once, then hover cursor over it for a second or two. Folder name becomes selected with a typing cursor. Oh. Right.

Exit out of the renaming, since the folder is no longer typo-a-rific in the repository. Check toolbar for a way to refresh the repository. Fail. Right-click the main area. Fail. Double click the repository nickname in the sidebar. Fail. Right-click the repository nickname in the sidebar. Doesn’t even have a context menu. Open the gear menu in the sidebar (bizarrely positioned at the top). Fail. Go through every menu and sub-menu a second time. Fail. Attempt to rename the folder in the hopes that it will encourage the repository to refresh itself. Fail. Bizarre error message.

Quit Cornerstone. Trash Cornerstone. Hope for Versions to be a real product soon.

I highly recommend anyone who is looking for a better way to manage their favorite recipes to take a look at MacGourmet Deluxe. It’s a program that I don’t use all that often, but when I need to find that favorite recipe I can count on it being in MacGourmet and super easy to find and access.

MacGourmet Deluxe will also be available as boxed software, so good luck to Advenio and Mariner Software in spreading the word about the best recipe software on the Mac to an even larger crowd.

I highly recommend Get Smart for anyone who enjoys spy movies, comedies, or the classic TV show. It was well worth a trip to the theater.

Unfortunately, whenever I recommend OfficeTime recently people are put off by the price. It started at a modest $25 (when I purchased it), but as the developer has been adding features they’ve been steadily ramping the price up (currently it’s almost twice what I paid). Of course, the increase in price hasn’t mattered for me since they’ve never charged an update fee, but it’s a shame that such a great piece of software has become a much harder sell. However, today June 19, 2008 only OfficeTime is on sale for $25 once more from MacUpdate Promo. If you are a freelancer or otherwise need to track your time during the day accurately and easily, I strongly recommend OfficeTime. It’s ease of use and powerful reports are far superior to any of the other Mac time tracking software I’ve found.

Even if you miss the sale, you might be able to get OfficeTime at a discount since the MacUpdate promo usually runs decreasingly good discounts over several weeks. Try a direct link to OfficeTime on MacUpdate Promo to give it a shot.

Pretty disappointing for a Neil Gaiman novel (even if he was collaborating). I have not been impressed with much of Gaiman’s work since Anansi Boys, and even that wasn’t as good as its predecessors. I’m beginning to wonder if he’s one of those authors who has a brilliant early career but isn’t able to sustain it.

Unless you are a hummingbird, do not drink this stuff. It’s like drinking syrup (sans the viscosity). My girlfriend, who normally is of the opinion that more sugar equals more fun, ended up pouring most of a can down the sink. I drank a can with lunch, and while I made it all the way through the resulting headache argues I should have followed her example. This stuff is ridiculously sweet.

Perhaps Jones Soda has always been sickeningly sweet (I don’t know if I’ve ever tried it before, and lord knows there’s a market). If so, and you’re not already a fan (or hummingbird), consider yourself warned. As for me, the search for a lower budget cream soda alternative continues. I do love me the Thomas Kemper Cream Soda, but it’s hard to justify the cost for day-to-day consumption (as a side note, their Ginger Ale is also to die for).

Even if you miss the deal, you’ll likely still be able to get PathFinder through MacUpdate for a discount a few days to weeks afterward. Here’s a direct link to the PathFinder page, so feel free to check it out.