Software

One of the world’s worst, most-annoying spam-prevention systems is the one in my current version of Outlook — Microsoft® Outlook® 2003 (11.8002.6568) SP2. I’d say about one out of every three times I attempt to click on a link in an email, I get a warning telling me that all links in the message have been disabled to help protect me from ones that may be “harmful”. As far as I can tell there is no way to globally deactivate this, so I have to continually enable links before I can click anything. It is obnoxious and insulting and I hate it.

For at least a year or two I’ve been waiting for someone to build a web service I could use to map running routes. This morning I drove to my buddy’s house at 6 and we went on a long run around Beverly Hills. With less than three weeks until the LA Marathon, it’s time to get serious about hitting the pavement. It took us about an hour and ten minutes, but — once again — I had no reliable way to determine the distance other than driving the route and watching my odometer. This is simply not practical in Los Angeles; at 7:30 in the morning there is so much traffic it would have taken me another hour of driving to do that. When I got to the office I figured I’d try searching for a Google Maps mashup. With the Nike iPod for runners and all the other cool mashups I’ve seen for everything else lately, I figured there must be one for running by now.

And there are two! At USATF (USA Track & Field) some brilliant souls have built a perfect route-mapping tool. We ran 6.72 mi (10.81km) this morning. How awesome! And now I can map the other five or six routes we take all the time to see how far I’ve really been going. Awesome. (There’s also one by Nike, but it’s not as cool.)

Just how long, do you think, until OscarTorrents gets slammed by Hollywood? They’re making it a snap to download all of this year’s Oscar-nominated films. Stuck somewhere without internet access? There’s a company named FON that’s giving away wifi routers in the hopes of blanketing the country with free wireless internet access. Already own one of the DVDs? LifeHacker has instructions that show you how to load a DVD onto your video iPod. Hell, don’t stop there! Why not host your own radio show — for free, of course — to discuss the films? You could also write about them if you want. Then use some free software to convert your text to a PDF document. Welcome to 2007!

Now … where’s my damn jetpack?

From the Department of Nifty: If you have multiple tabs opened in Firefox and hover the mouse over one of the tabs, the mouse scroll wheel will allow you to scroll through the open tabs. This is cool. I have a folder bookmarked with all my daily blog reads, and I use the “Open all in tabs” feature to open all my favorites once or twice each day. Being able to scroll through them using the mouse scroll wheel is way, way cooler than using the left and right arrows on either end of the tab row.

Well I finally did it. I’ve been playing with it for a few weeks and I decided to make the switch. I’ve instructed my laptop to use FireFox as my default browser. It is just a damn hell ass better browser than Internet Explorer. I like the tabs. (No, I love the tabs.) I like the RSS stuff. I like being able to do so many geeky things. I like the fact that it never seems to crash or hang. I like pretty much everything about FireFox. In fact my only real complaint is that I had to open the help files to find the keyboard shortcut to switch the active tab. (It’s CTRL-TAB, by the way. Why is that so hard to find?) I humbly apologize to all those people I thought were dorks for using FF all this time. You were right. I was wrong. Long live FireFox.

How cool is the World Wide Web™? Within 24 hours of the game I was able to use μtorrent to download the entire 2006 BCS Championship Game and watch it using the latest DivX player. The 2.2GB file took about 20 hours to download, but it’s worth it. I’m considering using the office projector to play the game on the wall behind me on a constant loop.

(While you’re waiting for the massive download, take a look at this awesome video of suffering OSU fans at the game, set to the tune of Beck’s “Loser“. It’s very evil and completely bad karma, but still great.)

You have got to be kidding me. This is just about the coolest thing ever. A few weeks ago I lamented that there was no place where I could go to import the entire NCAA College Football Bowl schedule into my Outlook calendar. Today I received an email from Greg Titamer, the owner of Calendar Updates. Not only does Greg’s site provide a complete college football bowl schedule to download into Outlook, but he sent me a free coupon! I would have gladly paid the $1.99 for this. Sweet!

A few weeks ago I saw an image on Chris Pearson’s Pearsonified that I just loved. He had taken a photo of something — I can’t remember what it was — and made it look like an old-fashioned Polaroid. “What a great idea!” I thought. Surely I can figure out how to do that in Photoshop. And I did. So now I’ll share.

How to Create a Polaroid Using Photoshop in 10 Simple Steps

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How to Hack MySQL Paging Functionality into Microsoft SQL Server

Web developers using PHP and MySQL have a crucial piece of functionality that classic ASP developers working with Microsoft SQL Server don’t. It’s pagination. Using MySQL’s LIMIT and OFFSET commands you can very easily add pagination to recordsets that you want to display on web pages. If you’ve spent any amount of time searching for a way to do this with ASP and SQL Server, you know that the code is pretty hard to find. You’re lucky if you find it at all. The few tutorials on the ‘net tend to be overly complicated and pretty bad hacks, usually involving convoluted and resource-intensive subqueries on top of subqueries. This solution is certainly not the best, and it, too, is a resource hog, but it’s the only one I’ve got, so I’m sharing.
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Reason #4,213 Why People Get Frustrated with Microsoft:

Can anyone tell me if I really need Java 2 Runtime Environment, SE v1.4.2_03 and J2SE Runtime Environment 5.0 Update 3? These things are ridiculous. Each one is over 100MB! What a waste.

I love Please Take Me Home from blink-182’s “Take Off Your Pants and Jacket“. It’s a great song with one glaring problem: For some ridiculous reason they decided to pull a Nirvana on it and extend the track length of this 3:03 song to 6:06. So when I am listening to my iPod in shuffle mode (which is just about the only way I ever listen to iPod or iTunes), there’s three minutes and three seconds of dead air. Annoying. Very annoying.

I’m a computer geek. I really am. I am an ultra-nerd of the highest order. But I loathe graphics-editing, video-editing, and audio-editing. I don’t know why. I just do. Could I figure it out? Yes. Of course. I know there are programs that I could use to manually strip dead space from the ends of songs. Hell, I could probably use a hex editor and just delete the bytes from the actual mp3 file. But that’s annoying, too.

It just so happens that Apple was thinking, I can only assume, of me and my ilk when their coders sat down to develop iTunes.

Open iTunes. Browse your way to Please Take Me Home. Right-click it. Select “Get Info”. Go to the “Options” tab. Put a check in the “Stop Time” checkbox. Change the “Stop Time” value to 3:03. Done.

Brilliant.

The unsung MVP of professional football? It’s IT. Analysis systems let teams archive stats and digital video from every game.

It looks like I was able to successfully convert my site to WordPress. Maybe now I’ll start posting more often again. :0)

Also: How to Write a Plug-In