Only recently did I start using the iTunes Music Store. I am not very much into music, I don’t own an iPod or other portable mp3 player and I don’t buy music (not often at least).

However I wanted a specific song and the best thing to do was to try the iTMS. I downloaded and installed iTMS, bought the song, burned it to a CD and had it playing on my CD player in about 20 minutes! I was dumbfounded by how easy it was. And a great experience too. Everything worked perfectly and was painless.

I believe there is a lesson to be learned here about the way some services are made, “luring” you to spend money and being happy afterwards.

Ian Landsman just released HelpSpot, a web based help desk application.

Ian has a very interesting blog, where he writes about his efforts creating HelpSpot and launching UserScape (his company).

For some reason Google has a different PageRank for rapidsignal.com and www.rapidsignal.com.

No big deal really, but it bothered me a bit. So I added this rule to .htaccess to fix it:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.rapidsignal.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://rapidsignal.com/$1 [R=301,L]


This way I got rid of the www part once and for all, which I also find nicer. I used a 301 Permanent redirect hoping Google will understand that a search for link:http://rapidsignal.com/blog/ and a search for link:http://www.rapidsignal.com/blog/ should return the same results.

The Flock team released a Developer Preview of the Flock browser. Flock is based in Firefox but adds some interesting features. The most notable ones are:

• Integration with del.icio.us
• Tagging
• Blogging from inside the browser (integrates with WordPress, Movable Type, Typepad, Blogger)
• Inserting images from Flickr to your posts

I’ve being following Michael Sica’s blog for many months now. Michael was building a Project Management tool named Unity. Recently he decided that it’s better to drop it and start over.

Along with his friend Jeff Marder, they intend to build a brand new product. Their efforts will be described on their blog.

Personally, I think it was a good decision and I wish them best of luck!

I stumbled upon Wikimedia’s page about the servers they are currently running.

We are talking about 100 servers running MySQL, Apache, Squid or misc stuff. It’s impressive and it tangles my mind how all this stuff works together! I would love to read such a detailed description of an even bigger / more complex data provider, like Google, Yahoo! etc

Not even two months ago I was writing about increasing spam on this blog. Back then I installed Hashcash which indeed solved the problem.

Hashcash sends me an email whenever ~20 spam attempts are blocked (whenever it’s spam log gets to 8kb actually). I am now at the point where I receive about 10 such emails per day! That’s more than 200 spam attempts per day, more spam than I receive on my 5 or so email addresses. Fortunately Hashcash can be configured to either not send emails or keep a bigger log before sending.

Well, I really do have more important things I should be doing. But I was bored and somehow I found myself at the Wordpress Theme Browser, looking at all the available themes.

So, I downloaded a theme I liked (from H P Nadig), installed it, customized it and there it is now, live at http://rapidsignal.com/blog/.

With online maps becoming so popular after Google Maps (not that people didn’t use them before, but it is my understanding everyone knows about them now), I had decided to put a “show map” link wherever an address is displayed in MagnaCRM.

So today I added this feature. These “show map” links, open in a new window, calling a specific php script and passing it all available address data (address, city, zip, region/state, country).

The problem is what to do with these fields. Although I created an easy way to define which service you want to use (by defining the url), which fields to pass and with what name, it’s still not working perfectly.

Google maps always locates a US address and almost always a UK one. Searches for other countries don’t behave well, even though satellite images exist for them. So searching for “address, athens, greece” shows nothing, while searching for “athens, greece” gets you a nice, detailed map of Athens. It would be nice if Google would try a little harder to at least guess the city or country.

Mapquest is better in this regard. If the address is unknown, it will ask you if you want the map of the city or country. On the other hand, Mapquest needs different fields for US maps and rest-of-the-world maps.

Anyway, the best results for non US / UK countries probably come from local mapping services. So I now have to implement country based service selection. I hope this gets better results for everyone, without having to change any settings.

These days all I read about is acquisitions. I mean Yahoo! bought upcoming.org, AOL bought weblogsinc (Engadget etc), Verisign bought weblogs.com and Newsgator bought Netnewswire.

I feel like I entered a time machine and travelled some 5+ years in the past. I really hope the outcome is better this time.

I haven’t read any reviews of Reader, but I’ve used it the last 2 days.

I was very disappointed by it. Although it looks nice, I find it hard to keep up with my feeds using it. Here is my basic problem: I can’t find a way to make Reader display more than one post at a time. So, maybe it’s ideal for up to 10 feeds, but for ~85 feeds I’m reading (100-200 posts per day), there is no way I will read / examine each post one by one! I need a way to quickly scan groups of posts (reading the title and maybe the first lines) to decide what to fully read.

For MagnaCRM, I use FogBugz for to-do lists and bug tracking, replacing the wiki I was using before. Now I use the wiki for personal stuff only.

So, today I cleaned up my lists (features and bugs). A lot of things had crept in there (notes, thoughts, weird feature ideas etc) and I also found some duplicate entries. After two hours, it feels neat again! Naturally, some things moved from v1.0 to v2.0 and vice versa :-)

I knew some people make good money from AdSense and the like, but I always thought “good money” was something like maybe a couple thousand dollars per month. I just happened to read this on problogger.com:

Adsense earnings for August - $15,849.73

I was shocked to read that number. And it’s not like he has the most popular blog of all… He has some 400+ Bloglines subscribers when JoelOnSoftware has 15.000+, kottke.org has 7.200+ and Russell Beattie has 2.700+

Update: Darren has 20 blogs! The above amount is coming from all his blogs.

In their words:

Ning is a free online service (or, as we like to call it, a Playground) for people to build and run social applications. Social “apps” are web applications that enable anyone to match, transact, and communicate with other people.

As I understand it, it’s a service that lets you easily create “applications” like HotOrNot, KittenWar, Match.com, Craigslist and many others. I never thought these services were called social applications. Anyway it looks very interesting.

Ning is the (secret until now) product of 24 Hour Laundry, a startup by Marc Andreessen and others.

I was experimenting with some UTF-8 PHP files today and I run again into the infamous BOM not ignored bug. I hadn’t been bitten by it for more than a year now and had forgotten what a PITA it is.

In case you are not familiar with it, the problem is that PHP doesn’t ignore the BOM bytes at the very beginning of a unicode file. So whenever you include a unicode file with BOM, PHP thinks the BOM is valid output and sends it to the browser, sending the HTTP headers along the way. So no more header manipulation after this point.

This is fixed in PHP 5 (and PHP 6 will have a better solution for it) but for now only 3 workarounds exist (that I know of):

• Direct your editor not to save the BOM. I mostly use UltraEdit (ver 10.xx) and it has an option for that, but then it doesn’t recognize the file as UTF-8.
• Turn output buffering on. This solves the header problem, but has other issues. One of them is that the 2-3 BOM bytes do get send to the browser after all and this can cause problems with invalid output or with server created javascript.
• Turn on buffering before the include and delete the buffer contents after the include. This works when the included PHP file doesn’t create any other output. Example:
  ob_start();
  include ‘unicode_with_bom.php’;
  ob_end_clean();