I was talking to Dave today and was mentioning Apple's new powerbooks which now come with Bluetooth 2.0. The idea is to make streaming audio to bluetooth headphones much higher quality, which makes sense but why they jumped from 1.2 to 2.0 who knows. I think its just going to add a whole load of confusion to the market. Anyhow, Dave was not convinced bluetooth headphones were the way to go. He offer the alternative of FM headphones. At first I kinda of dismissed it but now I'm thinking there pretty damm cheap and last a long time in battery life when compared to bluetooth headphones. Also using a FM Transmiter (which is still not sold in the UK!) its really easy to use the same pair of headphones anywhere. For example at work it would be easy to plug in my FM transmiter and use a small pair of FM headphones or headphones attached to one of those cheap FM radios to listen to my music wirefree and anywhere within 50meters. Its even better if you have one of the phones with a FM radio built in. Maybe Dave is right about this, for now while Bluetooth evolves in this area at least.
Month: February 2005
Trackback Spam, easily solved?
Seems cubicgarden is actually getting its first hit of trackback spam. People never ever believe me when I say cubicgarden actually gets a reasonable amount of readers (mainly through the rss) but this proves its easy to find and also a target for spam bots. its really easily solved, but I'm going to hold off for a bit to see how this trackback spamming progresses. I could use the open proxy moderation plugin which is pretty harsh or the Trackback moderation plugin. Someone once mentioned somewhere that most spam bots dont leave any referer, so maybe someone will build a plugin for blojsom which ignores trackbacks without a referer, if thats actually possible?
CSS 2 XML idea
At work recently, we've been thinking about managing CSS. It may sound quite a simple task but actually we have 43+ stylesheets and there all slightly different. They've been managed and edited by different people and we've been keeping it all logged in some kind of spreadsheet. Not great, but it will do. Well anyway i'm doing some tidying up and doing some comparisons between different styles. And I started to think about how to go about this when I thought wouldn't this be so much easier if it was all structured content? (Well yes CSS is structured but not in a form where I can consume it with XML tools)
After a couple mins of conversation with work friends, Tom mentioned a Perl Lib which could read CSS. Which lead to the conclusion that once in Perl, it would be easily serialized into XML where I could do all manner of analysis, charting and what ever else we choose to do with it. But wait it doesn't stop there, it not only allows us to manage CSS but also generate CSS using XSL. Pretty useful I would say. Anyway, I've convinced everyone involved we should open source the Perl code, XML schema and idea for anyone to use. So I'll drop some links in once we got something going… I'm highly suprised no one had already done this and opened into on to the web, I would love to see a Cocoon reader for CSS.
And at long last everything you need to get started… Thanks Tom for the great work, comments to the usual place
