Could you even imagine somehow being possessed (or coerced more likely) to watch the IMDB bottom 100 films? *shudder*

Recently I’ve been looking into blog/content aggregation for a variety of purposes:

• gathering a single person’s output across heterogeneous systems
• taking a single post and repurposing in multiple outputs in a single internal system

The former requires one to externally reference (but to probably mirror for convenience) the content, but the latter of course can be accomplished simply by extending the data model to assign m:n relations for posts:outputs.

Another alternative for the latter is to use Trackback (example) although the pinging interface is pretty limited, allowing only a 252 character excerpt, and without Author, posting (not ping) date, etc…

Webloggers deal Harvard blog-bores a black eye (hilarity via Nick)

“Apologies to the 90% of the audience at this thing who will likely be reporters for magazines and websites, their fees paid by their respective editors to Find Out What The Kids Are Up To These Days, but I not only am not going to this thing, but publicly and pre-emptively pity anyone in that remaining 10% who would actually pay that much to do so.”

I hadn’t even heard about this before reading this, and from the looks of things, I’m not missing anything special.

Microsoft abandons Outlook Express – now, one’s beginning to see a pattern emerging here… It’s pretty clear that MS is wrapping these projects up one-by-one as it moves towards a subscription model. (you don’t think they really canned HailStorm do you? it’s undergoing rebranding)

fsh is a drop-in rsh-compatible replacement for ssh that automatically resuses ssh tunnels.

• Windows 2000 IP filtering – straightforward tutorial for using built in IPSec for port filtering
• Windows 2000 Firewall

iptables is much better/easier to set up, but you take what you can get. Use nmap to check it’s working

Human genetics: Dual identities

Making an ISO out of a DMG file: the easiest way I found was to mount the DMG and then run mkisofs (from Fink). Apple’s Disk Copy will happily convert from ISO to DMG, but not vice versa.

*update*: Gabe points out that one can enable Disk Copy’s expert mode, which allows converting to a few other image types (although not ISO).

Been doing some DHTML GUI work recently. One way to do it is to, as ppk suggests, Keep It Simple. Of course, what I really want is a window manager that does all the basic GUI stuff, including, if possible, handling flexible variable-resulotion window positioning/resizing.

Adding more comments as I work with these…

• DynAPI – v3.0 is almost out; it sports comprehensive functionality, impressive browser support and is LGPL’d. On the other hand, it’s pretty massive, I’m iffy about their RPC library, and the documentation for the new version is a bit spotty currently
• netWindows – a neat looking framework, w/ some very slick features, AFL – still looking into it, yet to test; some development going on, but looks partially stalled out
• Bindows – thought I’d give it a mention; Erik, one of the WebFX guys has been working on it, and it looks like it has some great features, most prominently a complete Swing/WinForms like GUI toolkit. Alas, it’s slow as all get out, and currently IE 5.5+ only.

Of course, the current functionality I need is pretty simple, so I’ll string together some simple libs first and see if there might be a more logical way to tie all this together…

Unpatched IE security holes (currently 21 unpatched vulnerabilities, including some real doozies)