Howdy from Austin. Crazy schedule action going on this year, with film and interactive to choose from, and the general schmoozing. Linkdump soon. Brenda Laurel just kicked off the conference w/ a interesting talk on transmedia and transmodal design. More when I get some more time…

More OS X toys (new to me):

  • GeekTool – a preference pane that allows you to show logs, unix output and web images on your desktop or overlaid Now you can have your uptime easily available; Now if we could render HTML files w/ WebKit…
  • SSH Tunnel Manager – a front-end so you don’t need to remember (err… or write an alias) for your tunnelling needs
  • SSHKeychain – front-end for ssh-agent

Neal Krawertz (hmm, some interesting recent presentations) has recently written two pretty good summary overviews of anti-spam solutions:

Good comments:

  • Don’t forget SMTP+AUTH – SMTP+AUTH is great if you don’t have a VPN/stunnel, also interesting is the comment below about blocking entire countries/netblocks, although blocking entire ranges on one spam seems… err, asking for losing lots of mail
  • Good old fashioned riddles – interesting way to keep a form-mailer from being used for spam; combine w/ honeypots/blackholers and you have something that can be used for comment spam blocking
  • Re:Proof? – good points on how to aggregate IPs for blacklisting based on C/R failures
  • Having experience, I can answer 1.2.1 – good points on C/R systems
  • most effective – unfortunately, the most effective way is RBL blacklisting

I visited Eric‘s work office (a horde grad/post-grad students stuffed into a mid-sized room, filled to the brim with several dozen computers, most apparently non-functional) the other day and noticed that he was using a pretty nice virtual desktop package. In the past, I’ve never been big user of virtual desktops, having seen the dual-monitored light back in 1999. However, with my Powerbook, things have really gotten out of hand. While the Codetek package looks nice, by chance, I came across a very nice GPL’d virtual desktop package called Desktop Manager. While not as completely fully featured, it’s still really great, and the transition effects rock! (I’m currently using Cube; all the ones that are built into Panther are available).

The only things that I’d like to be able to do is to have some control over which windows open where, a way to switch to specific desktops automatically when switching over to an app (w/ all windows on one screen), and possibly a way to although task switch between apps on a desktop.

Related: take a look at the various Apple Store sites for the sheer number of free workshops and other events (iCal enabled, of course):