Ah Yes ... The Windows Serial Number

Well my venture into "Scott's Tired of Incessant Crashing And Needs a Linux Box" led to "Must Clean Office" and "Must Fix Corrupted Windows Advanced Server Installation on Test Box".  Which in turn led to "Must Find Serial #".  And that, dear reader, led me to Cerials.net.  Great site to get a serial # for virtually anything.  As you can tell -- its a happy morning here at the Fuzzy#$#)($#Windows#$#($#(Group. 

1:18:55 PM  | Permalink:   | comment []  |  IM Me About This   

My Perspective on the Spam Wars: 200% Increase Since October

Here's some anecdotal evidance on the rise in spam based on my own metrics.  Now I admittedly put my email address out into the wild* quite a bit -- its on my blog and my site and other places.  When I checked back in October I was getting roughly 120 odd spams per day.  Now I get roughly 230 per day.  That's a 200% increase.

*Why do I put my email address out into the wild?  Well it forces the Inbox Buddy spam filter to get continually improved.  I'm a big fan of companies that eat, sleep and breathe their own products and this is how I do it for Inbox Buddy.

1:05:22 PM  | Permalink:   | comment []  |  IM Me About This   

God Bless JWZ

Via Dave.  As I've written here before, I'm not a CSS guru.  To be honest at times it feels like I can barely "tie my CSS shoes".  JWZ has a great, informative rant about CSS today.  To be honest I don't even view it as a rant -- its quite informed and the CSS folks have chipped in with alternatives to his problems.  A couple of relevant points from all this augmented by thoughts from my own experience:

• CSS just plain can't be done like old style html -- you have to sit down with a real book and learn it.  None of us tend to do this which is why so many of us have issues with CSS.
• Stealing CSS is basically not worth the effort, IMHO.  I've tried this I don't know how many times and it just doesn't work.  Even when the CSS is good -- like Plone.  I based Feedster on Plone originally and have tossed much of it.  It was too hard to understand (at least for me) and when I tried to use it on a Mac with IE it failed -- but only when I made the html XHTML compliant.
• The best argument, imho, for CSS is that a text browser like Lynx deals better with that than tables.

Overall though?  I'm way more in JWZ's camp than the CSS camp.

12:35:08 PM  | Permalink:   | comment []  |  IM Me About This   

Good Morning Blogdom!

Just a random ass title.  For whatever reason when I get up early on an unexpected morning (like 5:23 am on a Saturday), I have the urge to yell that out to the blogging community.  Anywho ...  Yesterday I had a really good post all ready to go and then I got one of those "Windows is running out of VM" messages and **poof**.  Oh well I didn't really want those few hundred words.  And its my own damn fault for not putting together a stable Linux desktop yet.  Again with the anywho since I'm rambling.

There should definitely be some frothy Feedster goodness coming next week.  I've been working my geeky little buns off to build some cool, much requested stuff and I think people will be happy.  Online and grinding pretty much all weekend to get it done.  Questions or comments, drop me a line.  I can always use thoughts from smart people.

6:22:29 AM  | Permalink:   | comment []  |  IM Me About This