I just started reading Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother using one of his ebooks he has relesed under the Creative Commons license. I have to admit that I had never heard of Cory of BoingBoing fame, or his books until I read about them via CelticBear. As a ‘paranoid’ geeked I’m hooked on Little Brother, and if you like tech, geek and drama you should check it out as well. Update: I went to buy a copy from a local bookstore, but it is not released in Australia yet.

Have you ever had your website hit on a topic that people find conflicting? When the site gets viewed by the masses, you need to be prepared. If you have access to modify your web server .htaccess file then go and have a read of the Coral CDN Overview For those interested in the techie bits, here is my .htaccess for news site flood protection, and to allow CDN to serve up all my site images – thus offloading from my puny connection the bandwidth burden for images.

We’ve had some stong winds in Melbourne yesterday. Up to 130 kph! These winds were good enough to cause a 24 hour extended power outage in my area, meaning my provider had upstream outages and the internet connection was down. Add that to the errant html comment in my last post which made the whole page commented out. All resolved now. Now what else do I have to debug that is technical?

You may have noticed that my last 3 posts were about free software. I like free stuff. Everyone likes free stuff. Why talk about free stuff? A friend told me that the reason he enjoys using Open Source (and usually free) apps is he can customise them. He finds it frustrating that when you pay $1K per seat for an application like Mercury (now owned by HP) that sometimes it just wont do what you need.

Disco is one of the smartest looking and basic (yet powerful) CD/DVD burning solutions for your Mac. Yesterday it was updated with a maintenance release to V1.0.3, which includes quite a number of fixes for crashing that may have occurred. It has been almost 1 year since the last update so this is welcomed. Incidentally, the developer is offering this software for USD$19.95 (and there is a very good USD->AUD exchange rate) for a limited time.

A number of weeks ago I gave up caffeine, and was pretty OK with that. But, I have come to the conclusion that there is a direct correlation with Caffeine and all other things tech, including tech blogging. As you may have noticed if you subscribed to my feed, or read this site, my posts have been minimal. Yet after having caffeine on the weekend in an energy drink, and subsequently picking up where I left of with decent illy coffee, I have had the urge to blog again.

With the 10.4.11 upgrade came Safari V3. It looks neat, but I started having issues with closing Windows. It turns out the SIMBL input manager that I was using on Safari was conflicting with it. By deleting ~/Library/InputManagers/SIMBL it fixed the issue. On the same theme, here has been a lot of talk lately about Input Managers and whether they will be completely removed in Leopard. Just recently David Watanabe blogged about the uncertain future of Inquisitor.

Did you ever have too many RSS feeds you are subscribed to? Wasting your time posting updates to Flickr, Twitter, facebook, and so on? This guy thinks he has the answers. Cut out the IM and stop reading your email so often. Me? I just removed 70% of my news feeds in my reader, turned my phone off, and I’m going to bed to read a book (and get away from this blog for now).

Some guy was on the train today reading his “Face to Face with God” book, an he kept glancing over my way. No doubt noticing my copy of Morning of the Magicians that I was reading. As he got off the train, he starts saying a bunch of Jesus stuff and handing out these cards – and as he passes me I say NO THANKS! But he forces it on me.

Looking in my inbox today I read this: This message is being sent to confirm that all credit card information has been removed from the World of Warcraft account ********, effectively cancelling its recurring subscription as of September 23, 2007 5:47 AM UTC. The account will not bill or renew any further unless new payment information (credit card or game card) is manually entered in. The account will remain playable for the remaining time it has already paid for.