Code

Happy new year, everyone!

From Slashdot, BoingBoing, and almost everyone else comes word of the new Netscape browser, which will let you switch between IE and Firefox rendering engines. Will it work? I don’t know. I do know that most folks no longer care, now that Netscape has been rebranded as a bargain-basement dialup ISP by America Online. And the fact that a user can choose either IE or Firefox makes it unpredictable and irrelevant from a testing standpoint: we know we must focus on either IE or Firefox when building, but if there is some odd bug that spans across how Netscape selects between the two…

Excellent! Firefox has finally gone, well, final. I know, I know, we don’t need another person writing about how a piece of software has gone final, but for me it’s a relief. Since the early days of Mozilla I was part of that faction that didn’t want the full suite of apps, that didn’t want the bloat of mail and news in my web browser since I was never going to use it, and Firefox has freed us from that. It’s even more rewarding to see so many people adopting it. And while I am still a heavy Safari user—let’s face it, it just looks better in Mac OS X than Firefox does—Firefox is still browser #2 for me on the Mac and #1 when I have to sit in front of a PC.

Comment spam is back, so either a local account or a Drupal ID is needed to post comments now, plus I’m also looking into using the new spam.module to bring back anonymous users.

Seriously tho’, distributed authentication is nice: get an account on one Drupal site, and be able to log into others without having to re-register. Who’s running Drupal? Glad you asked…

[Edited 10/10] I’m experimenting with the spam.module, so anonymous posting is back.

Back when iChat AV came out, I was itching to patch iTunes into it and hack it into a little radio station. I made it halfway with my iChat Cover Status script, but I needed something like the old BeOS Media Kit, where you could take the audio output of one application and literally patch it in as the audio input of another app at the OS level.

Sunflower seems to provide this kind of feature for Mac OS X, in a sort of hacked way. Unfortunatelty, the download seems to be broken (an invalid pre-install script that Installer refuses to run), so I won’t know until it gets fixed…

So some fella tried to comment spam me, and thanks to Drupal, they were all trapped in the approval queue and never got published to the site… but it exposed a couple of points that should get addressed at some point with Drupal: - There is no batch delete option: to delete 60 spam comments—what I am doing right now—you need to click delete on the line item, which takes you to a confirmation page, which leads to a results page (deletion successful). You then need to find your own way back to the approval queue page, because there is no link back provided. - There is no data provided in the queue about the poster, such as IP. The statistics module has all this data, but it’s interwoven with other, legitimate requests. Each comment in the queue should have host information attached to it. This would be valuable for blacklisting people, if necessary.