Can you spell cacophony?

I have been toying with the idea of moving from my nice thunderbird email+feeds setup back to an all-online solution.

I have been using a gmail account with POP3 access, so that part was no-brainer.

The feed reader was a bit more of a problem. I have used Bloglines in the past and enjoyed it except for a few small problems. I wanted to try Google reader (in the hope that they will eventually integrate it properly with gmail), and yesterday had quite a long play with it, but was finding quite a few shortcomings.

So what happens today, when I log in?

I see this! – they have changed it, literally overnight!!

The good news of this is, despite my wasted time yesterday, is that most of what I considered shortcomings in the old version have been addressed.

So far so good, I might think about doing a proper review later…

This post has been superceded. Please check out [Running Azureus as a windows service revisited][1].

I am in the process of writing another howto.

Actually, all I am doing is documenting a process that I went through to get Azureus running as a windows service. I really wanted to be able to have (down+up)loads working even when the computer is in a logged out state, or logged in under another user.

There were plenty of tips around, but really nothing that spelled it out step-by-step.

This document is far from complete, but if you would like to see what has been done so far, download the first draft here (.odt document at the moment, so will need Openoffice or similar to read).

Please don’t hesitate to leave comments if you happen to find this and have something useful to add!

[1]: http://shayne.powerlot.net/2008/10/22/running-azureus-as-a-windows-service-revisited/

I’m just updating my online presence today, and moving everything (which isn’t much if the truth be told) to blogspot.

That includes my GPG public key. If you know what it is for, here it is. If not, just go on to the next post!!

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (MingW32)
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ecU0bUYAoJmdnyYFKyHL8fIH2k6VQalUoYZ9uQENBELPw8wQBADCudgR9W4ABpdC
Y6OydvhQQLJFIsgtLmX/+eddo8UlgxXPa/Or52YoGUzxpoKpERzHgiXs0tbXEzqG
MJ5OcBTevXAnRbBXKIp7zFTsKpijaCmzG6H3RNG6crZukSXK9xYZVaFKKXpUImuw
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mnV3/nAdA09fE4RJsCLEpp2jhbGaq06NvKMSfZwZgxGHy54Js5vgcTHhMw51Ivah
+AFsgHD6ch5RtHS2kpuL/SQz3TUz27umQa1NsXGKl2wPkO2TRXqx/SJGpX985a+Z
4xC2vuXFRQjuO2aISQQYEQIACQUCQs/DzAIbDAAKCRDAjgtlh7DdVsZqAJwKdZze
u21x6WK9WflZNyHLTHOYegCffbjhVM/UpELYH/+lVOYIR4P4VFM=
=IEQU
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

Please note, this is not about spam filtering. Filtering is like shutting the barn
door after the horse has bolted. Having said that, it is often necessary, but luckily can be
done when it is.

This document is about protecting your email address so that it does not get into the hands
of those who would abuse it. Now that is easier said than done. Consider all of these things
that you may do on the internet:

• Post to a publically viewable forum, mailing list or usenet group
• Sign up for a “special offer”
• Register for access to a site
• Put your contact details on a web page
• etc, etc …

Each of these things (and no doubt many more that I haven’t thought of) put your email
address within reach of friendly spammers. Once they have it, it has a tendency to multiply
as those helpful people share their information with each other!

… So prevention is much better than cure …

OK, online tip #1.

One of my great finds of the last year has been an online bookmarking service called “delicious”, which you will find at http://del.icio.us

Anyone familiar will this sort of thing will tell you that there are a number of similar services around, but this is the one I found first, and even after flirting with one of the others (spurl.net) I have come back to delicious.

When I first discovered delicious, I was using about 5 different computers (and perhaps more at certain times) every week. All of which I might take online, find something useful and want to come back to it. This creates a very difficult situation with respect to bookmarks.

I tried a couple of firefox extension which had the potential to act as synchronisers, but didn’t have much joy.

Then along came delicious.

You have to see it to realise what it can do. And then sign up and play with it to really have a good look!! It’s like a lot of things on the net, unless you have a play, you will miss out on most of the good features.

Go and have a look at my bookmarks

What you will hopefully see is a list of my most recent bookmarks. You will read the title, which will be in larger font and will be a hyperlink. Click on it if you want to see it… Underneath that there may or may not be a comment and underneath that, the “tags” that I have used to classify the link and a figure of how many other people have marked it too! (Oh, and the date)

Down on the right hand side you will see a (very) long list of all the tags that I use. You can click on any of these to see all of the links I have put that tag on to. Try it, click “computer”…

You will see that the link has taken you to http://del.icio.us/wynter/computer, I’m sure you can see the pattern. But wait, there is more! You will notice that there is now a second column of links to the left of the other one. These are the “related tags” and that means that these are all the tags that I have used ALONG WITH “computer”. If you click on one of them (don’t at this point) you will go to that list of links. But the better trick is to click on the plus-sign next to the tag. Try it, click on the one next to “esperance”.

You should now be at http://del.icio.us/wynter/computer+esperance – get it? These link(s) (there is only one at this stage – the google group home page) are all the ones that I have tagged with both “computer” and “esperance”.

Two quick tips before I go:

1. replace my user name (wynter) with the word “tag” to see all (ie everyone’s) links with those tags, eg http://del.icio.us/tag/computer+esperance – this shows the same stuff at the moment, but if any of you were to decide to bookmark any pages that might be of interest to the “Esperance+Computer” Club might be interested in, then they would show up here!

2. Do you understand RSS? If not, ignore this bit. If you do, have a look at the link that is under the orange icon with RSS on it. Copy the link and put it in your newsreader or whatever you use (I use one or both of Firefox and Thunderbird, depending on the type of link). Now, whenever a new link is posted, it will show up in your reader, a bit like an email….

OK, this was a long post, but I suggest you sign up (no email required, but necessary if you ever want to recover your password) and have a play. Make sure you read the help section but be warned, this is not all that easy to get your head around straight away.

Go and enjoy your delicious meal.