Gadgetopia

You have the love the state of technology that allows you to get emails like this one with the attached picture: According to the jetblue map, I m directly over you right now. Not much to see. Adam Kalsey This is like when Joe sent me a picture of a ...

Spam Talk: Adam Kalsey has a nice exchange with a comment spammer. "After receiving a bit of comment spam I hunted down the hosting company of the offending party and asked that their account be suspended, since that's the penalty set forth for spam by the host’s acceptable use policy. ...

MT Consulting: Adam is certainly the one to do it. We'll see more of these in the coming year, I'm sure. MT has become so much more than a blogging tool. "Between this site, various other sites I run that are managed with Movable Type, and the variety of MT ...

The Mythbusters Answer Your Questions: Adam and Jamie from the total awesomeness that is Mythbusters finally showed up to answer their questions over at Slashdot. Some good ones, like whether or not they've ever been injured in the line of duty. Adam: Besides a couple of stitch-worthy cuts that I've ...

Kalsey Consulting Group acquires BlogSnob.: Adam Kalsey is set to become a blog mogul. He just made his first acquisition. Not quite on the order of the EMC / Documentum coupling, but still very cool. "Kalsey Consulting Group today announced that it acquired weblog advertising service BlogSnob from idya Research. ...

Ask The Mythbusters: Slashdot have got Adam and Jamie from Mythbusters to agree to answer questions. Rock on.

Lockergnome's RSS Resource: Chris Pirillo has started a site about all things RSS. Via Adam Kalsey.

Feed Crier :: RSS and Atom Feeds by instant message: Adam Kalsey needs to sleep more. Feed Crier is your instant news reader. Subscribe to any RSS feed using your AOL Instant Messenger account. Waiting for an aggregator to update is so 2005.

Why I don't recommend Firefox: Adam doesn't think that Firefox is ready to be unleashed on all users just yet. He makes some good points. Firefox right now is very good for an experienced net user, but is not at all ready for the average person. If you plan on ...

Height and Width challenged: Adam Kalsey has some interesting thoughts about height and width arguments in images. >Could someone tell me why height and width attributes are needed for images? Non-graphic browsers don’t use them, and graphic browsers should be smart enough to figure out the size on their own. ...

Spammers now clogging blogs, cell phones: Kalsey got quoted in this AP story about blog spam. Three years ago, Adam Kalsey set up a Web log to share his thoughts about online business and the digital revolution. Like countless other "bloggers," he lets his readers post comments on his ...

Growing pains for Wikipedia: Apparently there were a couple of scandals over at Wikipedia last week involcing Adam Curry and a former Kennedy staff member. Accordingly, there's a big, philosophical change in the works over there. Thus, to avoid future problems, Wales plans to bar anonymous users from creating new ...

Testing Blog Clients: A nice little wrap-up of blog posting clients. Bummer about Zempt though: Unfortunately, while the Zempt website is still around, I haven't been able to get any of the download links to work for over a week, and there haven't been any updates or news for months. ...

ReUSEIT: There's a contest on to redesign Jakon Nielsen's site. Apparently Nielsen himself has blessed it...sort of. "Web usability maven Jakob Nielsen has been writing his "Alertbox" column on web usability since 1995. His web site, UseIt.com is read by millions of web professionals and other interested parties each year. ...

Blogathon 2003: I say pre-write them, queue them up, then schedule a script. "Now, remember when you were in school and you would bowl for charity? And for every pin you knocked down you got, say, ten cents? Or run for a dollar a mile? During the Blogathon, people update ...

Ounce of prevention: Adam Kalsey is in a war against comment spam, and he shares some great ideas here: "What will probably be the biggest help is the thing that was easiest to do: changing the comment script name. What else would be effective is changing the names of all ...

Registering an Application to a URL Protocol: Here's a handy note on how to register a new URL protocol to an application in Windows. Adam did it with Zempt a URL starting with "zempt://" will start that app and pass it a bunch of information. I always wondered how ...

I'm of the opinion that tales of Wikipedia's inaccuracy are widely overblown, but if you ever read any Encyclopedia Brown books as a kid, Adam Cadre's Wikipedia Brown is hilarious. "Wow, [the zoo's koala population] tripled in six months?", Officer Clancy asked, whistling. "Yes, it's true", said the zookeeper, "We ...

ALTer: Adam Kalsey whipped up a quick script to add ALT attributes to all IMG tags in a site. Sometimes, the simple solutions are the best. "The program walks through a directory and opens every file ending with .html or .htm. Then it looks for image tags without alt attributes ...

After the spam problem of a few weeks ago, I took a single step that Adam Kalsey talked about a long time ago that has fairly well fixed my spam problem: I renamed the Movable Type comments script. I have had exactly one spam in the last three weeks. Spam ...

Social manners: Adam makes a good point about the social networking apps. I’ve been invited onto the friends lists on Orkut and LinkedIn by several people that I don’t really know...Part of me feels awkward when rejecting these invitations, but I think I should know you before I call you ...

Is it true that if you shoot a bullet through the skin of an airliner in flight, everyone would get sucked out the little hole? If not, Hollywood has a lot of explaining to do. Adam and Jamie from Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel set out the other night to ...

Lockergnome's RSS Resource: Adam Kalsey is writing a series over at LockerGnome's RSS site about optimizing RSS feeds. He makes this good point: "Since most people read feeds through an aggregator or some sort, feed requests are typically made in an automated fashion by software, whether the feed has been ...

I've got a bad cold, so my butt hit the couch tonight, and hasn't moved much. Fortunately, it was a good night to be stuck in front of the TV. Discovery Channel ran Corvette: Rebuilding an Icon, which covered the design, testing, and release of the new C6 Corvette. The ...

Payloads for RSS: A long time ago (in Internet time), there was a short-lived start-up called LoadTV. You installed the LoadTV viewer, subscribed to some channels which had content you wanted to see, and it downloaded full-motion video in the background all day long. The best part was that whatever ...

No Truce in the Spam Wars: This is wonderful. A spammer filed a lawsuit against two spam blacklists. It was widely believed that the lawsuit was frivolous, and that he filed it just as a warning to others that might try to interrupt his spamming ways. Well, last week, the ...

Architecture Astronauts Are Back: Joel Spolsky goes eloquently buckwild on the term "Web 2.0." Bonus points for the Adam Sandler reference. The term Web 2.0 particularly bugs me. It's not a real concept. It has no meaning. It's a big, vague, nebulous cloud of pure architectural nothingness. When people use ...

Gadgetopia got targeted by a comment spam bot over the weekend. Two entries were targeted, and each got 80 comments apiece one for a site with rape fiction, the other for a porn site apparently specializing in incest. This happen three times over the weekend, for a total of ...

7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails: For some some odd reason, this post is very obscene, but still interesting. This guy set out to re-write cdbaby.com in Rails. But at every step, it seemed our needs clashed with Rails’ preferences. (Like trying to turn ...

A couple of people mentioned podcasting in my post about the offer on my domain name. I had heard of it, and knew what it was in theory, but I'd never heard one. So I went looking, and I listened to four: Adam Curry's "Daily Source Code" Some guy with ...

A few weeks ago I finally took the plunge and purchased an iPod. I'm a little late to the party, but that doesn't mean I don't appreciate how this little device has changed my appreciation and usage of the music I have owned for years. Even before my little prize ...

On PHP: There have been a lot of blogs jumping around on PHP in the last few days, and I've finally tracked it back to its source. Tim Bray -- one of the "pillars of the Web," if I can be so bold -- posted about PHP a week ago. ...

Differences in the "standard" coding style from language to language frustrate me. I get irritated that I have to change styles to fit in with the accepted norms for different languages. Traditionally, some use variable names with_underscores, some MixedCase some mixedCase with the first word uncapitalized, some use tabs, some ...