Only one article so far, but I plan on following this Hacking Congress column. I’m quite interested in statistics and large data sets and screenscraping. Like I needed to tell you.

I don’t have Quicktime installed on my Linux machine, and unless you have crossover, you probably don’t either. There’s always mplayerplug-in, but I’ve never had good luck with that. Finally inspired by Mozilla bug 255704, I’ve made a bookmarklet that converts every OBJECT tag on a page into a link to the source. You can then right click and download it.

Just drag this link to your bookmark toolbar: Objects to links

Note: right now this doesn’t work at the most useful location: Apple Trailers. They use some funky quicktime forwarding stuff. I’m working on a solution.

Remember WEBoggle? The guy who made a mirror has ended up making tons of functionality improvements. It’s apparently a lot faster on the backend, you can submit words that you think are missing from the dictionary, and it now supports two simultaneous games (one of which is 5x5 Big Boggle)! Check it out.

Update, 08-13: Holy hell. WEBoggle was posted to Metafilter today (for the second time, to be honest). It was flooded with about six thousand players. I wish it were still on my site, but it’s nice to see comments like “This kicks ass. Best use of simple DHTML game I’ve seen."

I’ve never really had anything specific against PHP. The problem I’ve always had is that it’s too similar to Perl for me to be able to keep them straight in my head, but too different for my Perl skills to be much use at all. Someone has now contrasted PHP and Perl from a strict usability point of view. And the arguments make perfect sense.

Gmail Agent API, plus a lot of great details on URLs and how the Javascript works.

You know you’re an obsessive-compulsive standards snob when you get upset at non-standard behaviour of utilities like rotatelogs (included in the Apache web server). It does exactly what it sounds like: rotates your logs after a period of time, however long you define. It names the logs whatever you tell it, even allowing you to use strftime() syntax.

But, it doesnt use the local time to rotate the logs, like a normal sane application would. Oh no, it takes your local time and then MUNGES IT TO FUCKING UTC! You have to tell it how many hours you are from UTC! That means I have to change my httpd.conf next sunday!

I have created a solution though.