Would love for an option to hide labels, but not combine windows in the task bar in Windows 7.

Busy pulling off of my posts from Google Notebook. Suppose now’s as good a time as any to resort my OneNote Notebooks as well.

Coming Soon…

http://throughphp.com/

Until then, I’ll be updating WordPress.

Internet Relay Chat

It’s about dialogs with multiple people. around since the ’80s, and still kicking with over 100,000 active users per day. Bots are the programming element that seems to be hit upon over and over and over again. People too lazy to open up their web browsers, or people just trying to save bandwidth use them for information or to automate tasks. For me, it’s down to sports, Twitter, weather, and html verification. Why head to Yahoo with all the bloat when I can just type in ::weather in a channel? Same for sports, albeit my implementations aren’t as sophisticated as others.

Why so interested? Well, it’s more so the interaction one gets. Blogs are one thing, but it really is a delayed response between people, often misunderstood or unable to cover certain points. As IRC is line by line, it’s easy to elaborate or stay as simple as needed, without the wait for comment approval, responses, etc. As well, IRC clients have established many ways to notify. Flashing the window, changing the window title, tray icon blinking, and popup alerts all are used to grab the attention of the user immediately, as opposed to blogs or Twitter.

What about IM? Instant Messangers are cool and all, but their group chat feature is usually gimped after the first half dozen people or so. Any more than that and it becomes inefficient in memory, bandwidth, and screen bloat. Avatars and different size fonts show up to create a mess. Again, this ole IRC is text based completely, allowing clients to interpret the chat differently. Prefer the avatars? You can have it, but to those who want to do away with all of the eye candy can, and that’s one of the essential reasons IRC is still around.

AJAX Topic Retriever

In accompaniment to the Topic retrieving bot I had created yesterday, this morning it was how to make a page show the topic change without having to refresh. Here was my solution.

ajaxtopic

IRC Topic Retriever Version 2

A friend of mine requested a script that’d connect to an IRC network and sit there, grabbing the topic of a given channel at a defined period, dumping it into a file. This does just that, using the net_smartIRC framework. It is the second version of such script. I previously had the first script on the blog, but the link has since went dead. I’ll fix that in the coming days. Until then, enjoy.

Topic Getter 2.0

Issues with WordPress

Decided to reinstall wordpress completely, exporting the old file and importing the new one. While doing so, somehow everything got converted to lower case. And I’m too lazy to reimport everything or edit. So for now, all prior posts will be lower case. Eh. It’s not too bad.

Anyway, here’s hoping the new design is reasonably liked. I had an idea for a layout, but found this one which seems to be so much better. And hey, it’s another week with somewhat of an update! Better record than Tim Burke. :P

EDIT: After looking at this latest theme’s css, it is apparently that that is causing the lowercaseness. It is sort of appealing.

Keeping Me From Switching OS’s

Things Keeping Me from Switching to Linux

• Microsoft OneNote, which has no mature equivalent
• iTunes or Zune (iPod Touch and/or Zune Mini)

Things Keeping Me from Switching to OSX

• Microsoft OneNote, which has no mature equivalent
• Money Money Money Money Money
• My strong desire not to be an asshole

Things Keeping Me from Switching to XP

• Lack of a legal copy

RSS Reader

I tried to use NewsGator because it offered a web platform, Windows client, and dedicated iPhone client with offline ability.

It sucked ass.

It’s only renewed my faith in Google Reader, and makes me realize they need a client for the iPhone. There’s an unofficial one that costs money in the app store. I might have to check it out.

All I join are dying communities…

Apparently. ’cause the Datablab Forums are apparently dead, AceIRC‘s IRC Network seems to be waning in activity as evident by the SearchIRC rank, and a few other small communities I follow are struck by procrastination to develop. I suppose its the school year, but one would think they’d still show some sort of activity. :(