Recently in Tech Category

Okay, so I'm terrible at adding new content to my blog. I'm so rarely at a desk able to type up new entries that blogging becomes something I have to do in my in-between moments, and I haven't found a blogging engine thus far that allows me to work effectively from a BlackBerry. I've been Twittering quite a bit more, as there's a decent twitter client for the BB (I refuse to pony up for an SMS plan just to twitter, especially when decent native clients abound), but Twitter's a far cry from blogging: no pictures, no music, no real formatting. It's pure stream of consciousness for the most part, though that might also be related to the audience as much as the format.

And now I'm going on vacation for a week to lovely Lake Tahoe, CA for the 4th of July holiday - why would I choose to post now, since I'm just going to let things go dark for yet another week? Well, because I'm trying something new. See, there's a middle ground between blogging and twittering - it's called tumblelogging micro-blogging, as created (I believe) by Tumblr. Tumblelogging lets the blog engine do most of the work and expects short, simple text or multimedia content as input. Perfect for my typical style of information sharing. However, Given my heavy reliance on a BlackBerry as a primary means of communication, I've elected to try out micro-blogging over at newcomer Posterous instead. They allow email input and simply Do The Right Thing with whatever's attached to the emails - photos, music, video or simple links.

I'll continue to post here about technical matters - modem scripts, GreaseMonkey scripts and various Ruby on Rails topics. In short, this blog will become more of a public, technical platform and less about personal stuff. The fun, short stuff will live over at Posterous instead - you can check out the new hotness here. Of course my notion of fun frequently involves technical arcana, so don't be too surprised to see some stuff bleed over.

If you're a rabid early adopter like me, you've probably already installed Leopard and discovered that the original modem script doesn't work with the new OS. However, it's unlikely you then repackaged all of the modem scripts (BlackBerry 8100,8700 and 8800) into the new modem script format and made them available for download. If you did, why didn't you let me know?! You would have saved me a half-hour's worth of work. Sheesh, some people.

At any rate, if you're on Leopard and jonesing for a Bluetooth modem fix, here's what you do:

1. Download the new scripts. One download for all phone models!
2. Unzip that file into Macintosh HD:Library:Modem Scripts. The same location th old script lived. If successful, you should see a new directory named BlackBerry.ccl there.
3. Pair your phone as usual - when asked for the phone's Vendor and Model, choose 'Research in Motion' and whatever model of phone you have. I'm not a mind reader, you know.
4. The username, password and phone number fields should be filled in with the same values as before; namely, whatever is appropriate for your carrier. Check the forums if you're not sure.

That's it! I'd like to make an installer for this to make it even more seamless, but for now this should get you going. As always, let me know if you run into problems and I'll try to help.

Being the brave early adopter I am, I jumped at the chance to install Movable Type's latest version here on Fibble. My impressions so far:

• The install procedure was more painful than it had to be. Despite installing in a fresh directory, I had problems with default templates being missing.
• Akismet still isn't part of the default anti-spam package - why is this? The built in logic does a decent job, but the collaborative filtering provided by Akismet is far and away a better solution.
• The new authoring engine is quite nice. I keep finding small niceties as I need them; for example, the bottom of the text area I'm typing in has a grab handle that allows me to resize it as necessary.
• The meta-soup of tags, keywords and categories hasn't been unified yet. I realize people have probably created their own ontologies by now, but Melissa's tag cloud is empty because she always uses categories - every heard of a category cloud? 'Cos I haven't.
• The new templates are lovely, and well-organized. I'm looking forward to building a new site or two based on MT as a lightweight CMS thanks to the new page templates.
• Comment handling still seems to have some issues. The 'Report as Spam' link in emails I receive from MT is as likely to take me to an error page as it is to work properly.

Clearly SixApart has their work cut out for them, but I'm still pretty happy overall. Kudos to the MT team for the release.

Please stop trying to advertise on my blog. I've removed the comment in question (posted by one 'iMobimac_Guru', from a Brazilian IP address no less) and will do the same to any other obviously commercial comments. Feel free to contact me directly if you'd like ad space on Fibble.org, but the price just went up. Way up.

As a side note, I'm not opposed to iMobimac - there are models of BlackBerry out there who won't be able to connect any other way. But if you own a bluetooth-capable BlackBerry that can be upgraded to OS 4.2.1 or later, you're wasting your money by buying someone's software to accomplish what you can do yourself for free, with very little effort.

Dreamhost had an extended outage over the last twenty four hours - there's a good chance any mail I received between 7PM PST yesterday and now is lost. So if you sent me something important, please re-send.

Wow, it's been a while. Here's what's going on:

• Mark's now six months old! Time flies. He's huge and adorable. Check out the gallery for new photos, including our first hiking trip in our new backpack carrier! (Okay, it was only to the local park, but hey. Plus, bonus photos of his first time in a real swing!)
• SpotDJ now has a Facebook app! Check it out and let me know what you think. I'm having a lot of fun using it as a personal jukebox during the day.
• I've upgraded my BlackBerry Pearl to the latest OS from T-Mobile, and now I'm unable to tether it to my Mac successfully - after one successful connect, it won't reconnect until I pull the battery to reset it. Cingular users have been reporting this for ages, but I couldn't reproduce it until now. Here's hoping there's a simple solution.
• DisableTextAds has been updated - I was contacted by the developers of the Lingospot inline ad system. They actually provided me with a simple hook for disabling their ads. Kudos to them for giving users the chance to opt out.

I'm in lovely Portland, Oregon for the rest of the week for RailsConf 2007. As such, I'll likely be slow to respond to email until I get back on Sunday. Expect occasional reports from the field as time and sobriety permit (hey, it's a big geek party in the beer capital of the west coast).