Akismet Spam Stopper for WordPress

OK, I’m convinced! Matt announced Akismet a few days ago. Its a spamstopper which is installed as a plugin in your WordPress plugins directory. Akismet requires an API key from your wordpress.com blog (you don’t need to use it there, wordpress.com already have spam controlled for you) to activate it on your other blogs.

Akismet found 17 spam comments straight up after install… obviously my previous spam stopper, whilst pretty effective, was missing some. You get the option to review trapped spam and delete it, as well.

Akismet is free for personal use.

Go to WordPress.com and enter your email address into the appropriate slot and then sit back and wait for your invitation (which might take a few days or a few weeks). I have one spare invite…

Adobe to acquire Macromedia

About Adobe – Adobe to acquire Macromedia

Gee… I never keep up with these things. This was announced back in April!!

So now we can look forward to… what… Macromedia products being 2-3 times their normal price? Dreamweaver getting buried in favour of the lack-lustre Go-Live?

Time will tell, I guess.

Google Print

Books of Revelation
By Eric Schmidt
The Wall Street Journal
October 18, 2005

Imagine sitting at your computer and, in less than a second, searching the full text of every book ever written. Imagine an historian being able to instantly find every book that mentions the Battle of Algiers. Imagine a high school student in Bangladesh discovering an out-of-print author held only in a library in Ann Arbor. Imagine one giant electronic card catalog that makes all the world’s books discoverable with just a few keystrokes by anyone, anywhere, anytime.

That’s the vision behind Google Print, a program we introduced last fall to help users search through the oceans of information contained in the world’s books.

The Point of Google Print

Try it out here

I rather like the idea, but I can see why the publishers are getting nervous.

I wonder, also, about the notion of one company having all of that… still… as long as we continue to have hardcopy, there shouldnt be any real issues except those of copyright.

Eric Schmidt is the CEO of Google.

[Addit] In order to read the full text of any book, you need a Google account. You might want to consider getting gMail for that purpose (leave a comment with a valid email address stating you’d like a gMail account and I’ll send you an invite). However you can sign up for a google account using any email address via this page.

apcmag.com: Macs take the lead

Its so nice to see a pro-Mac article in what has become a Wintel standard mag. APC has always given other operating systems a glance, Linux particularly, but generally its Windows based and Windows biased. It was the mag I never missed when I was a Windows user.

James Wang has written an unbiased, interesting article explaining his rationale for moving to Mac, and his experience in doing so. Its a good read for anyone who is considering buying a Mac.

apcmag.com: Macs take the lead

Interesting new Browser

FLOCK!  Its a new browser based on the gecko engine (Mozilla, Firefox, Camino et al) and it includes some pretty neat features, and almost none that you are used to.

I’m typing this in the builtin blog tool.  You can set up your blog really easily, and once your entry window is open, you can axctually drag stuff straight into a little box, to blog it.  The tool also retrieves your previous post titles. There’s also a builtin flickr client, and the bookmarks manager is like nothing I have ever seen. 

You no longer need to submit your name to a list and wait to be invited to join.  I got my dev copy this past week on invitation and have been enjoying the exploration, but I note now that the latest version is available for all to download.

Versions available for Windows, MacOSX and Linux.

Technorati Tags: flock, developer, blog tool, windows, osx, linux

gMail and File Storage

Its all very well to have vast spaces in which to store your email, but unless you have more email than life, you probably don’t really have a great use for the space gMail is giving. Unless you also need some online storage space.

Enter the gDisk.

The gDisk app comes with preset categories which you can choose to install, or not.

The little send window. The Download window is identical. As yet, no progress indicator.

The final result. I did try to send a 50mb file, but gDisk crashed. I rather suspect that was because of the inherent filesize limit imposed by gMail in any case.

This application is for MacOSX only, sorry Windows users. But you lot have access to a shell extension called gMail Drive which works as an additional drive and shows up in your Windows Explorer as such.

Technorati Tags: gmail, gdisk, online file storage, gmail drive

E-Books

One mut not forget e-books in the flurry of excitement over discovering audiobooks.

I’ve commented in an earlier post about e-books and dead tree versions and so on, so won’t comment here. This post is to list the sources of FREE e-books (legal, not stolen) which I have come across in my travels.

This list is not exhaustive and it does NOT contain “get rich quick” books of any kind.

Additions are welcome via the comments section, if you know of other sources, but be warned, all URLs will be checked and if found to be of the other kind (“get rich quick”) of ebook, they will be deleted with no discussion.

Without further ado:

The Gutenberg Project
Baen Free Library
Fictionwise (requires free subscription)
University of Pennsylvania Online Books
Blackmask Online
Manybooks

You’ll find that Manybooks, Gutenberg and Blackmask have books which are absolute classics. Don’t go looking for any new titles in these places, you won’t find them. Having said that, however, Fictionwise is a great source of freebies including snippets of new releases from new authors as well as full version ebooks, and the prices for their books for sale in most cases is quite reasonable. UPenn seems to have a predominance of academic texts but this too can be useful.

Have fun!