Mattsapundit

Hey, this is pretty cool.

You can have animated favicons in Firefox! The icons for each site on the Firefox tabs are animated and when you bookmark them, the bookmark icon is animated too. A quick peek at the HTML of a page with animated favicons shows they simply have a 16×16 animated gif and point the page to that as their favicon with this:

link xhref=”images/favico.gif” TYPE=”image/gif” REL=”icon”

That can be pretty slick, if it’s done well. I’ll have to add one. Need to add transparency, too.

Matt Bramanti | November 15, 2006 at 2:11 am
Posted to Uncategorized, Tech, Design, Blogging

7 comments

My cell phone died yesterday. Well, it didn’t really die, but it’s critically ill and in a coma. The screen flashes on and off, I can’t receive calls, and it’s totally unresponsive.

So now I’m on the phone with “Alicia,” my helpful and friendly Indian customer-service representative. I’m telling her about my problem, and how it is entirely due to a manufacturing defect by Motorola, since the phone has not suffered any physical damage.

Now she’s putting me on hold for the moment, and the hold music is some haunting sitar stuff with a cool beat. Someone at Verizon has a sense of humor, anyway.

Back to Alicia. She’s telling me my options:

1. Remove the battery and put it back in
2. Call Verizon
3. Take it in to a service center
4. Send it in to Motorola to get fixed under warranty

Okay, thank you, Alicia. Bye-bye.

Here are the problems with those options:

1. Did not work.
2. Verizon’s reps are friendly, but not very empowered to help the customer with problems.
3. I think they’re gonna charge me an arm and a leg.
4. It’ll take two weeks, during which time I’ll either be without a phone, or using an old one which I’ll have to activate.

Damn.

Matt Bramanti | September 10, 2006 at 10:44 am
Posted to Uncategorized

1 comment

I’m watching “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” I always get a kick out of the scene where Tuco is about to be hanged, and the executioner is reading his convictions. His rap sheet is so long, diverse and over the top that you just have to laugh:

…wanted in fourteen counties of this state, the condemned is found guilty of crimes of murder, armed robbery of citizens, state banks and post offices;  the theft of sacred objects, arson in a state prison, perjury, bigamy, deserting his wife and children, inciting prostitution, kidnapping, extortion, receiving stolen goods, selling stolen goods, passing counterfeit money and contrary to the laws of this state the condemned is guilty of using marked cards and loaded dice

Heh. Soon after escaping, he finds himself in the same pickle, but with an even more colorful rap sheet:

wanted in fifteen counties of this state, the condemned standing before us…sitting before us…Tuco Benedicto Pacifico Juan Maria Ramirez has been found guilty by the third district circuit court of the following crimes:    Murder, assaulting a justice of the peace, raping a virgin of the white race, statuatory rape of a minor of the black race…derailing a train in order to rob the passengers, bank robbery, highway robbery, robbing an unknown number of Post Offices, breaking out of the state prison, using marked cards and loaded dice, promoting prostitution, blackmail, intention of selling fugitive slaves, and counterfeiting.   Crimes against places of high authority include burning down the courthouse and sheriff’s office in Sonora. The accused is also guilty of cattle rustling, horse thievery, supplying Indians with firearms…misrepresenting himself as a Mexican General, unlawfully drawing salarly and living allowances from the Union Army

He’s the Audie Murphy of banditos.

Here’s a very rough transcript of the movie.

Matt Bramanti | September 10, 2006 at 12:37 am
Posted to Uncategorized

4 comments

I read about Windows Live Writer on Lifehacker this morning:

Windows only: Microsoft has just released Windows Live Writer to write to multiple blogs, insert photos, play with maps, and more goodies.

Less than 24 hours old, this product is still in beta, so there are sure to be some bugs; plus, you’ve got to download the .NET framework to even get to it.

We’ll see how well this works. It’s kind of cool, in that it shows my post in live preview, just how Mattsapundit displays it (red links, blockquote style, all that stuff).

Categories are in random order, though, unlike the alphabetical list I’m used to.

Let’s see what happens with an image.

Hmm. I don’t really care for how it handles images. It doesn’t let me center them.

I probably won’t be using this again. It was worth a shot, though.

Matt Bramanti | August 14, 2006 at 12:43 pm
Posted to Uncategorized

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Regular readers of Mattsapundit will notice that this blog is devoid of comment spam. No Viagra from Canada, no midget porn, no 1% mortgages, none of that crap.

But scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page, and you’ll see that I’ve had more than 1,300 attempted spam attacks, all of them rebuffed without incident. This is because I use Spam Karma 2, an excellent anti-spam program.

The way it works is this: as comments come in, they’re automatically put through a series of filters, each of which can be configured for strictness. Each filter looks for a specific trait common to automatically-generated comments. One looks for comments generated too rapidly, one checks comments against an IP blacklist of known spammers, another checks for an unusually high number of links, while yet another checks for comments on older posts. There are 10 filters in total.

Each filter assigns the comment a karma value based on its performance. This value is cumulative as the comment makes its way through the chain. Suspicious comments tend to have more than one spam-like attribute, so the negative karma builds up. At a certain point, determined by a very high negative karma value, the comment is obviously spam and it’s automagically discarded. Buh-bye, scumbags.

Conversely, real, human-generated comments get good karma. They might have one or two suspicious attributes (originating from a browser that doesn’t support JavaScript, for instance), but they’ll pass the other filters and get posted without a hitch.

The software works almost perfectly. No spam gets through. I haven’t had a single spam comment since I’ve been using Spam Karma 2. That’s pretty impressive, considering I’m just using the default settings. Even better, it’s given no false positives to date. Every once in a while, the software isn’t quite sure whether a comment is spam, and it holds it in moderation for me to approve or deny manually, but that’s only happened maybe three times.

All in all, it’s a nearly perfect anti-spam measure. If you use WordPress, check it out.

Matt Bramanti | June 7, 2006 at 12:29 pm
Posted to Uncategorized, Tech, Reviews, Scumbags, Blogging

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I’m still shaking my head at this one.

Matt Bramanti | October 25, 2005 at 11:57 am
Posted to Uncategorized

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