midtoad's blog

Why no news?

I've been finding it oh-so convenient to make blog postings using my account over at blogger.com, particularly since I can make mobile postings by e-mail. So unless I need to do something special with photos or special formatting, you'll probably see most of my news over there. Check it out at midtoad.blogspot.com

No news is good news

No blog postings here for a while doesn't indicate that I've fallen off the side of the earth. Rather, I've been busy on another site I manage, bikecalgary.org. If you're a cyclist, head on over and take a look!

Canada's banks are helping criminal phishing scammers

I wrote a short article about this on another page on my website. That page also includes a score-card for Canada's top banks. All of them fail, except one. This means that all of them are financing scammers. The one exception (as of Nov. 17th, 2006) is the Laurentian Bank of Canada. Congratulations Laurentian Bank! You're the only one that has hired a webmaster that isn't lazy or incompetent.

By the way, the scorecard and article are here.

Scary news on the environment

Now here's a scary story from Australia: the world's forests may have just 100 years to live. If global temperatures continue to rise, and reach levels just 3 degrees above present on an average basis, many of the world's forests may be in danger of disappearing.

What are you doing to reduce your energy footprint?

Long time no see

I haven't updated this blog for quite a while (except to upgrade to Frog v.1.8 just a few minutes ago). I've been busy hacking on another Python blogging tool, Firedrop2. The main difference between it and Frog is that Firedrop2 doesn't require python (or anything else) to be installed on the webspace where the blog postings will appear. You can actually just install Firedrop2 on a USB key (via Movable Python) and you'll always have your blog tools with you.

I've started another blog using Firedop2, but so far I've limited its content primaril to testing Firedrop2 itself. I still maintain a webserver, so why not continue to use Frog? (for the time being, anyway).

Email via cellphone from PDA

Nothing earth-shaking here, but I got a new feature set up today. Now I can compose e-mail on my PDA, then send it via a wireless Bluetooth connection to my cell phone, which acts as an internet connection. If you need to do this, read on!

Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website, and application. The idea is for you to be able to have access anywhere to your bookmarks, and also to be able to share them with others.

You can look interesting bookmarks found by others for, say, 'python', by going to the following URL: del.icio.us/tag/python. The more popular the bookmark, the more likely it is to turn up near the front of the list for the tag you are interested in.

Another feature is that if you find someone who consistently posts bookmarks you are interested in, you can subscribe to that person's tag list. Simply get their del.icio.us username, then go to your del.icio.us inbox, and then to the settings. For me, the URL for this would be: del.icio.us/settings/midtoad/inbox

Here are the tags (i.e. subjects) that I have created in my del.icio.us account:

Welcome to Frog!

Welcome to my new blog. It's powered by Frog, which you can read more about by clicking on the icon on the bottom of the page. For the techies, Frog is a web app that runs on the Snakelets web application server, written entirely in Python. For the non-techies, I basically have a blog with a manual transmission instead of an automatic, so I am more in control of the way it drives.