Technical Articles

The Flock web browser lost its charm. It offered a lot of stuff that I didn't use. I liked the Facebook integration and the ability to post blog entries offline. In the end, Flock go in its own way

I've always wanted to be able to post to this blog without actually going to the site. Using the Drupal XML API, I'm now able to create posts like these from other application.

I'm using the Flock web browser. It's an interesting web browser based on the Mozilla Gecko engine. It's branded a "social web browser" - which means it comes ready to hook into all the social networking sites like Facebook, Flickr, etc. It's nifty, but not revolutionary. In fact, if this ability to post to my blog hadn't worked out, I'd have dumped Flock altogether.

Now, I won't pretend to know everything that's going on with the battle for an open office document standard. Personally, I use the OpenDocument standard as implemented by OpenOffice.org. However, when I was purusing Slashdot this morning, I saw that Patrick Durusau - editor of the OpenDocument standard - seems to be endorsing Microsoft's Office OpenXML (OOXML) format. You know that confused look dogs make? Yeah, that was me.

I wanted to set this up because I decided to remove the encryption from my wireless connection at home. I'm using MAC address filtering, what extra good in encryption doing to keep people from using my wireless bandwidth?

After some more thought, I realized all my email traffic was going out over the Internet in plain-text, regardless of what type of connection I used at home (wired or wireless). Makes sense, the data's gotta leave my router at some point. So, I took David's suggestion and decided to create an SSH tunnel for my email client to communicate with my web host for IMAP and SMTP. I did this because it seems that the web host doesn't support any kind of secure connection for IMAP and SMTP.

Playing on the jukebox: "Me and Becky" by Chris Rice, "A Witch's Invitation" by Carman and "Spoken For" by MercyMe.

This is the first entry I've made from somewhere other than my house - remember this day! I've been quite preoccupied lately. Thus explains my lack of posting here. The following is a summary of my preoccupying experience: