New Blog - MarshallFellows.org

August 24th, 2004 • 1 comment Marshall Memorial Fellowship

I’ve started up a new blog (as if I wasn’t having enough trouble keeping up with this one) for my fellow Marshall Fellows. The site, www.marshallfellows.org, is going to focus on all things that relate to international affairs, transatlantic relations, cultural differences, and other Marshall Fellow type stuff. The authors on the blog include myself but also other individuals that are past or present Marshall Fellows. Right now everyone is just from the American side but I hope to fix that soon.

So if you’re interested in the pontificating of some Marshall Fellows, wander on over and take a read. By the way, the pictures on the site were all taken by me during my Marshall Fellowship trip in June.

Posting With Hidden Intent

August 24th, 2004 • 1 comment Rants, Technology

I’m generally not one to complain about the behavior of others, but in this instance I think a quick post is warranted. “Nathan” from Synop posted a comment in my post about RSS readers and specifically about FeedDemon. Looking at the logs and the fact that I don’t know “Nathan”, it seems like he probably found my posting through a search on an RSS search engine. Obviously he was looking to spread news about his product, Sauce Reader, when people were talking about competitive products. I don’t generally have a problem with this except for the fact that “Nathan” doesn’t mention his affiliation in his comment. I also take issue with this comment since it is in my blog and not a “common good” and hey, I make the rules here. If you’re going to post a comment, post something meaningful and non-commercial. If it is commercial and meaningful, make sure you mark it as such.

That is all.

P.S. I deleted “Nathan”’s original comment from the site because I don’t want people here wandering there and supporting this kind of behavior. If you want to find his product, you’ll have to use a search engine the old fashioned way.

RSS Tool and Apple

August 21st, 2004 • Comments Off Technology

By popular demand (actually Coty posting a comment on this), here is my pick of RSS aggregation tools. I downloaded and bought (for $29.95) FeedDemon. FeedDemon has a couple of things I really like and one I really don’t like but I’ve organized a work around for myself. FeedDemon doesn’t just download and maintain your feeds but it will proactively search the feeds for terms that you specify. Matching feed items are copied into these search channels so that you can quickly find information of interest which is especially useful when you have a lot of feeds. The thing I don’t like about FeedDemon is the lack of a structured feed index. So because of that, if you have one channel group selected as active, the non-active channel groups won’t get updated. The way to get around this is to stick all of the feeds in one master channel group. This makes your feeds non-organized but I’ll suffer that to have all the feeds updated constantly.

A good alternative choice (but it doesn’t have the same search capabilities) for those who don’t want to buy software is the freely available FeedReader. For me, the ability to have search channels was too much of a factor so I passed on FeedReader. I’m sure other folks will provide this functionality in their readers soon but I believe FeedDemon is the only one right now.

Finally, I don’t have a strong hate for Apple, just the method of their madness. I used to be a solid Apple guy until Apple decided to abandon the (in my opinion, more advanced at the time) Apple // line of computers in favor of the Macintosh line. A company that will do a wholesale dump of an entire product line (and the customer base using those products) like that is one that I can’t trust with my money. That being said, with a closed system like what Apple builds with controlled software and hardware, there is little chance of incompatibility and everything works really well together. You just end up paying for that compatibility insurance with higher hardware and software costs due to the controlled and closed nature of their systems.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention another great feature of FeedDemon. FeedDemon will use Windows’ built in browsing capability but it is possible (through a experimental patch) to have it use the FireFox/Mozilla rendering engine instead. If you use FireFox or Mozilla you’ll know how important this is. The Gecko engine is way faster than the engine used in IE.

Converted the Blog

August 21st, 2004 • Comments Off General

I finally got around to converting my blog from Movable Type to WordPress. WordPress is open source software and has a pretty good following to it. I also found a nice template to run the site on which has some nice design elements. In doing this though, the RSS feeds have changed and so for the three of you actually monitoring this blog with an aggregator, you’ll have to fix your aggregator. One really nice thing (of many actually) of WordPress is that folks have written plug-ins which nicely extend and expand the functionality of WordPress in a easy to deploy manner.

Cryptography News

August 18th, 2004 • Comments Off Technology

For the one person (out of the six that read this blog) that does care about this, there is some interesting developments on collisions on MD5, SHA-0, and SHA-1. More information about this on Freedom to Tinker. Based on the description (the presentation happened last night and I haven’t heard it), everyone should [fairly quickly if possible] move away from MD5 and to SHA-1 if possible. With the hope that a method of doing full collisions on SHA-1 doesn’t happen until after a new hash function is certified and deployed.