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I cannot decide what if anything I want to use this for, but this is a very nice little tutorial on writing your own IM bot. [via Lifehacker] It presumes you know how to do the server-side scripting (though they do give a nice sample php script so you can see there really isn’t anything IM specific in there) and the tutorial just shows how to IMified service to host a bot for you. Right now IMified is in beta, so you can get an account free, but it looks like they may start charging later so if you think you are interested you might want to sign up now. If you really get into it, there is also more documentation at the IMified site, but I like the short tutorial I linked for giving you the essentials on what it would take to get this set up.

Oddly, Chrome actually imported all of my bookmarks except the one in my “Daily” folder to my weblog management system (I clear through spam comments and the like each morning). It took me probably ten minutes to figure out how to add a bookmark. There isn’t a Bookmark menu anymore. There is a Bookmark folder, but you can’t add a bookmark from there. Right clicking on the page, or it’s tab, doesn’t do it. Right clicking on the URL in the address bar doesn’t do it. It turns out there are two ways to do it – either click on the star next to the address bar when you are viewing the page you want to bookmark, or right click on the bookmarks folder you want to add the page to. The learning curve is a bit steeper than I’d like, especially for something as straightforward as adding a bookmark.
If you are entering text in a text box (say while commenting on a weblog), and you don’t like the size of it, you can resize it! I’m sure this only works for some ways of setting up text boxes, but the idea that you can have a modestly sized input area with a scroll bar but let the user make it larger (though possibly less aesthetic) if it would be more convenient for them is pretty cool.
I have started noticing that I miss some of my add-ons from Firefox. Download Statusbar and PDF Download are useful for the way I use my course management system with my classes. I miss my Forecastbar. But what is going to drive me back to Firefox is the lack of Mouse Gestures.

The Google Chrome browser came out this afternoon, and after reading the comic book description of its features and innovations I wanted to give it a try. The ideas behind it seemed intriguing, and I’m willing to admit that I’m a bit of a Google fangirl. I used it for the afternoon and evening, performing a variety of tasks including working with my course management software and the college’s registration/enrollment system, checking email, and generally websurfing, for work and for pleasure.
Installation, as you would expect, is easy, and, if you are using Firefox at least, if you let it import your bookmarks and settings you’ll end up with a configuration that really is ready to go; for example anything in your bookmark toolbar is pulled out similarly in Chrome. It feels like it runs faster than Firefox, but I haven’t tested that in any quantitative manner.
Maybe the coolest technological innovation is the use of separate processes for each tab, and for plug-ins. It makes sense that this can help address the problems of memory leakage. The Task Manager is great. You really can check out which tabs and/or plugins are taking up resources, and if you click through the provided link you can get even more fun information about the memory usage of the various processes associated with Chrome. It is (hopefully) a sign of its beta status that you access that additional information through a link labeled “Stats for nerds”.
The “New Tab” page that one gets when opening a new tab could turn out to be a cool feature but it clearly will improve as I use it. Just off the bat I like the recently closed tabs list, though it really does seem to mean “recently” in the temporal sense, not “your three most recently closed tabs”.
Somebody else had to point out to me that you can search directly from the address bar. That’s novel enough to me that I probably could have used Chrome for a week (or a month….) without having figured that out, because I would never have thought to try it. I’m sure it was mentioned in the comic book somewhere but I didn’t remember it. You can also use the address bar to search within other sites if you have previously done a search at them using their domain specific tool after having explicitly typed their domain into the address bar – it doesn’t work if you got to the site through a search or some other link. I’m finding the interface for that a bit odd, but I’ve set it up to have address bar searches into Amazon and Wikipedia and I’ll see how I like it. Basically, if I type ‘a’ and then tab, I get an Amazon search; ‘w’ and a tab gets me a Wikipedia search.
I find the lack of menus at the top of the window sort of distressing, though. It looks like my window is wrong – like there is some type of OS error going on and it hasn’t finished filling in the menus in the blank space above the tabs. This doesn’t feel like a Windows specific complaint to me either – I don’t think I’ve used any graphical operating system that doesn’t have menus for File, Edit, etc. and despite your OS of choice, you probably have a pretty strong association for what to expect in each one. It just seems like an odd choice to depart from such a prevalent model. Redundant access would be okay with me, if you think there are better places for some of those functionalities to be listed. But moving my mouse all the way to the right side of the screen to access the “Save page…” function feels wrong.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around the whole Google Gears thing, so I’ll have to say more about that later. Practically speaking, I have found two uses for it. First, it is the engine behind the “Create application shortcuts…” option that allows you to create a shortcut directly to a webpage (I think usually you would want this to be some web app you frequently used) which when opened will display that page in a “streamlined” Chrome window without the usual tabs, address bar, etc. I set one up for Google Reader and the interesting thing is if I click on one of the headlines in my feeds, which are set to open in new tabs, it throws the tabs back to my open Chrome window that does have the full tabbing environment. Frustratingly, if I do this using the ‘V’ shortcut, it no longer marks that item as read in Reader, the way it does if you view using ‘V’ inside a regular Chrome window. Honestly, that seems broken to me. From what I read the “Create application shortcuts” feature is supposed to work nicely with Gmail.
Google Reader also seems to have a new feature that, if you use it via Chrome, Google Gears allowed them to build a tool to download the needed content to continue browsing your feeds offline. No, that doesn’t mean that you can read through to the linked pages, but it does download all of your unread feeds with their summaries, and your starred items. I use my starred items folder to save interesting content to look at later, so that’s a pretty neat feature to me.
Overall, it’s a web browser. They admit up front it’s a bit sparse on features to start because they are focusing on building a strong underlying framework. How successfully they did that is something that I think will come out more in the next few days as people really put it through its paces and tear it apart. Honestly, I think the thing I have liked the most so far is the comic. Scott McCloud has a knack for this sort of instructional comic (he does some great things for Make magazine), and I was surprised at how far into the technical details the comic got. I’d definitely recommend taking the time to actually sit down and read it if you’re at all interested in the issues behind software development.

Another reason to feel sorry for the aardvark – they probably get more spam than any other animal. A study was done showing that patterns in your username, such as the first letter, seem to impact how much spam you get. Actually, their title claiming that aardvarks get more spam than zebras is misleading. The pattern is more complex than that, with L, P, R, and S seeming to lead the pack in terms of spam versus non-spam messages received. Really, it seems like all this is saying is that spammers guess email addresses, and if your address occurs on other domains frequently as well, you’re more likely to be spammed. So your nice mnemonic username might be socially appealing but problematic for your junk mail folder.

In yet another RFID update (it’s funny how once you are thinking about something like this you see it everywhere) this is an interesting little video of Adam Savage explaining why Mythbusters won’t be debunking any more RFID myths anytime soon. In short, they had an entire show planned around RFID myths – how hackable they are, how easy it is to track someone with them, etc. – and legal counsel for various large financial institutions contacted Discovery and scared them into blocking the show. But it is more fun to hear it in Adam’s words so go watch! I’m bummed – I think that would have been a great episode, and it is frustrating to see corporate interests blocking this type of information from getting out. After all, the show has covered myths where they make various explosive materials and they bleep out key ingredients or steps; at the very least, it seems like a negotiation to do something like that could have been reached. It also reminds me on the gag order that was put on the MIT students who were going to speak on how the hacked the Boston subway system at Defcon this year, though that injunction was lifted, albeit too late for the students to speak. In fact, that talk was supposed to be in part about an RFID security weakness as well!

Related to my post from last week, Scientific American has an article about how RFID tags are popping up in unexpected places and be able to be used to track individuals, including, due to poor security in the devices, by individuals unassociated with the tags. The main application that the article is concerned with is the desire to have border states issue drivers licenses equipped with RFID tags to simplify border crossings. Says the article:

Although such “enhanced” driver’s licenses remain voluntary in the states that offer them, privacy and security experts are concerned that those who sign up for the cards are unaware of the risk: anyone with a readily available reader device—unscrupulous marketers, government agents, stalkers, thieves and just plain snoops—can also access the data on the licenses to remotely track people without their knowledge or consent. What is more, once the tag’s ID number is associated with an individual’s identity—for example, when the person carrying the license makes a credit-card transaction—the radio tag becomes a proxy for that individual.

The article goes on beyond this, though, to lay out a nice history of the RFID tag, including the spotty history organizations have had in following through with the security that they claimed to be ensuring for data on the tags. The overall message is, again, that this technology is out there today in people’s hands and we need to wake up and stop trusting the producers of these devices to look out for our best interests. Serious legislation is required to limit both how corporations and how the government is permitted to use RFID tags.

While I have played around with sed/awk and perl and shell scripting in the past, in recent years I’ve spent more time using programming languages than scripting languages. This summer I’ve been playing around with Python a bit, though I’ll probably get more into it once I think of a good problem to solve using it. I thought about picking up Flash, but between it being so closed and it being difficult to just see your code, I decided to pass on that bit of frustration. Somehow I didn’t think of Javascript at all, though I do not do much web development so perhaps that is not too surprising. This discussion of the maturity of Javascript and the APIs for it has got me thinking that maybe it ought to move back up the priority list. If the APIs have gotten good enough to smooth over browser differences in a robust manner, that really would make web programming look more inviting. Of course, I return to the problem of needing a project to implement to really give the language a good test, but I think I’ll be keeping my eyes open this fall for places where I might get to try out one of these tools.