I recently stumbled upon a Lego Cad like program called Bricksmith, see [0]. It’s good fun, but like all Cad programs ( i presume) not easy to use at first. It’s mac only, alas. But some of you (i hope more then Madsen reads this, fx. Morten also) might like it.

I made a stupid “drawing” which can be seen on Kristian Bust’s new website [1]. Worth to check out, the website that is, if your into non-conform art with something to say.

[0] http://bricksmith.sourceforge.net/
[1] http://kristianbust.dk

During my recent contact with an English company, I’ve had to use the pound sign (£) a lot, which has uncovered a bug in Firefox 3 — at least I think it is… Using the danish keyboard layout the pound sign has to be made by pressing alt-4, but doing so in Firefox 3 will just result in switching to tab no. 4 if a such exists. If not, the shortcut will merely do nothing. Either way, no pound sign for me.

Effectively this means that all combinations from alt-1 – alt-9 are useless, which means that the following characters can’t be written in Firefox 3 on OS X with a danish keyboard layout: ¡, “, §, £, ∞, ™, ¶, [ and ]. I find it especially troublesome that the hard brackets doesn’t work, since they’re extensibly used in BBTags, as replacements for < and > when writing HTML examples in a place that doesn’t handle < and > well, it’s used as scope delimiter in Functional Grammar notation and in a ton of other places.

I’ve scoured the web for a solution (as well as about:config) but to no avail.

It’s around 9 months since it was discovered that MSN had implemented some pretty retarded keyword blocking rules on messages sent through MSN Messenger (aka. Live Messenger; not the client, the protocol). Now — according to Slashdot — they’ve added at least one more keyword to the list: “youtube.com”. I guess it’s only fair to speculate if this has something to do with the recent launch of Messenger TV in 20 countries.

allocinit has a more comprehensive list of blocked sub-strings and now you can add at least “youtube\.com” to it. Has anybody tested if links to Google Video gets through?

Now, this is just one reason that I don’t use MSN more than what is absolutely necessary…

UPDATE (May 12, 2008): I’ve tossed Adium into the trash can on my dock and am no longer using MSN. Try Google Talk instead, if you want to reach me via IM. It may not be open source or that far from MSN, but at least they don’t censor one’s messages and it’s based on Jabber (at least the protocol is open), so pretty much any Jabber client will work with it, hence everyone can join in without relying on a reverse engineered protocol. My Google Talk name is: lillesvin@gmail.com.

For my birthday, my dad got me a USB MIDI keyboard, which is awesome — especially if I want to use it with GarageBand, because MIDI on the Mac is soooo easy. One thing, though, is that I’d actually rather use it with LMMS and MuSe on my Ubuntu installation, but that seems to be rather difficult. It actually works fine with LMMS, but alas, LMMS does not seem to support SoundFonts and neither can I make (and play) an entire drum kit at once. I have to record each different sound individually — i.e. I have to record the tracks separatly, which is a pain, in my opinion.

So, MuSe and MIDI… It may just be me, but it seems I’ve tried every possible combination of settings and soft-synths, but still no cigar. I know that the keyboard is recognized, because — as I said — I can use it with LMMS, but MuSe just seems to make using MIDI really, really complicated, which is too bad. If anyone knows of any up-to-date documentation on the subject, please let me know, because what I’ve been digging up on google is ancient.

Anyways, I hope I don’t get too carried away with MIDI and totally lose the ability to keep it simple — don’t hesitate to let me know, if that happens. For now you’ll have to settle with my old tracks, until I’ve figured out how to work MIDI on Linux — or at least until I figure out how to make GarageBand obey my every command (hehe, yeah right… Like Apple would let me do that.) Alternatively, if Ardour make that native OS X port available soon and it has (some) MIDI editing capabilities, I might actually use that, because it absolutely rocks my boat.

Finally, if you have any tips or tricks (anything!) regarding MIDI on either Linux or OS X, please comment away (or email me). It’ll be greatly appreciated!

In a recent article on Slashdot is given yet another reason — actually two reasons — to not use MSN (not even just the Microsoft client, but the entire protocol). Apparently Microsoft is aware that malicious URLs can be sent through MSN, so they figured they’d better block some of them. Actually, they’re blocking the sub-strings, which means that .scr will catch not only http://example.com/file.scr but also http://example.com/my.screenshot.png and everything else containing the string .scr. The blocking is done server-side, so it doesn’t matter if you use the official Microsoft MSN client or Pidgin (The IM Client Formerly Known as Gaim), Adium or whatever’s available out there.

Now, what’s really retarded is that each and every TinyURL still gets through just fine (but probably not for long now) and now Microsoft has to play catch-up to maintain that list of blocked sub-strings. This is really, really stupid, because the poor end-user will never know why their link to http://cutesie.example.com/pics.php isn’t sent — just that it’s not. And most people will probably never see the list and know which words they can’t use, hence confusion. Besides, the fact that Microsoft choose to “solve” problems in this way instead of fixing the vulnerabilities in their software, just makes me wonder how common this practice is to them and how many other problems they’ve “fixed” in a similar manner.