Alex Jones: Web Technologist, Barbecue Acolyte, Information Junkie, Austinite

Legality of Home Poker in Texas

Legality of Home Poker in Texas - from a great Poker site, by a fellow Austinite: love and casino war poker blog

Posted in Poker, Quick Links

Change Multiple Text Layers in Photoshop

Wow, this is immensely helpful: Change Multiple Text Layers in Photoshop. As stated in the short article, if you want to make the same change to multiple text layers within Photoshop, you can skip the need to change each layer individually, or create an action. Simply follow these steps:
1. Link all of the text layers
2. Make sure one of the linked layers is currently selected
3. Hold down the Shift key while clicking on on the option bar to make the change

Very cool!

Thanks to Corrie Haffly for posting this on SitePoint.

Posted in Design, Design & UI

Overloading Spammers II

Edward Felton has posted some solid reasons against the implementation of the Lycos anti-spam screensaver that I mentioned previously. While I love the idea (retribution against spammers is very appealing), I can’t argue with his points, and have found my opinion turning against Lycos’ strategy. A snippet from his post:
> This is a serious lapse of judgment by Lycos. For one thing, this kind of vigilante attack erodes the line between the good guys and the bad guys. Spammers are bad because they use resources and keep people from getting to the messages they want to read. If you respond by wasting resources and keeping people from getting to the websites they want to read, it’s hard to see what separates you from the spammers.

His writing is, as always, insightful.

Posted in Technology

IPac Blog

The new IPac Blog is a great resource for those interested in intellectual property and copyright laws, and the need to change both for the better.

Posted in Law & Government & Tagged: ipac

IPac in Wired

Check out the Wired News story titled Battling the Copyright Big Boys, which provides a great introduction to what we, at IPac are building, and the goals we aim to accomplish. There is a lot to do, so if you have some time, and care about copyright and intellectual property issues (including whether or not you can record your favorite TV show), then stop by the IPac site, and sign up!

Donna Wentworth makes a great point concerning how to help us fight bad law. In her post about the story she recommends that people “give up today’s (and/or tomorrow’s) wildly over-priced Starbucks latte and make a donation to IPac.”

Chris Rush Cohen of the INDUCE Act Blog has also provided coverage and kind words regarding the IPac story. It’s great to see the word spreading!

Posted in Law & Government & Tagged: copyright, induce act, intellectual property, ipac, law

Dodecahedron Calendar

Dodecahedron Calendar - download a template to make your own 12 sided calendar - via Boing Boing

Posted in General, Quick Links

Mount a trashed hard drive using Target Disk mode

Mount a trashed hard drive using Target Disk mode - macosxhints

Posted in OS X, Quick Links

Overloading Spammers

As reported by the BBC, Lycos has created a screensaver that targets the Web sites of spammers, overloading them with requests for information. They hope to “make the monthly bandwidth bills of spammers soar by keeping their servers running flat out” and slow down their sites “under the weight of data requests. Early results show that response times of some sites have deteriorated by up to 85%.” The lists of spammer Web sites are pulled from real time black lists, which are built with addresses sent out to e-mails received by users from around the world. Even better, the method they are using, shouldn’t have a noticeable effect on the Net’s speed, unlike some other proposed solutions.

This is a great way to fight back, I really hope it works, even if it is only for a little while.

Posted in Technology

SilverSpider PlayList 1.0

A quick note to announce the public release of SilverSpider Play List, a set of PHP scripts that helps you add a recent music list to your Web site. Each time you listen to a song, your media player will send song information to your Web site which will gather the info, and with the help of Amazon, compile it into a list of entries, each containing the name of the song, the artist and the album cover.

Posted in PHP & MySQL, SilverSpider Play List

CSS - Conditional comments

CSS - Conditional comments are “excellently suited to give special instructions meant only for Explorer on Windows. They are supported from Explorer 5 onwards, and it is even possible to distinguish between 5.0, 5.5 and 6.0.” - from the amazingly helpful Quirksmode.

Posted in CSS, Quick Links