I’ve been very fortunate to have never been hit with spy/ad-ware. I’ve always been careful, and I’ve tried to teach my wife what actions are smart and which ones are not. Last night, however, I was looking for some information and ended up downloading a file from a shady website. After scanning the file and finding no viruses, I ran the executable. How stupid. It immediately began installing adware and my antivirus app began showing warnings of a trojan being installed.

When Jesus came to this earth over 2000 years ago, he came as a child — a baby. Although he was God in human flesh, he didn’t have the kind of birth that should be owed to the future king. Rather being born in a warm, clean hospital, his parents were kicked out to the barn to spend the night sleeping with animals, hay, and manure. The King of all kings and the Lord of all lords was born in a manger in the city of Bethleham, and nobody took notice except for a teenage virgin, a young carpenter, thee confused shepherds, and several bewildered animals.

I know that a lot of people are using Magpie RSS to power their del.icio.us sidebar links, so I figured I’d throw out a code sample showing how you could use SimplePie for the same task. If you need to come to terms with why SimplePie might be a better choice of RSS parser, check out the SimplePie project page. The only other thing that might be worth mentioning is that SimplePie still has a difficult time with non-encoded special characters in feeds and feeds in non-western-european/non-american/non-australian languages.

Happy Birthday, Emily Ann Boydston! I know it’s been a while since we’ve talked, and I know that this is an old picture (1998), but happy 22nd birthday. I hope that things are going great for you!

Rather than completely hold off the next version of SimplePie until it’s totally complete (which appears to be taking some time), I’ve decided to make the current Beta versions available for testing purposes. Although it appears to be fairly stable, I wouldn’t recommend this for a production site just yet. If you’d like to test out the current Beta build (2004.12.03), you can do so a couple of ways: Basic Online Feed Reader utilizing the latest version of SimplePie The SimplePie source file The documentation file for this particular build Please take the time to test it with your feeds that you read.

I know that I’m a couple of weeks late for this, but here’s my hat in the ring… Heads-up: the linked image is a 1.3 MB PNG file.

My wife and I have been married for roughly 3.5 years. For most of that time, we were renting a room from her parents. Whenever Christmas would come around, her parents would get a tree and decorate it, and I was never really part of the process. This year is the first year where we have our own place where we can pick out the tree together, decorate it together, and wrap presents together (although she’s really good, and I just goof it all up).

Paul Griffin has just released SPG 1.1! For those who aren’t familiar with this project, Simple PHP Gallery is exactly that—an easy-to-use image gallery system, written in PHP. There are several new features listed on Paul’s SPG Mini-Site, but there are a few that are my favorites (as I was a beta tester for this and the last versions): Image Precaching This was one of the two features that I actually coded the original code for *grin*. In v1.0 and the early v1.

My birthday is coming up on Tuesday (lucky me!), but I was allowed to open a present early. My wonderful three-year-old daughter (and her wonderful Mommy) knew exactly what to get me… another toy. Introducing my new iSight. With the 15 minutes I’ve had to play with it, it’s very cool, and will make chatting my long distance friends even better. I called my best friend Eric to see if he was home and could come online so that I could see this thing in action, but he wasn’t home.

Is this the answer that Airport Express owners have been waiting for? A USB powered remote control that can handle a variety of media apps, including iTunes. From the developer’s website: When used with AirPort Express the Express Remote provides a powerful way to locally control music being streamed from iTunes on a remote PC or Mac. It’s due to be released in November sometime. I think I’m gonna get one. Let’s just hope that it’s everything it seems to be.