I forwarded a Simon Delivers order receipt email on to a friend, and he was able to view the order without being logged in as me. Turns out that if you have a Simon Delivers account at all they let you view any order. I created a quick web form to let anyone view any order using my account. Here's my favorite order so far:

I'm sure fixing this problem is simple as adding whatever the .asp equivalent of this is:

If things have been a little sparse around here over the last year or so it's because outside of work the bulk of my organizational and creative energies have been going into the planning of our wedding.

The wedding was this weekend, and everything was spectacular. Photos and details can be found on the wedding website.

I've come away from the wedding planning experience with this advice for guys: Don't bother helping; no one but your finance/wife will believe you've done anything, and she's already in love with you.

Google has a new calendar service, and it's great. I really try to avoid hosted data solutions, but this one's just too good to pass up. My one gripe is that there's no easy way for non google calendar users to view the calendars. They're available live as both ical and rss/xml files, but the average home web user doesn't know what to do with either of those.

There are plenty of services out there that will display an ical file as a web page, but none of them I tested rendered the google ical output well, and all of them were packed with ads. Previously, I'd used software called phpicalendar to display ical files created by my old calendaring solution on the web, so I started there. It didn't parse the google output well either. However, with a little tweaking (see the patch in the zip file below) and some Apache trickery (see the README in the zip file) I can now get good phpicalendar output from google.

Years back I wrote an IRC nick tracking script. It's served me well since then, but it has one major annoyance. When people changed their name slightly it would remember that name change, even though the old/new mapping didn't contain any real identity change information.

For example, when Gabe_ became Gabe it would display every message from him as <Gabe_(Gabe)>. That doesn't tell me anything interesting about who Gabe is.

Yesterday I got the warranty replacement machine for my (company's) Dell X300 laptop. Dell mailed me an X1, which seems a nice enough machine. It meets my firm criteria: under 3 lbs and thinner than an inch. If Apple would hit those numbers I'd be there in a second.

Unfortunately, it looks like getting Linux on to this thing is going to be a pain. Emperor Linux will sell an X1 with Linux pre-installed, but they want $450 to take the X1 I already "own" and put Linux on to it. If they're not able to simply mirror a debugged installation over, that says a lot about their volume. I value my time pretty highly, but $450 for a software install seems extreme.

My email server is configured such that email to ry4an-anything@ry4an.org gets correctly delivered to me. The dash and whatever is after it are retained but ignored completely.

When I give an email address to a company, say Northwest Airlines,I'll give them an email address that shows to whom it was given, say ry4an``-nwa``@ry4an.org. By doing this I'm able to check which companies are giving/selling/leaking my email address to spammers. Some of the leaks are surprising -- just a few weeks after giving out ry4an-philmont for the first time, giving it to the Boy Scouts, I started getting porn spam on it. When I called to let them know about the leak they assured me it was impossible.

Since this post I've upgraded my mailman installation to a newer version, which allows me to automatically reject messages from non-subscribers without having to resort to external scripting.

However, some of the mailing lists I run are subscribed to by a significant number of members who can't be counted on to post from the email address with which they subscribed, or indeed to even understand what that means. For those lists a policy that automatically rejects messages from non-members is just too draconion. Unfortunately, that means the few spam messages a day from non-members which make it past my filters but would normally be automatically rejected due to their non-member origins have be manually discarded so that I can approve the few non-member messages per month that really do belong on the list.

Earlier this month some friends and I hiked across Isle Royale in lake Superior. Joe kept his GPS running and produced good track points in an odd export format from his Mac software called "Topo". I created a quick conversion script to produce this GPS format data which can be used with the GPS visualizer website to produce images like this:

When editing source files checked out from CVS I sometimes want to prevent them from going back in to source control without further edits. Until now I've just used // FIXME comments and have tried to remember to grep for FIXMEs before committing the files back.

Problem is others use FIXME comments, and sometimes I forget to grep. So I've tweaked our CVSROOT files to prevent custom FIXME tags from going in to source control.

For years I've been using garble to pull track and way point data off of my Garmin eTrex GPS. Unfortunately it produces data in a completely non-standard format. In the past I've written a little custom software to turn the garble data into maps.

Now I'm using http://gpsvisualizer.com to produce much nicer maps, but it takes data in the superior GPX format. The GPSBabel software will pull way point data off of Garmin GPSs and puts them into GPX, but it doesn't handle tracks.