Halogen Labs Weblog

So I am in the process of moving my old weblog to this location. It was formerly running an ancient version of MovableType — 2.5 — and for a while I had been inundated with unchecked comment and trackback spam.

Well, MT2.5 isn’t all that keen on mass-deleting comment and TB spam, so I thought I’d just export the weblog and try to process it all at some other point in time. With 8MB of TB spam, exporting the entire blog to a text file isn’t something I want to tackle right now.

Anyway, I looked into upgrading 2.5 to the latest version, 3.2 or whatever. I head over to movabletype.org and get redirected to the SixApart website. I knew they went “corporate,” but damn!

Looking at my upgrade options, there’s about 50 different versions, and the basic personal license is freaking seventy dollars! So I go and track down the peon “free” version, which supports something like one author, and you have to agree to some licensing terms, etc. I agree, and YEARRRGGH!! I need to login!?!?

Oh man. Anyway. The last thing I need is a damn account on a website. Just let me freaking download your free software without a login. Please.

(via Todd Ditchendorf)

Looks like Google Earth for OS X leaks more than a bucket full of holes. Like a submarine with screen windows. Like a sieve. Like a… well, you get the idea.

The web’s been buzzing with stories of small, plucky companies hitting it big with a bright idea, selling their company to Google (or Yahoo), and retiring at the age of 30. Rob over at BusinessPundit has a post entitled, “Why I Quit Entrepreneurship and got a Real Job,” where he writes about all of the bad stuff about starting your own company.

Required reading for anybody thinking of making the plunge.

(via BadMagicNumber)

It appears that the Google RSS Reader uses web continuations, much like frameworks like Cocoon or Seaside.

The magic: <gr:continuation>COT3ruq0jYIC</gr:continuation>

Using continuations for Ajax is a great way to store state, and you preserve the ability to “undo” an action. Continuations in a non-Ajax setting allow you to have “undo” capability built into your webapp, just by pressing the “Back” button. Traditionally, pressing the back button on a browser in webapps can be dicey at best, but if the previous state of the system as a whole was preserved, then you have nothing to worry about :)