Here is my list of my favorite free Mac software:
My delegate is still spamming
My elected official, who obviously believes that opt-out is only for suckers, is now on my mail server’s blocklist. Bad riddance. I reported her again. This time she was connected through a Comcast connection. Let’s see if they can get her to stop. Of course, I won’t know, since I shouldn’t see her drivel any more.
What’s in your menu bar?
I change the items in my menu bar every few months. As of March 8, 2006 this is what I had:
From left to right:
- GizmoProject: VOIP client, $5 month for an incoming phone number, portable to any computer
- iKey: keyboard macros
- DeskTopple: hides my desktop’s icons (a bit better than Backdrop)
- NetMonitor: shows my network throughput,a nd my IP address info when I hover over it. I like it’s output a bit better than MenuMeters’ outout
- ClamXav Sentry: anti-virus monitor
- Boinc: a distributed processing client looking for new planets
- Spirited Away: hides applications that haven’t been used in the last few minutes
- SSHKeychain: manage keys for connecting with ssh servers
- Slim Battery Monitor: (no icon when plugged in) more useful information than the built in battery icon
- MenuMeters: shows disk activity, plus optional modules showing memory, cpu, and network info
- Keychain Access: allows me to easily lock my screen when I leave the computer, without the annoyances of starting the screen saver by hitting a hot corner of the screen accidentally
- iChat Apple’s AIM client
- System clock, part of OS X
- Airport status, part of OS X
- Spotlight, part of OS X
I also use Quicksilver, but have the menu icon turned off.
I used to have the Speaker Volume icon up, but removed it and don’t miss it. Same thing with the Displays icon. I have two different monitors I plug into (home and work), and the Mac just remembers which is which, so I removed the menubar icon.
(Update: 2019-05-21 Links to bad URLs removed.)
Internet Blog Serial Number
My IBSN (Internet Blog Serial Number) is 46-00-43-9745. Of course, I can’t tell if this is a serious undertaking, or a spoof, but the number itself is random. You can choose your own! And you can get a bar code too. Oooohhhh!
Update: 2008-01-06 5:45pm: It’s a porn site now, so I removed the link.
Update 2008-01-06 5:53pm: I found the real link. The site though is in a couple different languages, so it’s still kinda gimmicky.
Web Browser Usage
While cleaning my office, I found some ancient web server logs. I started playing with them and realized I could run a web browser chart to see how popular various web browsers really are. The site these logs are generated from is a small site that is not actively updated any longer. I don’t want to mention the site URL as that would bias any new results that I may analyze. Here are the specifics for March 2001 and December 2005:
| Browser | March 2001 | December 2005 |
|---|---|---|
| Other/Unknown | 3.0 | 9.6 |
| Netscape | 16.1 | 1.7 |
| Safari | – | 2.1 |
| Opera | 0.4 | 0.5 |
| Mozilla | 1.7 | 1.4 |
| Firefox | – | 9.4 |
| MS Internet Explorer | 78.8 | 75.3 |
It is interesting to note that:
- MS IE usage has only lost a little bit of status from where they were in March 2001.
- MS IE peaked in April 2003 with 90.5% of traffic.
- Firefox first appeared in October 2003.
- Firefox peaked at 10.1% in November 2005.
- Safari first appeared in January 2003.
- Safari peaked at 2.7%, also in November 2005.
- Netscape was at 16.1% in March 2001, and has been declining ever since.
- Opera ranged from 0.4% to 1.3%, although hasn’t been over 1.0% since April 2002. The release of Opera as free without ads in September 2005 doesn’t appear to have made a difference.
- There are many new browsers available, such as PDAs, phones, Linux-based browsers. For web designers, I see this as proof that designs should be as standards based as possible. Designing for any one web browser is an exercise in futility and headaches.
In March 2001, the site in question had 4,055 unique visitors (4,959 visits) who viewed 9,752 pages. In December 2005, the site had 3,090 unique visitors in March 2001 (4,413 visits) who viewed 11,835 pages.
The analysis was performed using AWstats, specifically Advanced Web Statistics 6.5 (build 1.857). AWstats removes spiders and robots from its analysis.
My State Delegate spams, or at least doesn’t honor opt-out requests
I was once a part of my state delegate’s bill reading group, as well as have talked with her about issues in the past. But now she emails me at my regular email address, not the tagged one I asked her to use. So I finally have filed a spam repor. Hopefully the postmaster -at- leg.state.va.us will be able to opt me out of my delegate’s mailing lists. But I’m not hopeful. A Spamassassin rule, or mail server block may be my only choices.
Guess what happens on March 26, 2006
If the current trends were to somehow magically hold steady through the end of the month, I’ll pass someone else’s Alexa rank on March 26, 2006. Here’s proof (after all, if there is a cool chart [well, it’s not real cool, this is just a quick and dirty Excel chart], it must be true!) 
to www or not to www?
I know there are some efforts out there to get web sites to stop using the www, but I still believe that a web site should resolve to the same place no matter if the user is entering planetmike.com or www.planetmike.com. Just now, I ran across two sites that don’t come up at all if you leave off the www. That feels like a waste of effort or laziness on their parts. Set the server to alias www to the regular site (or vice versa).
And my PageRank is …
So, the Alexa thing is kinda geeky, but useless. What other metrics can I find? Google’s pagerank of course. I found a cool Firefox extension SearchStatus that shows both the Google PageRank and the Alexa Rank in the status bar. PlanetMike.com is a PageRank of 6.
Booya. lol.
I found a Tiger Security Bug!
-Redacted-