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Blog archives for September 2008

Pukka 1.7.2: Faster, better, stronger

September 29, 2008 by Justin
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I've just released Pukka 1.7.2, an update which focuses solely on performance and speed. I studied the slowest points of the application and honed and sharpened those routines, making Pukka much faster at the things that it does most often in the background. And I studied the application launch and optimized the slowest parts of that as well.

I'm very happy to push out a free update that focuses so intently on making the application faster to launch and faster to use. So please, go grab it now and enjoy!

Update: I forgot to mention that I also made a change in the underlying URL fetching library used by Pukka on Leopard. Some time ago, I had moved to an alternate library due to stability issues on the then just-released Leopard release of OS X. Those days seem to be long gone, so I've reverted to the standard Cocoa way of doing this now for slightly better performance, but more importantly, better adherence to any system-wide proxy settings that you have set in your networking preferences. As always, you can keep up with the full release notes of each Pukka release in your RSS reader by following the appcast.

Mollom anti-spam service is out of beta

September 22, 2008 by Justin
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Like many other people, I received an email this morning announcing that Mollom, a project of Drupal founder Dries Buytaert, is out of beta. I use Mollom on this website, as well as another personal one, to reduce and sometimes outright eliminate blog comment spam. In my configuration, Mollom works by using heuristics against blog comments and if they are considered spammy enough, the user is challenged to a simple CAPTCHA system to prove that they are not an automated spammer.

Mollom is a great system, since some studies (direct PDF link) have shown that as much as 75% of all attempted comments on blogs are spam!

I've been using Mollom for a few months and have been very happy with it. If you run a blog, even one that isn't in Drupal, I would encourage you to check it out. It's free for many uses, so you lose nothing by at least giving it a shot. There is a developer API and Mollom has already made downloadable integration available for Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla, as well as language-specific libraries.

Congratulations to Dries and the Mollom team! I look forward to the system only getting better as more and more folks start to use it.

Update: A couple folks asked if I'd mind posting my Mollom statistics graph, so you can find it here. There were many hundreds of spams stopped in the past month!

Pukka 1.7.1: user experience bug fixes

September 18, 2008 by Justin
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I've just released Pukka 1.7.1, available here, to address some user experience issues. This release features better keyboard navigation in the main and preference windows, some minor bug fixes with the preferences involving showing the accounts in the dock and menu bar, and it ensures that the most recent bookmarks are shown by default, something that wasn't quite working right in 1.7. Enjoy!

NetworkLocation 3 and Meerkat

September 11, 2008 by Justin
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Congratulations to Centrix.ca on today's release of NetworkLocation 3! NetworkLocation is a great app for the mobile computer user that lets you setup actions and preferences that happen based on where you are physically. It can detect networks, peripherals, and now, even your geographic location. It's a great time-saver if you frequent client sites where you need to turn off Growl, coffee shops where you need to turn the screensaver on and the volume down, or home when you need to connect to your server and set your default printer.

What's more, we've written a plugin for NetworkLocation for Meerkat support! Now you can combine Meerkat's great handling of SSH tunnels with NetworkLocation's great detection of where you are and what you need to be doing. NetworkLocation can even set your system-wide proxy settings, so you can more easily use Meerkat for secure SOCKS-based web browsing when you're on the go.

If you want to grab the plugin directly, it's available on the NetworkLocation site. Again, congratulations to the guys at Centrix.ca!

C4[2] this weekend in Chicago

September 4, 2008 by Justin
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For the third year in a row, I'm headed to Chicago this weekend for the C4 Mac indie developer conference. C4 has been a great way to meet new folks, learn about the state of the independent Mac software industry, and get recharged for the coming year.

If you're headed to C4 this weekend, be sure to try to find me if we've never met. I love meeting new people -- and especially Mac developers!