I just finished off a new grobot for Grobots. It is winning with the highest scores since the release of my previous robot. It will probably take only a week for the other three programmers to make a new robot to counter it, but for now it’s clearly the king!

I had a shoot off yesterday to see which browser I’m going to be using for the next few months. The three contenders were Mozilla, Phoenix, and Chimera. I did not test Opera, IE, or Netscape 7, since I had tried them before and was not happy with how they worked on OS X.

Chimera is gorgeous. Unfortunately it’s missing one feature that I just can’t live without - keywords for bookmarks. I have most of my bookmarks with these keywords set, and they are a part of my fingers now. I can’t just give them up! :)

Phoenix is going to rule the PC world very soon. Unfortunately it’s not ready to run on Mac OS X - I tried a version someone had ported to the MAC. Unfortunately the port had a few bugs and could not become my day to day browser, but even so it made me wish I could use it. It’s fast, snappy, clean, and fun. Today, I had someone ask me if I had tried out Phoenix yet. The last time someone asked me something like that, it was several years ago about an almost unknown search engine called Google. Today I installed and am now using Phoenix as my standard browser on the Windows computers.

Mozilla is what I have been using for the past few months, and it looks like it gets to keep it’s spot as the browser that others are measured by. Day in and day out, I use it and works. The tabs are done right, and being able to quickly jump to my sites with a quick taps on the keyboard via the keywords for bookmarks also pays off.

I got to light a small Youth Concert at church this weekend. It’s the first time I’ve been behind a lighting board for a show in almost three years. I realized two things. Number one, I still greatly enjoy lighting. Number two, I hate using an Expression 3 for controlling intelligent lights.

It was great to be back in the action again, painting the stage with color. Getting ready for the show was a little bit of a challenge since I had never seen or heard the band before, no one had a CD of their music, no one know where they were going to be on stage, every conventional light from the front was in white, and I’d never done a show with an Expression 3 before. There were just enough intelligent lights out front to wash the small stage, so it was obvious that at any given moment I had a choice between having a stage in color, or having lights moving around with a white stage. Therefore, I decided to save all the moving about with the lights for the finale, and do static color looks for the rest of the show. (I was blessed with color mixing Studio Spots and Studio Colors. Color mixing is so wonderful, and opens up so many possibilities for gentle transitions and adds quite a bit of flexibility and ease to programming the show. ) I put about ten gorgeous to extra gorgeous looks on cues, then programmed the submasters with a combination of both effect lighting and normal submaster things (like the front white conventional washes). Since I had no idea what would be coming, everything had to be ultra flexible.

The show went off well, though I mistook the second to last song for the finale. (I can’t understand a word of rock music especially and when it is loud enough to make me feel like I was missing eye protection.) After cutting loose with with lights on the song finale, and doing a right good job of it, I realized about half way through the song that this was not the end! Good grief, how am I to top this?!?! After some quick thought, I was able to do even more for the real finale by bumping the color mixing submasters that I had used during programing. The crowd was wild as the entire building blacked out for a split second on the bands final bash on the guitars and drums. As they vanished and the MC appeared on stage, I was still glad I’d been able to drag up a little more for that last song. But the MC’s words chilled me, “Maybe if we yell loud enough, they will come back and play one more song!” Rats! There was no way I could just do a motionless stage with the band and the audience still wild from the finale just before. So once more I had to invent some action as we went into it. I’d have been in real trouble if I had not covered the subs with useful stuff before the show. It’s good to light again.

I tried out the just released iPulse tracker. It makes a cool little transparent gizzy that shows you how much processor power, RAM, hard drive, and bandwidth your computer is using. I can’t wait until someone hacks this to be able to monitor a remote server over SSH. A row of these little dials on my desktop keeping me up to date on all my web servers servers would be cool.

I’m switching over to Movable Type for this site, since I really think having comments would be fun and exciting. I’ll probably have to write a script to handle importing all of my old entries. The real decision is wether to programing my importer in PHP or Ruby .

I’m testing out posting from my brand new Treo. Movable Type’s ability to do both desktop and web based posting is one of the resons I swiched. Being able to post from anywhere I go is going to be great.

I decided to use Ruby to make a script for creating a import file from Blosxom to Movable Type. If anyone wants it, you can download the script. My primary reason for using Ruby instead of PHP, is that Ruby comes installed by default on all new OS X (10.2+) installations, but very few people have a command line version of PHP on their computers as I do.

Ruby turned out to be a great choice. I’ll definitly be using it as my filesystem scripting language of choice now. Take a look at the source for my simple import script - that’s so clean and easy to read compared with perl or sh. And yet it is powerful.

My Treo, iPod, and desktop G4 now all sync their contacts and calandar through the magic that is iSync. Now I just need to pick a good email program for the Treo, and find out how to use AIM.

I just posted my email address on this site - not having it was just an oversight actualy. But you will notice that I have posted it completely in the clear, with no encryption or anything to keep it away from spambots. The reason is simple - I don’t have any more problems with spam.

With about ten website with my name and email address on then plus four years of using the internet, I get a lot of spam. But I only see about two spam emails every day. My email client, Apple Mail correctly sorts the rest of it right off into the junk mail box. It’s liberating not to have to worry about my email addy. Macs Rule!

I just tried out Screen, metioned over on Freshmeat in this article. Screen is awesome at easing work on remote hosts, and will be something I use from now on. No longer do I have to have multiple SSH windows open to track error logs.