A new version of the paypal plugin has been released. This release is a security update and contains no additional features. If you have already purchased the product, please log into the site and download the update. To purchase, please visit the Vinny's Space Store.

Rest assured that I am hard at work on a large update to the paypal plugin. Features already in work include product categories, better support for physical purchases, better support for multiple items, pagination, and full support for anonymous purchases.

I'd like to thank David for finding the the bug that resulted in this release and for help with testing the fix. As always, please email me with any questions.

Just heard about a really cool site from NPR. Zillow.com is a cool way to price real estate around where you live (or around where your moving too). Probably not a replacement for a good real estate agent (though a great replacement for a crappy agent). Check it out.

Just a couple of links to some sites that might help locate some decent podcasts. There are alot of 'em out there and its hard to find the diamonds in the rough. My current favorite podcast finder is Odeo, which has a very svelte interface and tons of good podcasts. Also popular (and sites I occasionally look at) are iPodder, Podcast.net, and Podcast Alley. None of those live up to Odeo's clean interface though.

One disappointment to me has been Apple's ITunes podcast section. When Apple began pushing podcasting and integrated a podcast receiver into ITunes I expected a powerfull search engine to find good podcasts and some unique features. Instead, all that came is a section that looks just like the music shopping sections of ITunes and depends on a "most popular" list for locating podcasts. Not really much help in locating podcasts unless you already know what you are looking for (and doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose?).

I suppose I'll leave you with my current favorite podcast: TBoy's Tea Time a electronica music podcast.

Boston.com, in a very ambitious undertaking, has endeavored to create a list of the Top 50 Sci-Fi TV Shows of All Time. The list is very comprehensive with shows ranging from The Wild Wild West to the modern remake of Battlestar Gallatica.

While the list is thorough, it does have a few glaring mistakes. Like where is Star Trek: Deep Space 9 and The Dead Zone? How did Xena make the list over Hercules? And the ordering of the list, in many cases, is...questionable.

Still, considering how subjective such a list must be, they seemed to have generally gotten a pretty good grasp of the best that sci-fi has managed to put on TV. Which makes me wonder, why hasn't the industry made more [better] sci-fi television shows? Many (well, a few) sci-fi themed shows have seen really good ratings and a small number have even won critical acclaim. There certainly has always seemed to be a lack of respect for Science Fiction in Hollywood, but that might be changing.

It appears we're seeing a full fledged Sci-Fi invasion of our television sets. It began last year with ABC's Lost and Sci-Fi's Battlestar Gallactica, and got really into full motion this year with the networks introducing a flood of sci-fi fare: Surface, Medium, Supernatural, Invasion, Ghost Whisperer, Threshold and a few others I likely missed.

It's a good time to be a sci-fi fan.

Anyone who reads this blog has probably noticied the sudden dearth of posts in the last two months. This is due to a combination of factors:

1. A wonderfull 10 day vacation to Hawaii
2. Weekend trips to see family and friends throughout September
3. A new job (with the same company)
4. The huge amount of stuff that needed to get done around the house and the lack of time to do it because of 1-3

With any luck, this post will mark the end of my Vacation. I enjoy posting here as it helps me keep a record of what I've been looking at on the web and its fun to read back and see what I was thinking.

And of course I now have some competition. My buddy Bafii had started a blog. Of course, now that my friends are doing it, I'm not sure its nearly as cool...

I was talked into taking one of those stupid web quizes... you can check out what my personality defect is by clicking the read more link below.

Following up on a previous article discussing the importance of good commenting in code, I ran across the article Successful Strategies for Commenting Code from particletree.

While my previous article went into detail (some would say excuciating detail) on how important code commenting is to writing and maintaining good software; the article by particletree goes into detail discussing some specific ways to improve commenting. I already use many of the suggested methods (or related derivations), but the article presents a good summary of what good commenting should accomplish.

Geeklog has been consistently (if slowly at times) improving the comments in its code base, I can only hope that the 1.3.x branch someday attains the nirvana of good code commenting across the entire codebase. Geeklog 2, on the other hand, has started with good comments, so I have high hopes that it will remain that way as developement continues (good job Tony). Note to self: I really should update the coding standards for Geeklog 2 to better indicate the importance of good commenting.

While trying to clean out some comment spam I accidentally deleted all the comments on the site. While I could recover them, the hassle involved in recovering them didn't seem worth it for so few comments (though there were a couple of good comments that I'll miss, they were mostly attahed to really old articles).

To prevent this from happening in the future, I'm going get rid of comment spam by disabling anonymous commenting until I get better filters set up. This may take a while... I'm sorry for the hassle this might cause, but its the best I can do for the time being.

-Vinny

This is another "lessons learned" post in relation to handling dependencies on Gentoo (a linux distribution). I'm in the process of converting my old Gentoo Desktop machine into a headless server. So I am trying to remove all the unnecessary packages I have installed. This is a lot harder than it sounds. With several hundred packages installed, going through manually and figuring out which ones are necessary and which ones aren't would be impossible (or at least take a really long time). You also have to keep track of which packages depend on others. Breaking those dependencies can make really bad things happen. Fortunately, there is help...

This script, found on the Gentoo Forums does all sorts of nifty dependencie checking and cleaning for you. Really, this is a tool that should be available with one of the gentoo tools packages, but of course it is not. Anyway, I highly suggest anyone running Gentoo check it out (and that I keep a link of it handy for myself in case I misplace the copy I downloaded).

BrickJournel, a magazine for fans of Legos, is probably the single coolest magazine ever. It is currently distributed on-line (free of charge) and has some of the coolest Lego "hacks" I have ever seen. I used to be a huge collector of legos, and I'm vain enough to think that some of my creations could have made this magazine. If only it existed back in "the day".

Unfortunately my Lego collection, having seen better days, is stored at my parents house and used whenever young visiters come calling. I guess it is just as well, I'm pretty sure that if I had my Lego's around right now they would turn into a (almost) as big a time sink as my computer. (I mean, how long did this guy spend putting all that together.)