I hate web hosting... one of these days I'll settle down and buy some space somewhere, but in the meantime I'll be right over here.

(You should all go visit sysprosoft.com if you ever need powerful windows policy management software ;))

Ok so I've been sitting on these links, hoping to make a proper update sometime soon. That ain't gonna happen for a while still, so here ya go:

• We Are Scientists' Webpage - not only do they have good music, they are funny to boot! Be sure to check out "Chris Reviews his Mustache" on that page.
• A list of lists from "Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency" - a great (and massive) list, here are a few of my favourites:
• SEVERAL PHRASES THAT HAVE NEVER BEEN UTTERED IN HUMAN HISTORY.
• LISTS INVOLVING CHRIST, CHRISTIAN NAMES, AND PEACE OF MIND.
• DIVES NOT RECOGNIZED BY THE OLYMPIC DIVING COMMITTEE.
• AS A PORN MOVIE TITLER, I MAY LACK PROMISE.

By the way, often if I find links that don't require a post I'll just add them to my del.icio.us page (that's where the links under the menu come from). So yeah, if you wanna know what I find cool then you can add that RSS feed to your newsreader.

In life news, I have exams at the moment, thus not much posting going on.

I have often thought that iTunes for windows could be better. I've been developing a program which used the iTunes COM interface for a while now, called iRank. For the most part, iTunes has been fairly good to me, and any inneficiencies I have managed to work around. But in recent testing, I was confronted with a rather alarming error message which iTunes sent my application (pictured on the right).

Catastrophic: (adj) Causing ruin or destruction.

Now, I'm not normally one to panic, but this did not look like a good thing. iTunes has handed me a few null-reference errors in the past which weren't too scary, but this one seemed like a pretty big deal. I do not normally consider my computer as a place for ruin or destruction, and being told otherwise was a bit of a shock to me.

Oddly enough, I couldn't actually spot anything out of place after this error occured. I tried to recreate it, but it seemed to be shy, and I couldn't reproduce it.

This afternoon however, it struck again. But this time, I figured out why:
For every Playlist in iTunes, there is a function called PlayFirstTrack(), which does exactly what you might imagine. However, if there are no tracks in said playlist, what is iTunes to do?

Personally, I would have said that it might raise some sort of Empty Playlist error, or maybe Track Not Found.
The iTunes programmers, it seems, disagree. For this is the exact circumstance which raises the previously mentioned Catastrophic Failure error message. I know iTunes dearly loves to play music, but is it really that much of a catastrophe if it has no tracks to play?

Long time readers of this blog (there have been rumors, but I'm still not convinced they're out there) may remember back in october when I gave this cool TiddlyWiki thing a CSS makeover. Since then, TiddlyWiki has become at least twice as awesome, but not much prettier. My friend Matt stumbled across TiddlyWiki last week, and I showed him the re-style I did of the original version. He got enthused about it, and wrote the new CSS code to give the new version a similar look, which was no small task. We then went back and forth a bit, did some more changes, and ended up with a very nice final product.

Since I am inherently lazy, I shall direct you to Matt's post about it now so that you can read all about it ;)

OK, I got a little obsessed with this idea, and I've updated the original password bookmarklet to include added awesomeness(tm).

Now, instead of a Javascript prompt, it creates a floating HTML element in the current window. With this implementation you can finally type in your master password without it being displayed in clear text (it's just like a regular password box).
You can also edit the subdomain it uses if you need to, but this is as unobtrusive and as easy as possible.

Essentially, this script is now as awesome as I'm gonna make it. So use it! Drag it to your bookmarks bar to store it as a bookmarklet, or just click it to see what it does. Go on, you know you want to!

Password Generator

By the way, please leave a comment and tell me weather it works on non-firefox browsers (namely Safari and Opera). I'm aware that it won't wotk in IE due to bookmark length limitations, but that's beyond my control...

Update: Since it doesn't work in IE, I've put up a page that works in IE. It's a good idea to save this page to disk so you'll never be without it if my site goes down...