I’ve made some more improvements to my Twitter Gadget for Google / iGoogle. Check it out, follow the link to 32hours.com -> The Latest Changes - TwitteGadget for iGoogle
I’ve spent the better part of my rainy, Southern California Saturday updating, or more accurately, rewriting my Twitter gadget / widget for iGoogle. 
I’m really happy with it, now. The progress I’ve made is making me excited. I’ve learned a bit of AJAX today in order to make some nice changes. Want to have a look? Do you already have a Google account (like GMail) ? Click HERE!->Twitter iGoogle Gadget (32hours.com)
I’ve gotten a PHP version of a Google (iGoogle) gadget working. It follows your friends, and allows you to post, so far. Check it out at 32hours.com, or the direct article link. It’s working, and I’ll be improving it pretty quickly.
So I learned something new today. I’ve had this blog at http://robert.arlesnet.com for quite a while, but also had a site I never updated at http://www.arlesnet.com. I had finally decided it made more sense to have all “arlesnet.com” visitors end up at my blog rather than some unmaintained site. I put the code below in the .htaccess file at arlesnet.com. The actual directory location will vary per server, but is often something like a public_html or www directory. As a clue, it should be in the same place as the index file for the site you are trying to redirect. Also note that files starting with a dot are ‘hidden’ in *nix…
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} arlesnet.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://robert.arlesnet.com/$1 [R=301,L]
If you want to use this for your own site, all you need to change is the domain info in the 3rd and 4th lines. Line 3 is has the domain name you want to capture. Line 4 is where you want the visitor or search engine to be directed to. The ‘R=301′ sets this to be a permanent change. Presumably, search engines will get the hint.
Firefox 3 vs Firefox 2? I checked out Firefox 3 Beta 2 today. It was not stunning, but, wow, did it use a LOT less RAM by default. It reminded me that I hadn’t changed the settings to force Firefox to use less RAM. In Firefox 2, you:
Done. You can go back to about:config and just double click the key to modify it as you please…
Anyway. Enough Firefox 3 for me. Very few of my extensions worked. I’ll check back later when there are versions of del.icio.us, google-sync, passwordmaker, scribefire, etc.
So, I’ve written a small bit of PHP to pull RSS feeds. Not at all monumental, but I’ve written a bit, and taken some notes required for site setup (pear installs of XML stuff) My goal is still to create a widget that will work on iGoogle, and be configurable. If nothing else, at least I’ll get some more programming familiarity out of this. After all, I don’t know who you are and couldn’t possibly care what you get out of this. Well, unless I’m reading this. In that case I do care, and I may be actually creating some kind of verbal time-space loop-back by self reference. I hope that wouldn’t be painful or cause hair loss.
A Star Wars Nerd, you are? Enjoy this article about LucasFilm christmas cards, you might:
Cool Stuff: 30 Years of LucasFilm Christmas Cards | /Film
AutoHotkey comes to my aid, again. I recently came to realize I had a need to eject my iPod at 9:00am every day. There are two parts to this problem. You need a way to check the time, on some interval. And you need a way to tell windows to do the eject. While this is not terribley complicated, there is one catch. AutoHotkeys “eject” command only works on CD/DVD drives. The help file does have an example bit of code that does the job, though. Click below to read on…
(By the way, I noticed a link to this sitepointing to my other AutoHotkey entry. Autohotkey.blogspot.com appears to be starting up a collection of pointers to useful scripts)
I’m thinking about writing one. A terrible, horrible, PHP tutorial, that is. Why not? There isn’t another one out there. Well, maybe there are lots and lots terrible tutorials, but not self professed to be so. I’m thinking very seriously about writing a tutorial as I learn. I have some programming under my belt, and even a Google widget written in PHP, but I think I could use a fresh start. My thinking is that I may learn from it as I’m forced to think deeply about what I’m doing so that I can write about it, and that others might benefit as a side effect. Of course, I’m probably just feeding my own ego thinking anyone would read it, but it would be an interesting exercise, anyway. I think I’d post it on 32Hours.com, though. That has become my experimental site, and where I posted and host my Google widget.
I find it pretty amazing how many of the Top 500 are running some form of Linux. I guess I still have a hard time imagining a supercomputer being something other than “Cray-like” The link below takes you to the stats page showing the breakout of the Top 500 by OS Family. It’s really easy to use the selections on the right of their page to see many more interesting statistics. I’m just disappointed that they don’t show how many run Firefox as opposed to Internet Explorer, but I’ll bet you can figure it out when you see how few Windows systems are in the list 
Operating system Family share for 11/2007 | TOP500 Supercomputing Sites