I’ve been quite busy looking into getting a part-time or side job to increase my cashflow.

The bills are numerous, but I’ll find some way of getting through it.

I’ve also been spending some time writing a book.

It’s mostly a how-to in the style of the "for Dummies" books that walks people with little to no experience through writing HTML to XTML, and DHTML, and finally PHP and more dynamic websites.

(the grammar nazis must hate me right now)

Updates will be coming even if I have to kick myself in the ass to do so and things will go back to being regular next week.

BugMeNot

BugMeNot uses a certain website called BugMeNot of all things to bypass those darn websites that require you to sign in for simple things.  Now this is perfect for viewing pages on sites like NYtimes.com that give you a teaser article but won’t let you read the whole thing or just for using free services when you don’t want to disclose any personal information.

There is a catch, however, a sticky little EULA.

The user agrees to only use the extension to access free, mandatory registration sites. Attempting to access non-free and/or private web sites is against the intention of this extension and is a violation of the user agreement.

Basically, don’t use this to post anonymous messages on myspace, get free porn, or access expertsexchange (btw, fuck you expertsexchange).

That aside, it’s a good way to bypass those annoying sites that prompt you for a password when they really shouldn’t and to “preview” sites that you might actually want to join but don’t want to disclose your info now.

How does it work?

When prompted for a password on a site, right click in the area and the select “Sign in with BugMeNot” from the context menu.

Tags: firefox, flock, bugmenot

That was their update… and that was the push I needed.

I’ve always been a bit favorable to using portable browsers since I’ve been almost constantly traveling between Washington DC and Virginia Beach, VA since 2004.  Mind you, that may not seem like a long time, but when your ‘commute’ is three hours long and you know almost every side-street, alternate path, city, town, empty field, and rest-stop in between, it adds up.

Before I had a reliable laptop (Thanks to the donators who gave me a whopping $15 towards my MBP) I carried around a small gray 64MB USB key.  I’ve since lost the cap, the keychain hook has worn off, and all the paint has come off the sides, but I still use it.

On this key were a few Word documents, some mp3′s and Portable Firefox.  When I first found out about Flock and got excited.  Your bookmarks/favorites were stored online!  This was huge!

I started blogging seriously once I found out how easy Flock made it to be… but it was still tied to my desktop.

The idea behind PocketFlock was born.

At first just given the name Portable Flock (how unimaginative) and was just a Flock install with the directory renamed to firefox, and flock.exe to firefox.exe lazily pasted over John Haller’s launcher.  It went through many fits and spurts.  Lots of bundled extensions, upx packing, and many failed attempts to bring the experience to the Mac platform.

I snuck time here and there from work, and tweaked the theme, learned NSIS, PHP, met many great people, and started the most active development in my life.

I also started a huge controversial thread on the Flockstars Mailing list.

I had many detractors, and many supporters, it got very ugly and left everyone involved with a bad taste in their mouth.  Many of my detractors included people who were at that time on Flock’s payroll, where I was publicly derided on their personal blogs and in the instance of Lloyd Budd tried to deny my existence, deleting PocketFlock, and Flock’d from the Flock Wiki, many forum posts, and Wikipedia (and its easy to tell who it is when they go by the same handle on all these sites).  I would get harrassed on my blog, on other forums, but when reasonably approached was still able to apologize to those who I offended.

Things got overwhelming and I stopped caring.

It was a for a variety of personal reasons too.

Illness, 3 moves (4 if you just count august of 2007), many unsatisfying jobs, more spam than actual comments on outraged-artists, and horrible financial problems led to infrequent and half-assed updates.  Many people asked me if I had given up, if PocketFlock was dead, and I replied much later that that wasn’t the case, but I really didn’t act like it.

When Flock went from 0.7-0.9 there were many issues that were quite frankly security issues for people in a portable environment.  I tried to get back into things by submitting a buzilla entry and having a dialog with the Flock devs.  While they promised that there might be a fix in the future, they quickly closed the bug and only offered me the solution to compile my own binaries with modified source (to their credit they did tell me what to change and how to do it, but I didn’t have the resources to do it).  Again there was some hostilities towards me, but I tried to shrug it off.

Flock 1.1 got me excited again… I had switched from Flickr to Picasa, and had been asking for email support since Flock 0.4.x.  Most of the old staff was gone, and I felt like things were finally behind me.  Now, I’m still stretched for time, but I’m excited again and want to get back to being busy.

That brings us to today, I’m on a new domain, with a new blog, and a fresh start.
PocketFlock now supports 2 platforms, has a new source code under development, that might allow it to support Linux x86 and Vista.

I’m back, PocketFlock is back, and I want to get everyone excited again.

Tags: flock, pocketflock

I’ve also figured out exactly why the Mac version of PocketFlock won’t work in the dmg.  It seems that when I converted it to a compressed image, the contents were no longer read/write.  There’s still no fix for this, but that might come later.

I’ve started compressint the Windows version with 7zip instead of OSX’s built-in compressor and got some marginal improvement on the ratio.  I should probably start running both versions through upx again.

I’ve been meaning to improve my release schedule and I’m going to try to stick to it.  Many other projects may come and go, but PocketFlock seems to be the most desired.

So here it goes.
PocketFlock Mac 1.1b 26.5MB

PocketFlock Win 1.1b 12.1MB

Note that the Mac version is now 0.9MB larger on OSX and 0.4MB smaller on Windows.  Still no bundled extensions, but I’ll get to that when I can.

Tags: pocketflock, flock, windows, osx, dmg, 7zip

Still on my list (though not in any order of importance):

• Flock’d (and not just that old version, but a completely rewritten program that’s fully compliant)
• PocketFlock extensions… as part of my commitment to building the most complete portable browser experience, I’ve got to start better sorting what extensions get bundled with PocketFlock.
• Pollux.  Yeah… I had a working version, no I never posted it or it’s source, I’m reworking Pollux into a client side app instead of a server side app. (for those of you who forget it’s a podcast creator)

I’ve got a few new ideas brewing in my head that I just haven’t implemented yet, but I’ll do what I can when I can.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: flock’d, flock, pocketflock, podcast

The Mac version of PocketFlock no longer needs to be run from it’s dmg, but the compression definately helps with filesize.  Just click the happy pink icon to start the program (don’t close the text window because it will kill your Flock session).

The Windows version still has issues with Vista’s UAC (mostly due to the launcher being written in NSIS, therefore Vista thinks it’s a program installer).  Either disable UAC or be annoyed by it, because there’s no other way to deal with it without writing a new launcher (which I don’t have time for right now).

Mostly fixed, version 1.1b might be out soon, or I just might wait for 1.1 Final.