Month: March 2007

Is This Click-Fraud?

/ joeygibson / 1 Comment

I’ve been seeing lots (and lots) of traffic at work from two particular domains

  • e-mailpaysu.com
  • cashmoneyemail.com

which both sound like click-fraud houses to me.

I have looked at their sites and both offer to “pay you to read email,” which, again, sounds like nothing more than click-fraud. My guess is that they show you an email with an AdSense ad, or Y!’s ads, or whatever, and then you click on it. They get the revenue from the click and share it with the person doing the clicking. But the advertiser is paying for ad impressions/clicks to people who have no desire to buy the product or service, and are only clicking on the ads because they are being paid to do so. How can this not be fraud?

Am I wrong on this? If I am, then my apologies to the two websites. But I don’t think I’m wrong.

iTunes Script Menu on Context-Menu?

/ joeygibson / 4 Comments

Does anyone know if it’s possible to duplicate the iTunes Scripts menu in the context-menu? IOW, I want to right-click on a track and have a submenu on that context-menu called “Scripts” and all my installed scripts would be there. It doesn’t have to be called “Scripts” but you get the idea.

The reason this is important is that I have two monitors. I leave iTunes running on the second monitor which works perfectly 99 2/3% of the time. But since OSX has only a single menubar for all applications, and since that menubar only lives on the primary monitor, when I want to do something in iTunes, the menubar is actually on the other monitor. This makes using scripts from the main Scripts menu a pain. Thus my desire to context-ify the Scripts menu.

Is this possible? Anyone?

03/15/2007 17:53:23 Update: I did come up with something that works pretty well, though it’s quite different from what I asked for. The script I was really wanting to easily run sets the last played date on the currently-playing track to the current date and time, increments its play count and then skips to the next track. This is something I’ve been wanting for a long time, so that songs that Party Shuffle hits me with that I don’t like will be buried for all time. Anyway, the script works, but I wanted an easier way to get to it. What I really wanted was a global hotkey that would invoke the script, no matter if iTunes was up front of not. What I did was opened the script in the AppleScript editor, and then saved it as an application. Once I had the app, I added it to the dock. Now, whenever I click on it, it does what it’s supposed to do, then exists. It works pretty well.

03/19/2007 11:13:23 Update: I now have an even better solution. I installed QuickSilver which allows you to map just about anything to global hotkeys. I replaced iMote, which I had been using to give me global iTunes hotkeys, with the functionality in QuickSilver, but I also got more. I was able to map Opt-Cmd-PgDn to my “Skip and Update Play Count” script, which executes within iTunes itself. This is much faster than launching the program I mentioned in the update from Thursday. I’m still digging into QuickSilver, but even if it didn’t do anything else, I’m happy with it.

Vim Syntax-Highlighting Works In a Shell (I Didn’t Know That!)

/ joeygibson

I’ve been using the great Vim editor for many years (and vi even longer), but I just learned something about it this morning. Usually when I use Vim, I’m using gvim, which means it opens in its own GUI window. I had a stanza inside my .vimrc that would set some things only if Vim was running in GUI mode, and one of those things was syntax-highlighting. The bummer was that whenever I’d have to use Vim inside a shell (typically via ssh) I didn’t get the pretty pretty colors.

This morning I was looking at the FAQ for iTerm and noticed a screenshot section. I clicked on it, and one of the shots was of Vim, running inside iTerm, with full syntax-highlighting. I was surprised. I had never even tried to enable syntax-highlighting inside a shell. For some reason it never occurred to me that it would work, or even to try it. So I Cmd-Tabbed over to a shell, opened Vim on an XML file and typed :syntax on and BLAMMO! full-color XML. Very nice! I then edited my .vimrc to move the syntax on directive out of the GUI-only section and into the common area on all the machines I work on. It works perfectly. I can’t believe I’ve lived so many years without this feature turned on, but I’m quite happy now.