Online advertising is getting a great deal of attention days with players like Google, Double Click, Yahoo, just to name a few.

But with almost any advertising, there’s a movement to circumvent it.

.. TV vs DVR, time shifting, fast-forward.
.. FM radio vs Satellite radio, paid subscriptions, commercial free.

Remember the first years of pop-up advertising on websites? ISPs started offering “Pop-up Blocker” software free to their members. It was such a demand that most browsers now implement pop-up blocking as a standard feature.

Advertising is a balancing act. Google has been hugely successful with their text/banner-style AdWords - I believe because they’re not aggressive with their impact. Until this evening, I tolerated, sometimes enjoyed, viewing advertising. I felt like it educated me. A good advertisement might teach me of a new product I hadn’t heard of, a service I might use or recommend. Those AT&T commercials where two people are talking on mobile phones, and one is dropped… hilarious!

Until tonight, when I went to read this article on Wired.com.

Covering 50% of the first few paragraphs is an AT&T advertising overlay. I gave the ad 3 minutes to go away. I tried every key combo, tried following the link of the ad… nothing. The article is unreadable in Firefox. Same result in IE.

The Irony is: the article is about Safari 3 and how “Safari sucks.” Care to guess how the page looks in Safari? flawless. No content-blocking AT&T advertisement.

UPDATE: Wired apologizes for the ad.

In my last post, I briefly mentioned that I modify hotkeys for my applications in OS X. If you have ever wondered how to do this, it is quite easy assuming the item you want to create a hotkey for is in the main menu of the application. If it is in the main menu (File, Edit, View, Help, etc.) the file you’ll edit is usually called MainMenu.nib.

There is one caveat to this process. You’ll have to have the Xcode developer tools installed. I don’t know a way around this, but as a power user you should probably have this installed anyway so you can compile programs and do other nifty things.

1. To begin, right click the application you want to modify and select “Show Package Contents.”
   
2. Navigate through the Contents, Resources, and English.lproj folders.
   
3. Double click MainMenu.nib. It should have a pretty icon. If it doesn’t you don’t have Xcode installed.
4. Double click the MainMenu icon in the Instances tab that comes up and you’ll now see the menu as it appears in your toolbar in OS X.
   
5. And you’re done! You can navigate through the menu and double click any hotkey to replace it with something else. Just remember not to set two hotkeys to do the same thing! You’ll confuse yourself and your computer.
   
6. Oh, and don’t forget to save before you quit.