Tech
Monday, December 13, 2004
Finally Bombed
I was comment-spam-bombed yesterday. Fun stuff. Glad I’m quick with a sql statement.
I suppose I could be flattered, but I know it’s just about finding a new target, not caring how many read it, just wanting Google to crawl and help bump up their search engine listing.
Monday, November 22, 2004
Please Unplug My Former Host
Not so long ago I had shared hosting. I was originally with one company, who was bought by another, and then another. I then switched upon receiving horrible service, landed on my last shared hosting company (who was quite good) before moving to my own servers.
So one of the first companies - all one-in-the-same to me has a server (or more) that is basically a virus relay. I receive numerous emails a day from this one IP - all viruses. They have a few other things in common: they are only to domains and email accounts I had while hosting with this company and all of the spoofed “from” addresses are from other domains hosted at this company (or formerly hosted there).
I did what I hope most responsible people would do: I wrote them a polite email letting them know what’s happening and how and suggested they look into it. No response. So I wrote another email. No response.
At this point I’m pretty disgusted. I know they’re receiving my emails and they’re willingly letting this continue. I’ve gotten messages numbering in the teens (at least) within one day. I safely delete them - but I do wonder just how many other machines they’ve infected by letting this continue. I know the phrase “depraved indifference” is usually reserved for murder charges, but it’s quite fitting here.
I’ll have to simply block their IPs from delivering mail to me as I’m tired of receiving this stuff. If I were lawsuit trigger-happy and had some free time I’d probably have a fun case to attempt to set some precedent too, any hosting company that willingly allows viruses to be spread should have some action taken against them.
Tuesday, November 09, 2004
FireFox 1.0 Released
Jeremy’s put together a collection of links to make it easier to pick it up as well (as of right now, mozilla.org has a good chance of timing out on you).
Happy browsing.
Tuesday, November 09, 2004
Pirated Album Released on Internet - No Kidding
CNN is reporting U2’s “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb” has been pirated and released on the internet before the official release date. Wow, what a shocker. This puts them right up there with almost every other album released over the past 5-10 years. This happens with everything, you just have to know where to look. Obviously this is on some major download spots for it to gain the interest of CNN (along with being U2).
Not really a big deal since most people are probably sick of Vertigo already, the song in the overplayed iPod commercial.
The music industry will pretend this negatively affects sales, which it doesn’t according to most non-RIAA funded studies. Mark Cuban wonders “when will the music industry will get it right?”
Beats me.
Friday, October 08, 2004
Finally Found a DVD Authoring Program
For a while I was looking for a program that would easily allow me to take clips (mpg2 format) and put them onto a DVD. While they all do that, most will just add them as titles or separate timelines. The suggestion was usually to merge the clips and then make chapter points. Who wants to do that when you want to put 40 clips onto a DVD?
Finally, I found what I was looking for. TMPGEnc DVD Author 1.6 allowed me to easily add files (all at once) and have them be chapters in one timeline (although I could make other timelines too). I created a DVD easily, and can skip through it just as easy now. I spent a little extra time setting up a menu for it as well. I have it start out and go right to the first clip, but if you hit menu it’s there. It has about 10 pages of clips, title and picture for each chapter. Not bad. I just have to create a theme since I used a blah default one.
After all the trial programs and such I’ve had to download and try out I’m glad I’ve found something I can work with. As I create a few more DVDs I hope I can tweak it with the same ease it took to create what I’ve made so far.
Monday, September 27, 2004
Getting the Hockey Blogs Together
After patiently waiting for a way to improve the way I can produce a feed, I’m finally able to starting pushing the blog feed on The Ice Block. Blogger only produces an atom feed by default and I couldn’t read those for a while. Unfortunately many sites use Blogger. No problem anymore, atom is all good now. I did have to write a few to ask them to change the encoding, but no one outside of Jes GÅ‘lbez (who does need to use Eastern European accents) will see any difference in their site by doing so, and probably allows more to use their feed besides myself. Jes did change his encoding to an ISO format and hopefully I can tweak my script to include it soon.
Until then, have a look at some of the best blogs around and follow the feed to easily get a nice group update. If you think I’ve missed any major hockey blog, or even a small one that’s just really good and regularly updated, please let me know.
Friday, September 24, 2004
The Many Flavors of a Blogger Feed
I’ve got a decent amount of people I know blogging through Blogger.
Almost none of them have a link to their atom feed (Google does atom over rss as a default on Blogger blogs).
I have been able to find a feed for all I was looking for, but it doesn’t seem like there’s one standard.
Let’s say the url for your friend’s Blogger blog is:
blogname.blogspot.com
To get the feed, try one of these:
/atom.xml
/rss/blogname.xml
/rss/feed.xml
/blognamefeed
Note: you can also normally view the source of a Blogger’s page and get the feed location there.
If I find any more, I’ll post them.
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Trade Me Soon
So I was reading more about Jeremy’s sale of his blog, ensight.org and fine his latest post with a bunch of quotes from other blogs about it. So BJ’s post stood out to me because I’m not really up on Blogshares. To quote the site, Blogshares is:
“a simulated, fantasy stock market for weblogs where players invest fictional money to buy stocks and bonds in an artificial economy where attention is the commodity and weblogs are the companies.”
Seems like fun, reminds me of Wall Street Sports, although I used to do it back in the late 90s and it went on pause for a while and I don’t know how the new site is.
Anyway, seems I’m listed on Blogshares already, but I’m listed there twice. Once with the trailing slash, once without. I wrote to support, hopefully they can consolidate this and I can go tell you guys to buy and sell me. Just another fun thing to distract you from whatever it is you’re trying to be productive at.
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
Google to Release Its Own Browser
That’s what the NY Post wrote a couple of days ago at least.
I’m not positive Google wants to get into the browser game, but you never know. Ever since Google has made a lot of cash after going public everyone’s trying to predict what their next big move will be.
Wednesday, September 15, 2004
Jeremy Selling His Blog
Jeremy C. Wright of Ensight is selling his blog. While blogs are usually quite personal, and I don’t think I’d give up the name “VodkaFish”, as it’s me, I was all for this decision. His domain name isn’t just him, it’s just a name, and even though he mentions he’ll continue writing on Ensight (which means many will continue reading), I don’t feel that he’s really selling himself off, just something he built. You can argue that anything you build is a part of you, but there’s a difference between selling “something” and selling your identity. Jeremy will certainly keep his identity when all is said and done, and help his family by bringing in some extra cash. Can’t think of a better way to start the fall.