Schwer Log

Bloglines allows me to keep up to date on my blogroll from any where in the world, and no more overlap between disperate machines.

My public blogroll on Bloglines:

http://bloglines.com/public/augie/

Plogress.com

RSS feeds for your favorite politicians. Here are my Federal representatives:

Barbara Boxer
Dianne Feinstein
Lynn C. Woolsey

Wordpress Hashcash 2.2 – Elliott Back

Comment SPAM is a terrible blight on the blogging world (blogsphere), but WP-Hashcash totally eliminates comment SPAM.

A simple challenge is presented to a visitor’s browser using JavaScript (which most SPAM bots won’t be smart enough to have). Once the browser computes the hash correctly the comment is accepted otherwise the comment is denied.

I thought this was a far better idea than forcing users to type out letters in an image; which always seemed like a bit of a pain to me.

If you run WordPress, then go grab this plugin; it’s all in one file, unlike some other plugins which disperse themselves over several files.

Using BlogRolling’s PHP option on your PHP enabled weblog.

They have a nice bit of code that allows me to update the BlogRoll in just one place and have it update everywhere.

Project Honey Pot allows you to easily help fight SPAM by helping them collect data on spammers. Install a honey pot on your web site, or donate an MX entry if you can.

I have blogged about GeoURL before, but I finally added it back in since the move to WordPress; thanks to this GeoPlugin.

In the (new) “Buttons” section to the right you can see the new GeoURL button:

Which you can use to see which other bloggers are based near our location.

Sender Policy Framwork (SPF) is an excellent protocol for eliminating SPAM. It works by eliminating the ability of spammers to lie about who they are. No longer would you receive email from a spammer claiming to be your bank. The beauty of it all is that once spammers can no longer pretend that they are sending email from known good domains, they will be forced to send from their own domains. At that point we can only accept email from known good domains, and be SPAM free.

The best part is that it is actually catching on; check out the early adopters list.

Community networks are the latest trend on the Internet right now. They involve organizing individuals together into groups through the use of a single website as a medium.

Sites like Friendster.com and MySpace.com put you at the center of your own social network, from which you are connected to your friends, and to your friends friend’s and so on in a very linear fashion.

Tribe.net and Orkut.com have similar principals, but allow you to join communities of different interests. The names a few communities I am a part of are: Linux, NBLUG, Sonoma State University, and Gardens and Gardening.

Communities have the advantage of being able to convey to other people a little bit of information about you and your interests. They also allow you to participate in a group setting with like minded strangers.

In my opinion community websites without the ability to participate in communities outside of your immediate circle of friends are pointless. They do not allow you to meet and converse with new people except when they are already in your friend path. You are unable to group friends, organize events, or create new community groups (something you can do with both Orkut.com and Tribe.net). The only reason for sites like Friendster.com and MySpace.com seems to be for people to try and hook-up and make some attempt at romantic engagements, something I am not at all interested in.

Once you join Orkut and/or Tribe, you can find me through these links to my profile on each respective site:

My Orkut.com profile page.

My Tribe.net profile page.

Update (2004.04.08): I am dropping the Tribe.net account.

If you use Movable Type then you should download and install the MT-Blacklist plugin. We had a few spam comments that I promptly deleted, but this plugin will hopefully stop them before I have to deal with them. Installation and cofiguration were a breeze; now to see if it actually works.

If you are like me, then you probably read blogs written by your friends, or by people with similar interests, but what about reading blogs by location? That’s where www.localfeeds.com comes in. You can use localfeeds to search for syndicated sites by geographic location!

All that’s required is one snippet of code on your web site describing your location, and registering your site with GeoURL, all of which localfeeds will walk you through.

Then you can put a neat little GeoURL button on your site like this one:

which can be clicked to discover nearby URLs. Pretty neat.
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Nice Titles are a wonderful addition to any web site. If you have the right browser you may hover over certain links on this page to see what exactly Nice Titles are.

Here is an example from our site with the cursor hovering over the Home icon:

Unfortunately it seems to be a bit of a toss up whether this will work right for your browser. For example, using the Mozilla (and Firebird) build(s) from Mandrake this doesn’t work, however build(s) directly from Mozilla.org work just fine.
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This site has a few recent mozilla builds (Linux) with real nice fonts.

http://www.scottbolander.com/mozilla-xft.html

As seen on Slashdot there is an interesting Washington Post Story about an unsettling and growing trend in instant messaging called SPIM; which is IM SPAM.

I recently had enough of this junk, and finally turned on blocking on my instant messenger client, so that only those people already on my buddy list can contact me.

Linux Journal answers the question: What’s your presidential candidate for 2004 running for a web server?, in a recent article.

Apache does currently hold 64% [netcraft] of the web server market, so it should be of no surprise that most of the candidates are running it to serve their web sites. And seeing as there is only one Republican candidate it’s not really a very fair sample space. Also I suspect that the respective up times are directly related to the choice of web server, and not political affiliation.

But it is still way more fun to think that Microsoft and the Republicans are part of some sort of evil conspiracy.

Have you ever wondered what the world’s longest domain name was? Googling [def.] for it brings up many results two of which are web sites claiming to have the world’s longest domain name:

• www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll-llantysiliogogogoch.com
• www.thelongestdomainnameintheworldandthensomeandthensomemoreandmore.com

With 69 characters and 72 characters respectively. To be fair the first actually only claims to be the world’s longest single word domain name.

But is that it? Can there be no more contenders to the tittle? Well RFC 1035 says that the maximum length of a domain name is 255 octets. This includes all the labels and their separators (www and dots) plus an ending separator (dot) that you don’t see, and a null terminator (which you also don’t see). So in effect you can have a domain name of up to 253 characters! [¹]

The world waits in nerdy anticipation for the day when we can surf to a domain name of 253 characters.

Thanks to M.E. for pointing me to this site, which got this ball rolling.

The author of one of the Blaster worm’s variants was arrested Friday. Many sources are reporting it, but this is the article I read.

My favorite part of the story is how this big dummy got caught. Apparently his modification of the worm’s code was to have the infected machines register themselves, supposedly so he could use them to coordinate an attack at a later time. But he needs a central place for them to all submit their information, and what better place then your own website? (www.t33kid.com , note the l33t speak) Of course though the web site is registered to this guy’s dad, and what a proud moment that must have been for him when the F.B.I. came a knockin’.

Let this be a lesson to all you other criminals; if you are going to commit a crime, don’t leave a calling card with your name and home address at the scene.

According to this Technology Review article [google cache here] 40% of email in 2002 was SPAM, and that number is on the rise! The article talks about what people are doing to stop spammers. Filtering is currently the only weapon ISPs and consumers have right now. I know my ISP (sonic.net) currently uses SpamAssasin to filter my email for SPAM. But filters are just a set of rules set up by humans and implemented by machines, so they can very easily make a mistake and mark something as SPAM that wasn’t or let some SPAM through that it didn’t think was SPAM.

So to compliment the SPAM filters some are trying to persue legal action against spammers, and a few ISPs have won huge settlements against some notorious spammers, and some countries (not the U.S.A.) have enacted anti-spam laws. Another suggestion brought up in the article is to charge some small fee for each email sent. If each email you sent cost something small like one-tenth of a cent, or if your computer had to solve some math problem (costing you CPU time) you would hardly notice the difference, but if you were a spammer sending a million messages in one shot you would most certainly notice it, and it would hopefully be enough of a deterant not to do it again.

The future of SPAM and email is unclear, but I found this quote from the article pretty shocking:

So I suppose a few people can make a difference; too bad this is how they chose to do it.

For more info. on SPAM a few of the N.B.L.U.G. guys gave a great presentation last month.

mozilla 1.4 was released today, so go get it! the open source browser features: built-in spam filtering, pop-up ad blocking, image resizing, tabbed browsing, and a bunch of other cool features i can’t remember right now. highlights for this release include:

• Users can now specify “blank page,” “home page,” or “Last page visited” for each of first window, new window and new tab.

which will save me two extra key-strokes when i open up a new tab.