I visit kottke.org many times most every day. I remember more than a few years ago finding it as a result of an article mentioning Jason Kottke as one of the first full-time, “that’s my job”, bloggers. At the time he was open to (and soliciting I think) contributions. I thought the whole idea was cool enough that I sent a few dollars. And then promptly forgot all about it. It wasn’t until a couple years ago that I stumbled back across the blog and really became a dedicated reader.

As with any visual overhaul of familiar sites, it will probably take a bit getting used to. I really like the border concept as something unique (and sure to be mimicked). But the rest of the changes seem to be away from his more minimalistic design, which I loved, and towards something more……vanilla. It is, however, still a very clean looking site (much more so than my own). And to be honest, as long as he keeps posting his mix of quick hits, intelligent observations and informed opinions, I don’t mind what the site looks like.

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Kottke Redesign

Anyway, it worked. There were about 80 of them total, and I started selecting all of them to mark as read. Finally it got down to just one last one. I noticed it was marked as being in my inbox (unlike the others, which were most likely archived or in spam). It was from Adam Clayton (a name I don’t know). The subject was “Delivery Confirmation”. And it was sent September 21, 1976 (mere months before I was born). When it arrived, it slipped past spam filters and was dutifully placed in correct chronological order.

I’m not sure why the spammers would set the date like that, other than to accomplish what it did in my case, which was checking out the email (prescription drugs from Canada). But regardless, mystery solved. I won’t go insane after all.

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Unread Gmail From the 70’s

Today he forwarded an email he received, asking if he should be concerned. It begins with “On Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:05:53 +0700 we received a third party complaint of invalid domain contact information in the Whois database for this domain” and then goes on to say they investigated, found the information to be incorrect and canceled the domain.

The domain has subsequently been purchased by another party. You will need to contact them for any further inquiries regarding the domain.

So I went to enom.com (directly, not via the link in the email…which, if you look, turns out not to be to enom.com) and they have a warning posted front and center.

The warning includes a link to an image of the text of the email (note that the plain text version they show reveals the bogus enom.com link).

So, if you’ve got any domains registered via eNom, beware of this scam. And remember to never follow the links (always go directly to the site) when you receive an email like this.

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Warning: eNom Email Phishing Scam

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To Move ↑ You Must Have ♥

It’s incredibly easy to use. The URL entry method allows you to paste in multiple image paths at once. After you click “Smush”, you are (quickly) presented with a table linking to each of the new images along with some stats regarding the amount of reduction. Also very cool is that all of the processed images can be downloaded as a single, automatically generated zip file.

What’s more is that the total savings and zip file stay updated even during multiple “smushes”. Even when the images are added via different methods. For instance, I did a single URL first. Then I removed that URL from the entry area and did a bunch at once. At some point I also just uploaded a single file. After all that, the stats updated to reflect the total reductions and the zip file link contained all the new images.

Obvious Usage Tip ™

I’ve been using FireFTP for awhile now. It’s a great FTP client that plugs directly into Firefox. When viewing files on your server, you can select one and hit <CTRL>+U to copy the URL (as opposed to the server’s file path). To be able to do this though, you first have to edit that connection’s “Advanced” settings so that FireFTP will know how to construct the url.

For example, here’s my settings:

And for bonus points, you can select multiple files, hit <CTRL>+U and it will paste all the URL’s as a list. So if you’ve got a single directory with a bunch of image files in it, just <Ctrl>+A select them all, copy the URL’s and then with one quick paste into SmushIt’s URL loader, it’s all done. You’ve got a zip you can download and use to overwrite all the old, fat images with their new, slimmed versions.

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Yahoo’s “Smush It” Image Size Reduction Service

Every time you give someone a book, you earn a point and can get any book you want from anyone else at BookMooch. Once you’ve read a book, you can keep it forever or put it back into BookMooch for someone else, as you wish.
….

Points for entering books: you receive a tenth-of-a-point for every book you type into our system, and one point each time you give a book away. In order to keep receiving books, you need to give away at least one book for every three you receive.

The only cost associated with all of this that of shipping your books to those who’ve made the request. The site itself appears to do nothing more than serve as a matchmaker.

As enthusiastic as I am right now about doing this, I have a long and sordid history of initial energy for something followed by little to no follow through. But this time will be different! My fingers are in the crossed position!

Merci Scott Klarr

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The BookMooch Book Exchange

I now direct you towards the mother of all traffic binging posts. The ingeniously devised packet vacuuming blog entry that is 10 Movies Sold on a Sex Scene.

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Sex and Lists

Fuel Your Creativity posted about this a month ago and one of the commenters expressed some doubts, one of which was proof of its effectiveness. Lee Tengum (the man behind Clever Andy) responded:

…we have already moved some user submitted designs to production so you will see proof soon!

Assuming success stories are made available, this seems like a great resource for designers out there looking to cash in on some of their unused work.

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What’s in the Box?

The Big Word Project is a website to be set in your “my brain no ideas make” bag alongside The Million Dollar Homepage. The nuts and bolts of it is this: you pay a buck a letter to buy any valid word from them, and their site will link to your site using that word. I’ll let Paddy and Lee run a use-case by you:

For example, you may buy the word ‘Donkey’ for $6 and it will link to your site dedicated to donkeys. The word ‘Donkey’ will then be the gateway to your site and the definition will be changed. No longer will the word Donkey mean ‘a woodworking apparatus consisting of a clamping frame and saw, used for cutting marquetry veneers’, instead it will now be represented visually by ‘Chris’s Donkey Site’.

I bought woolie. Like donkey, it’s a six dollar investment. Here’s my badge:

What’s funny about all this is that I had a pretty strong desire to buy the word. There was, of course, the powerful incentive to experiment with link purchasing, and I’m sure that was the push that put me over the top. But there was also a strange need to buy it…some weird send of ownership I had to fulfill.

Kudos to the guys behind this. Great idea.

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Redefining Woolie

The Setup

The overall gist of the article is the promotion of good OO design. The focus is interface design, and the author begins with an example of acceptable code that could use a little redesign.

I start with a simple implementation of a PolarArray class that meets the requirements previously specified. I fixed the size of the globe to 8×8 (via const variables); see Listing One.

Okay, “Listing One”. I flip the page and there it is, “Listing One”, which is a complete implementation for his example class (plus six lines of example calls). This listing takes up more than half of the page. I am fully aware that this is the stepping stone towards greater understanding. I can see that the author has laid out some perfectly plausible code, in its entirety, as the starting point of a lesson.

Then, predictably, refinements are described. (By the way, all bold text in all of the following quotes are mine).

Consider how you might use the various features of object-oriented design to better differentiate the two concepts in play. What if you refactor the index-translation portion of the class so that it is publicly available? You could force users to understand coordinate system and coordinates as distinct concepts from value lookup.

Listing Two (available online; see “Resource Center,” page 5) certainly differentiates the value lookup from the coordinate system.

Okay, “Listing Two” isn’t included with the article. It appears that the author thought it would be included, because he doesn’t even really describe what he’s done. But whatever. I know that there’s only so much code they’re going to put in a print magazine. The author probably has a few more iterations of improvement to make anyway. And I am curious what the final result will be.

Let’s back up a step and try a different approach….If you add a few enums to the code, the implementation might look like Listing Three (available online). Now we’re getting somewhere!

What?! Alright, there’s no “Listing Three” code either. And seriously, is it just me, or does it seem like the author assumed it would be included with the article? Did the editors at Dobbs do any…editing work on this?

Let’s take this a step further….Similarly, you will create a Pole base class, from which we will derive NorthPole and SouthPole; see Listing Four (available online).

Now we’re really making progress! Looking at the example client code, you see that the distinction between the three concepts—value lookup, coordinate system, and coordinate—is clearly differentiated.

Sweet. What I like to do while reading Dr. Dobbs on the can is to also bring the laptop in with me just in case there’s some code I want to view.

Pay particular attention to the example client code at the bottom of the listing; notice how it is both readable and clearly differentiates the three concepts into separate tokens; see Listing Five (available online).

That’s it. The rest of the show is mostly a recap. Which is what I’d like to do as well.

The Punchline

There were five listings of code, each one serving as a point of improvement against its previous. The only code listing included with this article is the first one, the “wrong” one. It occupies more than half (literally) of the page. It didn’t have to be that way. It’s an interface that’s being described, right? So why not just print the function signatures? We don’t need no stinkin’ function bodies. And example client code? I need to see examples of function calls that have no parameters? With all the space used for that first listing, there’s more that could have been done.

The Kicker

Did you follow my link to the story at their website? You might have already noticed what I find to be the best part of all of this. I expected to see instances of “(available online)” replaced with the actual listings. They’re not. “Listing Two” is followed by “(available online at www.ddj.com/code/)”. The rest just say “(available online)”. That’s it. Not even a friggin’ link.

The magazine’s “Resource Center on page 5″ is a box that mentions “www.ddj.com”. The homepage. I guess they figure you can track down the specific article and from there find the code.

When you have found the article at their website, you are rewarded with “ddr.com/code“? What’s there? A list of three links, each a publications you might have read and for which you might be searching for code.

It’s all so wrong in so many ways. But I feel cleansed having now ranted.

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Available Online: When Print Has No Space for Content

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No More Single Servings at Torrent Freedom

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Stochastic Sketches

The first impetus towards wanting something like this was the news late last year that Comcast (my ISP) was screwing with their customer’s traffic.

Comcast is forging TCP RST packets which cause connections to drop (a technique also used by Internet censorship systems in China). These packets cause software at both ends to believe, mistakenly, that the software on the other side doesn’t want to continue communicating.

I knew this to be true because while running my Bittorrent client (Azureus), I noticed that once I was seeding, I had practically zero upstream traffic. In other words, my share ratio was close to nil. I, of course, figured I had messed something up, though for the life of me couldn’t figure out what. Not to mention it worked fine when used with another ISP. Comcast recently announced they would, by the end of the year, end that practice. But as this EFF article points out, ISPs will probably continue to fuddle with your traffic in some form without your knowledge. So, unless Comcast decides to start throttling all encrypted traffic (i.e. Canadian ISP Rogers), Torrent Freedom is a nice fix.

Another contributing factor is my plain curiosity to see something like this work. I’ve recently tried (though not a complete success yet) to create a VPN for my dad to use to connect to his office network while working remotely. The open source method for accomplishing this is OpenVPN, which is the code on which Torrent Freedom is built.

Torrent Freedom works by connecting you to their virtual network and assigning to your machine one of their IP addresses. Once connected, all traffic first travels to their servers, and is then forwarded along to its ultimate destination. The response routes back to their servers and is then forwarded back to you. It’s a definite excessive amount of hopping packets around, but it works.

To confirm this, I visited What Is My IP Address and saw a map pinpointing my location in……Holland. I followed the Visual Traceroute link and saw the traffic start at the site’s California server and end in lovely Bennekom, Netherlands.

The same page, from a different computer in the network, mapped me correctly to my hometown. Niffty.

The final piece in my decision to sign-up with Torrent Freedom was so that I could download TV shows without too much worry. I was reading through the comments at this Lifehacker entry, and noticed plenty of people reporting some form of “gotcha” when downloading HBO, NBC etc. shows. I had figured (naively) that because I never downloaded movies or music, I was pretty far removed from the “cease & desist” movement. The TV in our house has rabbit ears, and that’s it. But my wife and I love picking TV shows, downloading entire seasons, and making our way through them, one episode at a time (usually during that all-too-brief window of time between both kids in bed asleep and us not yet setting the alarm clock).

One last thing I wanted to show is the EULA you have to agree to when installing the Torrent Freedom client.

1. Some of the code in this client is opensource, and some of it has been custom-written. Please don’t steal the custom bits – we worked hard to build good code to extend the core OpenVPN technology. If you want to use it, contact us and we’ll license it to you. Just don’t steal it.

2. We can’t promise you that this little application will solve world hunger, untangle string theory, or teach humans to live together in peace. Instead, this client application is provided to you “as is” – just like a used car, only without the used part, and without the car.

3. If the application suddenly becomes possessed by a demon and does horrific things to your computer, please don’t sue us as it’s not our fault. We’ve tested it and we’re pretty sure there’s no demon-friendly backdoors, but we can’t pay you if it goes haywire, sorry.

May you walk the path in peace and find true wisdom along the way.

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I’m not really Dutch

It’s more than likely due to mod_rewrite not being allowed to do its job. If you don’t know anything about mod_rewrite, here is a nice howto. Also, of course, is Apache’s own documentation.

In a nutshell, the redirects created by Wordpress in your .htaccess need the authority to send a page request elsewheres. Open httpd.conf and make sure that you have AllowOverride set to All.

e.g.


Options Indexes FollowSymlinks MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

I don’t mean in the default “<Directory />” section of httpd.conf, I mean in the actual domain. For example, you’re testing Wordpress and you’ve got something like:

    Alias /wp "F:/webSites/wordpress"

Make sure you also have:


<Directory "F:/webSites/wordpress">
    Options Indexes FollowSymlinks MultiViews
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

Of course, mine was set to “None” instead of “All”.

Note also that you will obviously need to tell Apache to load that module by making sure the following line is uncommented (with ‘#’ characters denoting line comments):

    LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

I spent way too much time trying to figure out what was wrong. It’s almost always the case that the longer you spend trying to debug a specific problem, the more likely it is that the solution is dead simple.

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Friendly Reminder – mod_rewrite needs AllowOverride All

Three humorless guitar heroes who were lampooned in a series of YouTube “shredding” videos have had the clips pulled offline after citing copyright infringement.

What really stinks here has nothing to do with copyright laws or ridiculously luddite guitarists. No, the tragedy is that I previously posted a crap-your-pants-laughing video by the guy who created the shredder videos, and now my embedded U-tube clip is dead.

UPDATE: If you’ haven’t yet seen them, and wonder what the fuss is about, Wired has made the shredding series available at their site.

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Shred No More

Allow my isometric paradise to grow and prosper by taking a journey to Woolieopolis.

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Woolieopolis

Of course, DRM sticks itself out like a big red flag, and you know what that mean! Its time to head over to BoingBoing to see what Cory Doctorow has to say about all this (which I’m sure will be very interesting). So, free and legal PtoP music? I’m sorta excited.

UDATE: whoops!

Qtrax touted in a press release Sunday morning that it was the first Internet file-swapping service to be “fully embraced by the music industry,” and boasted it would carry up to 30 million tracks from “all the major labels.”

New York-based Warner Music undermined that claim, declaring in a statement that it “has not authorized the use of our content on Qtrax’s recently announced service.”

Universal Music Group and EMI Group PLC later confirmed they did not have licensing deals in place with Qtrax, noting discussions were still ongoing. A call to Sony BMG Music Entertainment was not immediately returned.

Looks like it was just a PR stunt to show just how many page hits it could generate (presumably as evidence to the labels).

[Qtrax] released a statement Monday touting all the attention the stunt has garnered, and claiming that the labels continue to support it in some sort of general, unmentionable way.

The statement mentions 61,000 unique visitors per hour. So I guess it worked? Of course, once you’ve attracted all those people with what amounts to a big, fat lie, you might want to have some songs ready:

A quick test Monday revealed that the songs listed in Qtrax’s slick, Songbird-based interface cannot be downloaded, putting the service in more or less the same holding pattern it’s been in for four and a half years: waiting for label approval.

Isn’t there a truth in advertising law that covers this type of thing? Maybe a press release doesn’t count. Does making the announcement in France make a difference? I would guess it would only matter where their headquarters are located (i.e. to whom to they pay their taxes). Oh well. I have to admit that if they do manage to strike a deal with all (or most) of the labels, I’d still give the service a shot. I’m also much more likely to try any competitors that show-up.

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Now Available on the Free and Legal Menu

The publication of this document by the W3C as a W3C Working Draft does not imply that all of the participants in the W3C HTML working group endorse the contents of the specification. Indeed, for any section of the specification, one can usually find many members of the working group or of the W3C as a whole who object strongly to the current text, the existence of the section at all, or the idea that the working group should even spend time discussing the concept of that section.

Got it…(awkward)

According to Firefox’s print preview, this sucker is a solid 238 page printout (including the table of contents), and as interested as I might be, it’s going to have be a “no” to reading this right now. Two reasons: 1. my eyes are fading fast 2. here are the cliffnotes (a more manageable 13 pages). To read the cool stuff, head straight to section four, “APIs”. There’s a new <canvas> tag in which graphics can be dynamically generated (i.e. games). There’s native support for drag-and-drop items via a new draggable attribute. It even mentions client-side storage of data using SQL statements. Neato.

Of course, all items subject to change. It’s still a “working draft” after all.

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HTML5

The cool thing is that the next time you make a purchase from the same place, it will automatically be converted to the “human readable” version. In addition, for every entry, you can add tags to each entry so that each time you visit your favorite bar (for example), your “alcohol” tag will automatically be associated with the entry. Neat eh? There’s a whole lotta automatical happening here. The end result is that, over time you build a pretty nice collection of data regarding your money, data that can then be used to generate graphs and such to really get a handle on your finances.

The problem I encountered was how I handled checks. Which was not so smartly. I would pretty much keep the checks titled as they originally came in (e.g. “CHECK #1022″). I’d then use the tags to identify that check’s purpose (e.g. “power bill”). It wasn’t ideal because, of course, every check is different. So I had to manually add tags for each one. But I thought I was using it as a sort of enhanced checkbook/register. A combo of check tracking and record keeping. Four months ago I realized how I should have been doing it. Instead of naming the entry “CHECK #1209″ and tagging it with “utility, bill, powercompany”, I should have named the entry “Power Company” and tagged it “bill, utility”. From that point forward, any check entry I rename as “Power Company” will automatically have associated with it the correct tags. I wish I could remember exactly what else, but there was some issues about generating those great spending graphs when all I used was the “powercompany” tag as opposed to all “Power Company” entries. The “Power Company” example is a real one. Some of the data I was most interested in collecting was utility bills (water, power, gas) over time, and it was only recently that I began paying those online.

I decided to go through and fix them. I would search for the “powercompany” tag and rename all of the entries as well as removing the tag. Something wasn’t working right so I then started going through every entry, one at a time, finding the “CHECK #n” ones and renaming them based on the tags. At some point during that arduous (yet absurdly rewarding) process, I noticed a strange mistake: Editing the name of one check entry to “Power Company” mysteriously changed most all entries for “Water Company” to “Power Company”. That change then triggered a tag update to match the “Water Company” tags. I was getting frustrated but backtracked, checked my checks register (maintained as a Google spreadsheet by the way) and re-fixed the entries. But of course, at some point during that process, it happened again. Now I was ticked. After a bunch of work and mucking around, I figured out where I had gone wrong.

When I got married, my wife and I started a joint checking account with a bank different from both of our personal accounts and household bills were paid out of this new account. For whatever reason, the new bank’s entries entered the Wesabe system as “FED CLEARING DEBIT”, and as they came in, I would match the amount with my register and then modify the entry’s name to match the check number. So as each “FED CLEARING DEBIT” came in, I would change it to “CHECK #1920″ and “CHECK #1921″ etc. For whatever reason future “FED CLEARING DEBIT” items weren’t automatically changed, and I continued editing them. So now, here I am attempting to change “CHECK #1920″ to “Power Company” and, in the background, Wesabe is going “This was originally ‘FED CLEARING DEBIT’ and the user is changing it to ‘Power Company’, find all entries that were previously ‘FED CLEARING DEBIT’ and change them to ‘Power Company’ as well.“. The powerful feature of automatically updating entries is now ruining my data. I sent them a support email, they asked me to use the site to generate a “key” and write back. I did so and was told that Brad would be handling my issue, but

It may take him a little while to get back to you – his support load is heavy right now and he has quite a bit of a backlog.

It says if I don’t hear back in ten days, shoot another email their way. Twenty-six days later I ask about an update and never heard back. So tonight I deleted it all. For it to just be sitting there unmanaged, rotting away as useless……well it was just too much for me.

It stinks because it really can be such a powerful tool. Collecting loads of data, marking it up with associated data, and then distilling it all into useful and/or interesting information is just plain geeky cool. I think sometime later I might try again. Maybe scale back to just the one, joint account. Plus now the vast majority of monthly bills are paid online.

And of course, now I know what to do.

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Closed Wesabe