Category Archives: Culture

Geek culture

More briefs

“You people should be ashamed of yourself! I did not ask to have 3 pop ups come across my screen when I visit you. I do not visit singles sites, and I don’t want to add 4 inches to my penis. As a matter of fact, I don’t use any of the services that pop up on my screen. I think it is disgusting that you money hungry bastards have infringed on my computer for your own selfish gain. From this moment on, I am boycotting you, and I am advising EVERYONE I know to do the same thing. Down with you and your pop up ads.” — User quoted by Jakob Nielsen (who it turns out probably had spyware on his machine. Umm, the user that is, not Jakob.)

This sounds pretty cool: Do you regularly rebuild your PC? This site has a guide to creating the ultimate Windows XP installation disk, with all your favourite applications, patches, settings and hacks built-in. (via David).

I used to wonder why the WinAPI GetTickCount() call always gave back a value that was a multiple of 55ms. Now I know why.

MS hits blogging. The blogosphere hits MS for its limitations. Oh well, that’s classic MSN… they do consumer products, not power tools. The whole censorship thing seems a bit drastic though.

These friendly freebie web hosters (Boss factor: risque, and note the URL) have a page where they expose people who abuse the facilities.

Dave’s quick guide to converting LP to CD

A number of comments

  • First comment – allow LOTS of time to convert.
  • I won’t speak of legal issues… (It should be noted that this is not legal in Australia without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. This is something that damn FTA should be made to fix… but probably won’t. — Daniel)
  • The end result will never be as good as a properly mastered commercial CD, but that said, the end results are still very acceptable.
  • If the LP is of Val Doonican or the Bay City Rollers, then… just don’t bother. 🙂

Now a few more specifics
Continue reading →

Quickies

Sick of that stupid “Open With” offering to find you a web service? Me too.

Oh great: MPs will be not only allowed, but funded to send SMS spam.

Most musos say the Net has increased incomes for their work, inspite of P2P sharing and piracy.

More on EA’s exploitation of programmers from the spouse of an EA employee. (via Bleeblog). Jeez. Should we started boycotting EA’s games?!

“A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.” — Emo Philips.

Podcasting – the next big thing?

I had a listen to the new G’Day World podcast yesterday, and most enjoyable it was too. The whole podcasting thing is an interesting development, something that could probably only take off properly now that IPods (etc), broadband and blogs have all hit the mainstream.

Back in ancient pre-history I did try something similar. To my surprise it’s still online (those archive.org people are geniuses). It didn’t last long… I could claim it was due to no broadband, no cruisy compressible-but-reasonable-quality MP3 format and no portable players, but principally I suspect it’s because the presentation and content were rather less than compelling.

I’d love to say I’d give it another go, but I probably don’t have time in the forseeable future, nor the inclination to say anything particularly interesting. But the concept is exciting, and I’ll be digging around for some good ones to listen to. It may inspire me to buy a portable MP3 player or an iPaq yet.

What will happen in the long term? Will this kill radio? (Some people have already abandoned their car radios in favour of listening to PodCasts on the drive to work). Or will existing media find a way to co-exist, as newspapers have with the web?

Hmmm. Personal video cameras have already got the power to get events not covered by the mainstream media onto the evening news. How long until video publishing hits the web in a big way?

SysRq

Ever wondered what the SysRq key does? Turns out it’s a kind of convoluted programmable key that hardcore programmers can commandeer. From the sounds of it’s it’s just as “programmable” and useful as the old function keys were on the Commodore 64 and Vic-20… eg not very much at all.

There’s also a less geeky explanation from the Straight Dope people, which goes through some of the other lesser-used keys too, including the mysterious Scroll Lock, which does have a modern use, at least in Excel, and Break, which when pressed with Ctrl will amongst other things stop execution in the VB IDE or batch files in DOS the command prompt.

Me, I wish the Insert key could be abolished. I don’t think I know of a more annoying toggle.

Snippets

Hax0r gameshow contestant wagers $1337 on Jeopardy. (via Rick)

Gary Schare, Director of Windows Product Management at Microsoft, talks about the future of IE, its features and security. (Via Cameron Reilly)

Speaking of ADO (which I was yesterday), trying to figure out the black magic that is an OLEDB connection string? Try here.

Feel like writing a little C++ or Java applet for your phone? Here’s tech specs for Nokia phones. For me that’s the kind of project I’d love to do, but it will have to happen after I invent a time machine so I’ve got the time to do it in.

RSS

XML feeds are the fashionable thing these days. Something like it almost showed up with Active Channels in IE4, but it’s taken RSS (and to a lesser extent, Atom) to grab a foothold for it to really take off. Anything half-decent has it, and the number of hits that most blogs get from RSS readers is ever-increasing.

One of the questions to ponder when setting up a feed for people is this: Do you provide your full content (at least of recent items), kit and kaboodle in the RSS feed, or just summaries? Pushing everything out uses more traffic (not a problem unless your site is very well-read) but gives people the convenience of reading everything in their RSS reader. Conversely, if you’re trying to get people onto your site (for whatever reason; to get people to see your adverts is important for commercial sites) you’d probably lean towards summaries.

My blog provides everything, because it was set-up this way when I was playing with it, and when I inadvertantly switched it to summaries during a WordPress upgrade, people used to reading it all quite rightly complained, so I switched it back.

This site uses summaries. (WordPress provides the first X words of an entry, or a specific Summary field if it’s filled in.) While we’re not commercial exactly, it would be nice to get enough Google ad revenue to at least cover the hosting fees. For this, you need people visiting.

We’ve had some comments about this, expressing the view that this is a Bad Thing as it discourages readers who like to read everything from their RSS readers. That’s probably true for some people — unless the summary (human or computer-provided) is compelling enough, they won’t visit. But do they bother to visit if they can read everything from the RSS reader? Maybe if there’s pictures or they feel compelled to leave a comment. A visit is only a click away, after all.

For now, we’ve decided, like an aging 80s rocker clearing out his CD collection, to keep the Status Quo, but do a little tweaking of the feed to provide more text in the auto-summaries. Hopefully there’s enough interesting content appearing here to keep people coming back.

Copy Protection?

Back for my birthday, Cathy bought me The Cat Empire CD. Which is great, I love The Cat Empire. After unwrapping the present, I read the back cover and realized it was one of the broken copy protected EMI CDs. And after much howling and frustration it went back to the shop (still in its shrinkwrap) to be swapped for a CD that complies with the Red Book standard.
Fast forward to last week, when I was at my local library. There was The Cat Empire CD! “Great, I’d Love to listen to that”, thinks I. I take it home, and in a fit of pique decide to see if I can load it onto my MP3/WMA player… and it does, using XP’s Media Player.
Isn’t copy protection meant to work? I guess that’s why I bought the LiteOn CD drive – it has a reputation for reading “difficult” disks. I can listen to the music, and haven’t paid for it, when I would have been happy to pay for it… the CIA calls that “blowback”, don’t they?

Blog spamming

At the time of writing, my main blog is under a sustained comment spamming attack. Over 50 spam comments today, all targeting the one old post, promoting a poker web site. At least one other WordPress-based blogger is getting them, so it’s not just me. And what’s interesting is they’re from a variety of different IP addresses, so assuming that’s not spoofed, it looks like the attack is coming from multiple zombies.

(Links in text deleted)

Author : poker (IP: 195.172.182.228 , 195.172.182.228)
E-mail : byob@y7263o.com
URL : http://www.poker-w.com
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=195.172.182.228
Comment:
7263 JUST A FEW LINKSFOR YOU TO CHECK OU WHEN YOU GET A CHANCE
Online poker
texas holdem poker
texas hold em

When I first saw this type of comment spam, I thought huh? What’s the point? Who is going to see such comments and click on them? Particularly in this case, with dozens of the same spams hitting one particular post. But the point is getting links to your sites into the search engines, and up the rankings. Whether it works or not I don’t know.

WordPress has a fair bit of flexibility when it comes to catching comment spam. The most useful generic setting is number of links in a comment. A surprising number of comment spams have heaps of links. You can also nominate keywords (though in 1.2 there was a bug in that if the final keyword on the list had a CR after it, every comment got caught). Caught comments go to moderation, so the never see the light of day. Handy for comment spam and for moderating particular users/IP addresses too.

Comment spammers, like other spammers, are getting cleverer. Hopefully the blogging community (and in particular those who write and update blogging software) will stay one step ahead of them.

Update Friday 07:30: The attack appears to be widening to more blog posts, and branching out to Viagra and weight-loss, but is still showing signs of being from the same source. To counter it, I have shutdown comment posting on entries more than 60 days old using Scott Hanson’s Auto Shutoff Comments plugin.

Defined: Wikipedia on blog comment spam.

Possible solution for WP?: Modification to comments code that ensures it can only be called from the form, not remotely. I’ll try this when I get the chance.

Update Friday 13:00: The patch above doesn’t work for this particular attack. Looks like this one spoofs the referrer… which makes sense, any decent spammer would think of that.