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Mar 12, 2005
By | Posted at 23:30:20
Josiah turned me on to AudioScrobber, which tracks what music you play for the purpose of recommending songs as well as comparing common musical themes between members of AudioScrobber groups (for instance, Josiah started one named after his blog).
The problem is that its update application leaves some functionality to be desired. It isn't a plugin to iTunes, it runs constantly in the background instead, watching for when the Recently Played playlist is updated in iTunes. Not quite comfortable making it an auto-start application until I used it for awhile, I started it manually. Shortly thereafter, I was away from my desktop for ten days, during which time I did not synchronize my iPod (I don't synchronize it with my laptop).
Tonight I plugged it in, forgetting that I had restarted my desktop (and therefore needed to restart AudioScrobber's tool) and therefore despite the fact that I had listened to a lot of music during the evenings the past two weeks, none of it will show up on my statistics page. Since some of the stats are only produced once a week, I'll wait another week before linking to my page on the site, since the stats still aren't that useful (grumble) unlike how they would have been if the app had just been a plugin and therefore would have caught my iPod sync.
Feb 26, 2005
By | Posted at 21:56:22
Google seems to have finally made Maps available for Safari, which is a real treat. It seems very user friendly and I like the fact that you can drag maps around and zoom in/out without having to wait for the page to reload. The only thing they could do to improve it is make a way to point out to the program if it gives you a route you do not want to take. I was trying it out, and it seemed to like going through various crime ridden areas to get there rather than taking the freeway. Sure, I like to save two minutes as much as the next guy, but it is not always worth it.
Feb 25, 2005
By | Posted at 22:40:45
That's the number of brute force attempts on Cedar since November. It is depressing to think that so many people have tried enough to set the alarm off. There are, of course, many more that tried only a few times. Like e-mail spam and blog spam, all of this seems to be done by bots; if the number of bots continues to increase at its alarming rate, it seems inevitable that the house of cards will fall… it is just a matter of when.
Feb 15, 2005
By | Posted at 0:6:55
Someone with too much time on their hands, decided to figure out exactly how much music they could get off Napster's new Napster to Go service, convert to WAV files and burn to CD's within the free trial period. Their calculations allow for the creation of 250+ CD's during that 14 day period. Of course, Napster To Go isn't suppose to allow burning, but the folks planning this simply did the same thing I did when I wanted to record a live audio stream a few years back — capture the audio stream and save it as WAV files.
Obviously, for those who'll abuse this service, this makes Napster To Go a much better value than iTunes Music Store, since you can't steal 250 CD's worth of music from iTMS. In the long run, however, I suspect that this might spell the end of Napster. If word about this gets around, the service will be abused and the record labels will get quite angry about people downloading thousands of songs and keeping them forever with an investment worth about one CD ($14.95).
I'm actually glad about this in a way, though. This means Microsoft PlayForSure Janus subscriber technology may be defeated before it becomes popular. Anything that keeps RIAA from making it so people don't even have a permanent copy of the music they pay for is a good thing for everyone else.
(Not that I advocate signing up for Napster to steal music off of it, I simply like the idea that maybe this will throw a wrench in a bad idea whose time has not come.)
Jan 21, 2005
By | Posted at 19:19:1
To an extent, it might seem that Apple has the beginnings of a monopoly going with the iPod. I was thinking this, and then Mark commented that the fact that iTunes Music Store only works with Apple products smelled of a monopoly. It is true that Apple has what is approaching a monopoly, but right now, we have something a lot more like a oligopoly, at best. Right now, there are three major ways of getting music: compact discs, Apple iTunes Music Store/FairPlay, and Microsoft Windows Media/PlayForSure.
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Jan 18, 2005
By | Posted at 0:28:55
Yeah, you want one… you know you want a co-located Mac mini server for only $22.95 a month (plus the cost of the system). And as I noted when this was posted to a list I'm on, that is the only reason you'd actually sign up for this service: because you'd like to say you have a co-lo Mac mini.
Don't get me wrong, it is a neat idea — and you saw it first on asisaid — but with a paltry 20 GB bandwidth allowance, that skyrockets in cost if you up it to enough to keep a dedicated server busy, and 24×7 onsite monitoring only available after you give up an additional twenty greenbacks, you'll quickly end up in budget dedicated territory minus all the perks of budget dedicated machines.
Still, it's a neat idea if you want to play around with having your own server, but can't justify the price of something a bit more expensive. I actually like the idea, I just hope someone doesn't think they are getting a bargain when they end up having to add all the upgrades later on.
Personally, I think rather than sending a new Mac mini to this place, I'd keep it at home and make it a media PC. Or a file server. Or a kitchen PC. What would you do with a Mac mini?
Dec 21, 2004
By | Posted at 18:14:23
Eduardo upgraded to WordPress 1.2.2 the other day, and when he did, I asked him if he had used Fantastico to perform the upgrade. Ed followed my advice to Eduardo and that killed his blog. Well, not really, but it made it look like it had choked. As it turned out, Fantastico did not run the upgrade.php script included in WordPress, and thus the database was not arranged properly.
I checked around Fantastico and could not find a way to fix it directly from there. But, running the aforementioned script did the trick just fine. I thought I'd share this in case anyone else tried to follow my advice.
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Dec 16, 2004
By | Posted at 12:23:13
Looking for a gift that will make your recipient say “Wow this is a really inside cheke and cimble gift”? Well, I reviewed 5 different gifts under $50 for the technically inclined among us (one — the “eyelighter” — is something almost anyone would appreciate). Take a look at OfB.biz.
Tried any of them? Have a better idea? Play the pundit. Write about your own inside cheke and cimble gift ideas below.
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Dec 13, 2004
By | Posted at 16:13:43
Here is a snapshot of my spam blocking statistics for the past two days (approximately). This is prior to re-enabling DUL blocking, something I did about a half hour ago. I'll let you know how it goes now that DUL is back on.
Total Spam Count = 17784
Total Success Count = 4914
Spam detected and blacklisted, by blacklist, since last refresh of exim log (2004-12-12 04:02:09.000000000 -0500).
Note: checks against blacklists stop after first positive match, therefore lower numbers from blacklists lower down should be expected and do not indicate performance of a given list.
sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org = 15306
zombie.dnsbl.sorbs.net = 0
cbl.abuseat.org = 120
opm.blitzed.org = 0
dul.dnsbl.sorbs.net [disabled 2004.12.05 00:15 due to overactive blocking] = 0
relays.ordb.org = 3
spam.dnsrbl.net = 0
dnsbl.njabl.org = 1215
blackhole.securitysage.com = 0
hil.habeas.com = 1
list.dsbl.org = 1080
manual =0
verify fail= 290
No Relay = 158
LAST UPDATED: Monday, 13-Dec-2004 22:05:03 EST
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Dec 11, 2004
By | Posted at 10:19:53
Here are some clarifications concerning my re-implementation of DUL blocking.
Will I still be able to send mail to ServerForest addresses?
Yes. Just to be clear, when I re-enable the dynamic users list (DUL), it will not block users from e-mailing me or anyone else on ServerForest, even if they have a dynamic address, so long as you send your messages through a normal SMTP server, such as the one from your ISP, web host, etc. The only people who will have problems are people who run their own SMTP server on their own computer that is connected to the Internet dynamically. If you don't know what that means, I can virtually assure you that you aren't doing it and this won't impact you at all.
Who runs an SMTP server from a dynamic address?
Almost all SMTP traffic coming from dynamic addresses is SMTP traffic caused by worms and similar malicious programs. Typically, this means they are either sending copies of themselves or working as zombies to send spam. Because it is likely that virtually no legitimate traffic will be sent this way, many hosts block DUL SMTP servers traffic, quite likely, yours already does (unless you are using my services, and then yours will shortly).
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