Wed, 30 June, 2004

Smoothing Things Over

Posted in General at 10 pm

“I’m sorry dear. I know you’re my husband and all, but I had sex with my 14-year-old student. I know you’re upset so here’s an iPod.”

Jabber in Tiger Server?

Posted in General at 10 pm

In the words of Kyle’s Mom…

“wha-wha-wha-WHAT??!?”

If I’m reading this post at cubicgarden.com correctly, it looks like Apple will be putting a Jabber server into OS X 10.4 “Tiger” Server.

Points to remember here: Jabber is cool, open source IM that’s better than IRC.

Jabber server is a pain in the ass to A) install and B) maintain. Having OS X with this installed means that pains A and B are probably going to be resolved.

Jabber has ‘transports’ which are gateways to other systems such as AOL/AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, etc. A Jabber client ‘could’ be attached to any and all of these networks at once. (I’ve had this working a couple of times.)

iChat has “some” Jabber code in it. It’s used for the local area peer-to-peer connections. So this leads to…

iChat able to connect to more than just AIM people? Jabber able to do video chats? hmmm…..

Tue, 29 June, 2004

Apple Is A Hoax

Posted in General at 2 pm

This posting: Crazy Apple Rumors Site: Apple A Hoax. had me howling in laughter. A lot of people use LOL when they simply smiled. This entry truly had me laughing out loud.

Mon, 28 June, 2004

Wipeout

Posted in General at 10 am

Holy cats… One of our sites got a quick run down of vulnerability probes on Saturday. The script that’s doing this is looking for easy to hack entry points, usually scripts that are insecure. Here’s an edited run down of the traffic we saw:

[Jun 26 16:27] [141.158.065.245] script not found: /cgi-bin/formmail.pl
[Jun 26 16:27] [209.026.056.010] script not found: /cgi-bin/contact.cgi
[Jun 26 16:27] [148.244.150.052] script not found: /cgi-bin/mailform.pl
[Jun 26 16:27] [062.087.154.034] script not found: /cgi-bin/formmail.cgi
[Jun 26 16:27] [193.172.150.002] script not found: /cgi-bin/FormMail.pl
[Jun 26 16:27] [146.101.066.159] script not found: /www/www.{domain}.com/mail.cgi
[Jun 26 16:28] [066.015.111.202] script not found: /cgi-bin/fmail.pl
[Jun 26 16:28] [193.144.127.011] script not found: /cgi-bin/form.cgi
[Jun 26 16:28] [213.215.169.210] script not found: /cgi-bin/contact.pl
[Jun 26 16:28] [208.185.016.039] script not found: /cgi-bin/mail.cgi
[Jun 26 16:28] [213.156.052.229] script not found: /www/www.{domain}.com/formmail.pl
[Jun 26 16:28] [066.043.173.226] script not found: /cgi-bin/feedback.cgi
[Jun 26 16:28] [066.144.004.003] script not found: /www/www.{domain}.com/contact.cgi
[Jun 26 16:28] [065.016.119.034] File does not exist: /www/www.{domain}.com/form-bin/deliver
[Jun 26 16:28] [168.143.113.138] script not found: /cgi-bin/cgiemail
[Jun 26 16:28] [162.006.217.199] script not found: /cgi-bin/cgiemail
[Jun 26 16:28] [141.158.065.245] script not found: /cgi-bin/form.pl
[Jun 26 16:29] [209.184.108.162] script not found: /cgi-bin/mailform.cgi
[Jun 26 16:29] [205.141.207.226] script not found: /cgi-bin/feedback.pl
[Jun 26 16:29] [168.143.113.138] script not found: /cgi-bin/mail.pl
[Jun 26 16:29] [193.144.127.011] script not found: /cgi-bin/sender.pl
[Jun 26 16:29] [066.234.235.202] script not found: /cgi-bin/mailer
[Jun 26 16:29] [194.212.229.228] script not found: /cgi-bin/ezformml.cgi

In a three minute span we had hits from all of these IP addresses, which are zombie servers, I’m sure. I wish I had the time to track them down but maybe this will help someone on the LazyWeb.

Sat, 26 June, 2004

Art 120 Critique Form

Posted in General at 4 pm

Dear {fellow faculty member},

You expressed an interest in the Critique form idea that I had. I ended up putting together this form:

http://www.ordersomewherechaos.com/rosso/critique/

I had gone over the terse labels on the form in class, so the students had a general idea of what to write. Most of them simply filled in the box with text up to the size of the box, but some went full bore, really getting into it.

It was a pretty good way of getting them to run through the steps of a critique. They critiqued two of their classmates and their own final piece.

In retrospect, I would have added a ‘grading’ or ranking field for them to select from, maybe listing a few different styles of grading: 5 stars, A-F grade, numeric ranking 1- 100, etc.

Thu, 24 June, 2004

FavIcon from Pics Web Service

Posted in General at 9 pm

Okay, I’ve been hanging on to this for a while now. Since I’ve got all of the Favicons that I want out of it, I’ll share it…

Chami.com’s FavIcon from Pics Service

This site will take your graphic (Gif, Jpeg, PNG, and a couple others) and convert them to “favicon.ico” files. These icons are the little graphics that modern browsers put next to URLs and bookmarks.

As of tonight, Dwelling has one of these, if you look up at the URL bar you’ll see a ‘D’ and a ‘w’ which I decided would make a nice nemonic icon for Dwelling. I thought about having just a spray or burst of red and yellow, but I thought the D would make a stronger image. But alone it wasn’t enough, so crowding the ‘w’ in there, in the same way that the ‘Chasing my own tale’ tag line is set in the header made for a nice connection.

I’ve been using this service all this week, having added FavIcons to a number of sites including: Hot Pepper and OMPA.org as well as WebVisionsEvent.com.

Daily Show Interview Stephen F Hayes

Posted in General at 8 pm

Daily Show with John Stewart (June 22, 2004)
Interview with Stephen F Hayes
Author, “The Connection: How Al Qaeda’s Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America”
Senior writer, The Weekly Standard

Hayes: “I think the idea behind the Bush doctrine is that if you support or harbor terrorist we are going to come after you. We’ll consider you a hostile regime. I don’t think that frankly in the aftermath of September 11–I really don’t think that’s an unreasonable doctrine.”

Stewart: “But here’s the problem. It’s not unreasonable, but it’s not the point. The point is… I’ll list you four things: developing weapons of mass destruction, inflammatory rhetoric against the United States, supporting and harboring terrorism, and oppression of their own people.

“Now here’s the problem with your doctrine. You can’t tell me which country I just named. And that’s a problem when you’re talking about war.”

See the video at:

On Lisa Rein’s Radar: Daily Show On “The Connection”

Wed, 23 June, 2004

Coby Cell Phone Earbud & Mic with FM Radio

Posted in General at 9 pm

The other month, Fry’s had the Coby “HANDS-FREE” EAR/MICROPHONE with FM SCANNER RADIO on sale for 87% off. It’s usually $20, but they were clearing them out for $2.50.

I don’t own a cell phone. I know, it must seem odd: a web producer who talks nothing but technology all day long but eschews cell phones (for the most part). Anyways I really wanted this because it’s the smallest, cheapest FM radio I’ve seen. It’s smaller than your average cigarette lighter, runs on a couple of watch batteries.

Stereo is Overrated - The best thing is that, since it’s supposed to be used for a cell phone, it only has one ear bud. Stereo is great if you’re really listening to music, but if you simply want the music to provide you with a beat that you can work to, and you don’t want to have an ‘outloud’ radio playing and you’re switching between computers all day long… or you’ve got a convertible car that doesn’t lock up very well and someone’s already tried to steal the cd player out of it once so you’ve got an old broken deck in there but that’s okay because you haven’t re-installed the speakers that you disconnected when you took the door panels out to fix and clean the window lifting mechanism and you just want something small, simple and not worth worrying about like an MP3 player that might cost more than $40, then this little FM radio is perfect. Even without the cell phone.

Does the radio have Incredible crystal clear reception that picks up the merest hint of a radio signal? No, of course not. Does it pick up my favorite stations on a regular basis? Yes.

For my own future reference, this is the Coby CV-FM70 and it runs on two watch batteries. The two that came with are “G13-A” also known as AG13 but Energizer’s 357 1.55v work too.

It’s telling that the $2.50 radio cost me $7 in replacement batteries. Next time around I’ll pick up the 8 pack.

Timbers Win In Minn

Posted in General at 12 pm

TIMBERS Cut Down Thunder

June 22, 2004 - The Minnesota Thunder outshot the Portland Timbers 26-10 but fell short 1-0 on a fluke first half goal in an A-League battle between the two…

PORTLAND Timbers in first place in conference

By CHRIS METZ, Timbers Writer. ST. PAUL, Minn. - The Portland Timbers shut down the Minnesota Thunder 1-0 behind a first-half goal by Alan Gordon and six saves…

See all stories on this topic

PORTLAND Timbers learn of Open Cup opponent

And the Portland Timbers learned who their potential next opponent would be should they advance past the third round. …

See all stories on this topic

Tue, 22 June, 2004

WebVisions 2004

Posted in General at 5 pm

Here it comes again…

I’m in a planning meeting for WebVisions 2004 and we’re gearing up for a really huge conference. 1 day, 5 rooms, 500 to 700 people. I’m the stage manager again this year, so I’m getting all of the volunteers slotted into specific roles and getting the floor plan and the event script written up and ready to go.

I also got all of the older WV web sites set up on sub-domains:

I’m tracking the error log as well in order to get redirects set up for the site. We got a favicon added to it and stuff. Woo hoo. :)