Month: December 2004

your tax dollars at work

The Newest,Fastest Proxies,All In ProxySky.com:

tracking down some spam, I find that a. it originates from a .mil address, b. it’s a misconfigured proxy server, and c. the email addresses for the contacts don’t work.

Outstanding, as someone would say.

The host doesn’t seem to be reachable right now, so perhaps someone has secured it already.

Apparently, I’m not the only one troubled by this:

[IP] more on Tenet suggests limiting the Internet to approved users.:

A month ago today Gadi was looking for a contact at US .mil, this morning I had the same need, as a node in the nipr.mil playpen was a major player in a 100+ node ddos directed at a web blog customer we host — it had a high rate of fire, accounting for over 20% of the total POST methods.

Email to the DO was a waste of time, but I did find a useful contact.

One of the nodes used in today’s ddos against that customer blog appeard in a seperate multi-thousand ad insert (unpaid, naturally) attack on another of our customer blogs, accounting for about half of the total POST methods.

nipr.mil is where my unwelcome visitors seem to have come from, as well.

would this help? I hope so

[IP] Teaching the Constitution:

Sen. Robert C. Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat and the Senate’s
unofficial constitutional scholar, has inserted language into the
final $388-billion spending bill for 2005 requiring that any
educational institution that receives federal aid offer its students
an instructional program on the U.S. Constitution each September 17,
the anniversary of its signing.

Back in the last century when I went to school, we were required to take a unit on “Americanism vs Communism” as part of American History (taken in one’s junior year). I suppose with the end of the Cold War (ten years after I fulfilled the requirement) this has fallen by the website.

I wish Senator Byrd luck in this: I think it’s a worthy effort when the very notion of a secular republic of laws is under attack.

after Firefox’s flameout, will Thunderbird fare any better?

Thunderbird – Reclaim Your Inbox:

Thunderbird gives you a faster, safer, and more productive email experience. We designed Thunderbird to prevent viruses and to stop junk mail so you can get back to reading your mail. Read on to find out more about the reasons why you should use Thunderbird as your mail client and RSS reader.

The first test will be if the bright sparks at Mozilla have figured out that Apple’s Mail.app uses old school mbox files so migration should be a snap. Discouragement will kick in if I find the situation unchanged since v0.9.

Import

Apparently not. This is enough of a show-stopper for me to go no further: ideally, TBird would read Apple’s mbox files natively. Granted, Apple uses some weird additional directory level for it’s mailboxes, but they’re still old school mobx files, for all that.

white:~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes

paul$ file mac-users.mbox/mbox mac-users.mbox/mbox: ASCII mail text

Are you a member of any Yahoo! groups? You should …

Are you a member of any Yahoo! groups? You should …:

Are you a member of any Yahoo! groups? You should know that Yahoo! is tracking your movement even outside the Yahoo! network using Web beacons. Click here to opt out.

And once you do that, be careful you don’t click the button or you undo it and opt back in. I’m not sure it’s fair to call it deceptive but if you’re in a hurry — as I was — you might not read it through.

Opt-Out-1

And of course, how do we know anything happened?

Gaiman on Grimm

The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > ‘The Annotated Brothers Grimm’: Grimmer Than You Thought:

”The Annotated Brothers Grimm” treats the stories as something important — not, in the end, because of what they tell us of the buried roots of Germanic myth, or because of the often contradictory and intermittently fashionable psychoanalytic interpretations, or for any other reason than that they are part of the way we see the world, because they should be told. That’s what I took from it, anyway. But fairy tales are magic mirrors: they show you what you wish to see.

These collections can be eye-opening if you only remember fairy-tales from your youth: Gaiman mentions “the Juniper Tree” which I just for the first time a month or two back in another Grimm collection. Gory, grisly, and not at all for children but still an insight into the human psyche, warts and all.

buckets o’ blood

FAQs About Donating Blood | Give Life | American Red Cross:

Thank you for making 43 donations. Did you know that you may have helped save as many as 129 lives?!

I just discovered that over the past 14 years or so, I have donated more than 5 gallons of blood, in both whole blood and apheresis.

Some blood centers count apheresis donations as doubles: if the local unit follows that rule, the total jumps to almost 69 units or almost 9 gallons.

Holiday 2004 iMix

I just published it to the iTunes Music Store: sadly the sequencing isn’t what I chose and not all the tracks I’ll be using are in the iMix since they’re not in the store (do you believe they don’t have “I want a hippopotamus for Christmas”?)

Here’s the whole thing:

Holiday 2004 iMix

I’m thinking I may burn CDs and print out these CD liners to include in any Christmas letter we send out this year.

ecto and Amazon

ecto 2:

So ecto 2 is updated, and one of the nifty new features is Amazon integration. It’s pretty slick, with a handy little search window within ecto to find items, one-button posting once you’ve chosen what you want, and a few options for how you want the finished link to appear.

I set up a quick tag to handle my affiliate needs back in ecto 1: I don’t know if this new feature makes it obsolete or not.

Asin

All I had to go was copy the ASIN number to the clipboard and the shortcut wrapped in the link stuff: at least I had the syntax right, for all the dough it’s made me šŸ˜‰

So let’s see how it works: I search for “Neil Gaiman” and get a list of books returned, click “make a link”, and hey presto. “Marvel 1602, Volume 1 (Marvel Heroes)” (Neil Gaiman, Andy Kubert)

who made the first mainstream personal computer?

I.B.M. Said to Put Its PC Business on the Market:

I.B.M., whose first PC moved personal computing into the consumer mainstream, has put the business up for sale.

I heard a piece on NPR today about IBM’s sale of their PC hardware business and how they brought out the first personal computer . . . eh? Even discounting the Altair (most people do), the Apple I and Apple II were on the market before the PC: Apple took out an ad in the business press to remind people that IBM wasn’t first to market.

Welcomeibm-3

And locating a copy it was this hard. <sigh>

Now playing: Must Be Santa (Polka) by Brave Combo from the album “Must Be Santa! The Rounder Christmas Album”