Well, I decided it was time to add a little more color to my blog. I’ll probably be making some more smaller adjustments as time goes on, but I think this will be a good start for now. Anyway, hope you like it. We now return you to our normally scheduled programming…
Category: General (Page 5 of 5)
Gus Mueller has posted some really cool music he has created with Apple’s GarageBand software. His latest was posted today. Here are a couple of his past postings.
Keep pumping out the cool tunes Gus!
While it seems that it will take a long time before something like this is implemented, Yahoo announced today that it is coming up with a new way to verify the origin of all email. While, the concept isn’t necessarily new, the implementation would be. Basically, they want to require all mail servers to have their own PGP key pair for a domain. In order to send mail, the sending server would include a small header containing a signature created by encrypting the message hash with it’s private key, and the receiving server would check to make sure that the signature decrypts with the public key to the hash that matches the message content.
This seems like a great idea to me. 90% of the SPAM that I get is from yahoo.com or aol.com addresses, but don’t originate from their servers. This would force people to send mail from their real network domain. Of course, this would cause a whole new set of problems. People would have to make sure their private keys are kept private (I can see it now…”Buy our CD of 100 million private keys for $99.95!”). There would also have to be an easy way of issuing a new key to a domain if for some reason they believe their private key has been compromised.
Well, Katrina and I finished putting up Christmas Lights on our house for the holidays. I took a picture a couple of nights ago. You can check it out here. The blue river is on top of where we have a rock river by day. Overall, we put up 3,765 lights this year. 🙂
Matt Barger just started his fifth attempt of having a blog. I met Matt a the O’Reilly MacOS X Conference, and his session, Give Your iBook a REST, had some excellent insight into how we currently organize our personal data and how personal data could be organized in the future. You can download his presentation file here. Anyway, check out his blog at http://www.mattbarger.com.
I thought this was an interesting post, originally linked to on Slashdot. If you’re curious about the effects that the Anti-SPAM Act will have, check it out. Doesn’t look like it will help much at all. Gotta love the power of marketing companies as lobbyists. The only hope (as mentioned by the second comment on the post) is that Congress will notice that it doesn’t help after it is passed and finally pass a law that will stop SPAM. At the very least, they should force spammers to include the text ADV in the email subject header such as the anti-spam laws in California do. This wouldn’t save bandwidth, but it will allow people to have an easy filter added to their mailbox to take out a huge chunk of SPAM.
Today there was an article in the Detroit Free Press about cyber bullying. Slashdot also had a story linking to the article. It’s amazing to me that these things happen, though I can’t say that I’m surprised. Kids have always done some pretty mean things, and technology now has armed them with new ways to take offense toward their peers.
Junior high and high school were already tough enough without other students taking “spy” photos and composing entire websites to give you a bad reputation. I want to know what gives these students such a strong urge to spend the time to make a website, just to put someone else down. I’d also be interested to find out how widespread this problem really is. It’s one thing to have it happen at a couple of schools, but if it’s turning into a pretty common practice, it’s definitely something to be concerned about.
I’ve always thought of technology as a very good learning tool to have in schools, but it seems that it may have come too far and has started to do more harm than good. I can see cell-to-cell video coming in the near future (see TV service on Sprint), but what new doors of “cyber bullying” will that open?
As you have probably noticed, this page takes awhile to load. The server I’m running this on is an older Mac running Yellow Dog Linux, so CGI page generation takes awhile. For this reason, I set up some caching pages at http://www.starcoder.com/blog/. That page will update every 10 minutes. I also set up a cache of the RSS feed at http://www.starcoder.com/blog/subscribe.rss which will update every 15 minutes. If you hit any of the links on those pages, the page will not be cached and will instead be loaded from the CGI, but I have a feeling 99% of the hits will be on those two URLs.
Alright, let’s give this a go. I’m not much of a blogger, but occasionally I have some things to say. As you can see down in the corner, this is blog uses blosxom to generate the pages. Thanks to Rael Dornfest for putting together an excellent piece of software. Not only has it worked flawlessly, but it only took 15 minutes to set it up.
Originally, I tried out iBlog, which is an incredible piece of software that just won second place in the third round of the O’Reilly Innovators Contest. It’s amazingly easy to get a blog started and start publishing, however I wanted to see what kind of open source solutions were out there. Editing story files on a Linux server isn’t the easiest way to publish, but the price is right. Anyway, I hope to be posting here semi-frequently. If you’re reading this, welcome to my blog!