CogBlogged from ‘August, 2006’

Thanks to Todd for alerting me that a low life spammer was exploiting Feed2JS to redirect feed links to their product site. It was clever, coy, and annoying all in one package. The spammer was generating a feed that had embedded javascript in the channel->description field of the feed, and when rendered via Feed2JS with the HTML option, it actually was able to redirect a browser using the embedded Feed2JS code to redirect and go to another site. They are getting away to it, since the links are to numerous Feed2JS sites around- so and thus appear as legitiamte links when really they all serve to point to the spammers nest. Specifically affected, are Feed2JS installed at: * http://feed2js.org/ (which is DOA, someone please rap the knuckles of my former Maricopa colleagues, and ask them to check the darn XServe, hello?) * http://www.library.yale.edu/feed/ * http://basw.co.uk/feed2js/ * http://alabelmizik.com/newhnr/newsfeed/ * http://coetechcenter.wichita.edu/feed/ * [...]

It takes a creative mind to think of a catchy clog subtitle, you know, a pithy phrase that can run underneath the blog’s name. Leave it to Guy Kawasaki’s Signum sine tinnitu: or skipping passed the image squinting: Blogger. n. Someone with nothing to say writing for someone with nothing to do. Perfect. And just for some reason why it’s worth reading this Guy, see Ten Things to Learn This School Year: I’m on the campus of UCSB this week at family camp, and it’s inspired me to blog about what students should learn in order to prepare for the real world after graduation. This is an opportune time to broach this subject because the school year is about to begin, and careers can still be affected… … It seems to me that schools often teach the opposite of what’s necessary for the real world. Perhaps in school people have [...]

My mis-behaving MacBookPro started its vacation a day before mine, but alas, it’s time away from home is shorter than mine… it was shipped to Apple from my doorstep Thursday afternoon, the 24th, while I left town Friday morning. The MBP was at Apple’s Spa for Weary Laptops on Friday, and turned around the next day, and actually the DHL driver was at my door Monday morning. All of this I know via the not so miraculous feat of online package shipping, and Apple’s Track my Repair status page. So all I know is my MBP spent a day in intensive care, so I must say with gratitude they responded quickly to the repair request. The big question…. what is in the box at home? Is it a new machine? Is it one with a new logic board? a new screen? something else? Did they fling it open, see a [...]

flickr foto no_trespassavailable on flickr I cannot read signs that I do not like. Blog activity subject to severe fluctuation– I am off for 12 days at our cabin retreat in Strawberry, AZ, where yes, Stephen, there are truly forests in Arizona. So I will have my feet on the rail of the deck, or be out in the woods looking for ways to not follow rules, a short backpack trip, or just plain doing nothing. A computer is likely not high on the itinerary, nor is a newspaper (the local paper prints twice a week), nor is TV (we have none). The world shall surely continue to spin and there shall be no whinging here about my lemon scented MacBookPro, which is on its way to a spa in California. Now just what does “prosecuted” mean? I did not get the photo on the drive up here, but passed [...]

My laptop screen is officially DOA. My shipping box to send it back to Apple’s intensive care unit should arrive today so I can send it off before I leave for vacation at the end of the week. When I was on the phone with Apple, they kept asking me if the effect was “re-producible” and I outlines the times it has gone down: * Using Windows on BootCamp when I shut the lid instead of Windows ShutDown * While looking at the screen in the middle of a telephone call -it flashed and went dim * Overnight, while the machine was asleep (when I put it to bed, the light was on, when I woke it up… dim. But now I do not have to reproduce it since there is no way I have been able to revive it. Yesterday, in the middle of an online session in Second [...]

Utterly amazing, and stupefyingly depressing… Less than 9 minutes after posting Metering Social Bookmarking Services, the inbox registered a quick response… from a casino splog: who obviously did not read my instructions: So who can get a high score (pills, porn, and casino, and other cockroach infested sites do not count)? The roaches are all caught in SpamKarma2 where they cannot leave their fetid footprints. The site is control-clicked sent t Splog Reporter. Does this all really do anything? The latest Wired (not online yet, but I got one in the mail) has a long article on Splogs, and little glimmer of hope beyond more captchas, challenges, and things that punish legitimate commenters. All of this tip-toes around a root cause. The reward system for links, one that rewards sploggers in more money than you or I could hope to ever earn in a month, is in the form of [...]

SocialMeter looked interesting- enter a URL and it pulls some stats from major services like del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Google, Yahoo, technorati for how many times the URL has been bookmarked. It returns a total hit count, and you can click each service to yank up its results. Of course, just like one’s first foray when GoogleMaps added the imagery (wow, I can see my house from space!), the first thing one does is a bit of ego surfing. So a SocialMeter for this CDB blog got a 1467 1517 score (what does that mean? who knows) nearly all from Google and Technorati. And I took another swipe by socialmetering the original Feed2JS site (interesting as the site no longer is even there…. hey someone at Maricopa, check the darn server!), where it pegged a 4200+ 6213 score with almost all from Technorati (it gets zero from Google since the site [...]

… though it may not be the best of ideas. As described a few barks back, in my work at NMC we’ve been exploring some audio technologies, primarily to bring live audio into our Second Life Campus. Because the audio channel in SecondLife that is tied to the “land” needs to be an MP3 url, you can either attach a fixed URl for a song/podcast you want everyone to hear, or have a live stream come in from a server. What may not be widely known, is that there are free / low cast software programs you can install on a computer that allow you to “broadcast” audio from your computer out to the net. The limiting factor, before you start asking for URLs, is that very, very few of us have the connectivity that could reliably support more than 3-4 individual streams, so this way out in the long [...]

To continue the flogging of a dead equine (yikes, I think I am boring myself)… To get the screen back on my MacBookPro, I have found that powering it down for somewhere greater than 5 hours seems to revive it (for an unknown amount of time). Yesterday, I let it rest for 3 hours, did a PMU reset… no lights. So I shut it down overnight, let it get some zzzzs, reset the PMU again… and I get a screen. It’s either this, or I try the writing the neck of a dead chicken over the patient. But we both go on vacation next week- me to Strawberry, the MBP to the Apple Repair clinic, where it will go through detox, some personal therapy sessions, perhaps a facial or a manicure… it just cannot decide.

The sad, tired tale of my lemon scented MacBookPro continues. Not following the take, it starts with one of those days (noisy fan), some bad taste from the Apple Store, a 3 day hiatus before the Lights Went Out in Screenville, followed by the sad song of Citrus Apples, a code #ID 10T, sinking to a door stop, lastly with the tragedy of the Dim Screen of Quasi Death. So folks form all over are commenting in that I should start a ruckus at an Apple Store and demand my in-store replacement. That may wash north of the border and elsewhere,b ut certainly not at the Phoenix store. I got the reaction as if I had asked for a free bath tub full of video iPods. So off it was to an appointment (I got wise and did it this morning) at the Genius Bar, where I was politely and [...]