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Paul's Time Sink

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Interview with a link spammer

Paul Westbrook | 31 January, 2005 08:23

The Register has an interesting interview with a link spammer. It is funny to think that he can make that much money from doing this link spamming, especially since most of the host names do not resolve.

I do have to say that I have been impressed with pLog's comment spam filter. All of the comment spams have been correctly been marked as spam. I am about to have pLog automatically delete these messages, instead of me manually deleting them, since it has not mis-categorized any of them.

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Pointless movie questions

Paul Westbrook | 30 January, 2005 14:10

Our son really likes Toy Story and Toy Story 2, so we watch them a lot. I have a few questions about the story-line of the Toy Story 2: What makes certain toys able to talk? Why did Woody save Wheezy and not the wooden car that the mom got from under the bed? Why wasn't the wooden car able to talk?

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G-PLAY Portable Media Player

Paul Westbrook | 29 January, 2005 19:51

GplayMac HTPC has a post that mentions the G-PLAY Portable Media Player. It is a standard Media player that plays the standard MPEG 1, MPEG 2 and MPEG 4 video files; MP3 and WAV audio files; and displays JPG graphic files. It will also have a 40Gb, 80Gb or 100Gb drive to store these files.

One of the coolest things about this player is that it will play standard iso images of DVDs, with all of the standard menus, so you don't have to transcode the DVD video to play it.
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pLog 1.0

Paul Westbrook | 29 January, 2005 10:45

I have been using the development version of pLog 1.0 for a while, and I do have to say that I am impressed. I do like the new layout of the admin interface. Also, this version has better support for xmlrpc posting, with attachments. <plug>Which I helped out with</plug>

Here is the post where the developer announces the testing plan for this release, and how to get the software.

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Denon-Link approved

Paul Westbrook | 27 January, 2005 14:20

Home Theater Blog has an interesting post that states that Denon has won approval from Sony and Philips to use their 'Denon-Link' for SACD content. I hope other manufacturers support this interface, and it is extended to support video.

I would love to only have a single cable that goes between each of my components and my receiver.

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Eyes on the Screen

Paul Westbrook | 27 January, 2005 09:46

Eyes on the Prize
Eyes on the Screen is a campaign that is organizing showings of "Eyes on the Prize".

The most important civil rights documentary of all time has been unavailable on video and television for 10 years because of copyright restrictions. Civil rights leader Lawrence Guyot said recently, This is analogous to stopping the circulation of all the books about Martin Luther King, stopping the circulation of all the books about Malcolm X, stopping the circulation of books about the founding of America.

On February 8th 2005, share "Eyes on the Prize" with your community.

Update: It appears that their lawyers have made them take down the BitTorrent tracker for the video.

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Apple Commercial Archive

Paul Westbrook | 25 January, 2005 08:40

The Beyond the Obvious blog has an article where he posts 165 Apple commercials in QuickTime format. He has also made the archive available on BitTorrent.

I have liked a lot of the Apple commercials.

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AppleScript to send Trackback pings

Paul Westbrook | 24 January, 2005 15:08

There is a new version of ecto that includes scripting support. This menu allows you to run different types of scripts directly from ecto.

Since I have started doing most of my blog writting directly from ecto, I have not been sending trackback pings for my blog entries. Before this was working because when I created posts directly from pLog's web interface, pings would be sent automatically. I wrote an AppleScript that performs trackback pings directly from ecto.

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Google and comment spam

Paul Westbrook | 20 January, 2005 18:43

Google and Yahoo have agreed to a new mechanism to help combat blog comment spam. They are going to respect rel="nofollow" attribute of links. When a link has this attribute these search engines will not follow the links.

I think that this will help to keep the rank of these websites down in the search results, but I don't think that this really solves the problem. These websites that have these urls in their comments will still be visible to users. I see these comments as a sort of graffiti on these web sites. I wouldn't want to leave a graffiti on a wall even if I have a note that says don't read this. (Which is what the nofollow attributes state.)
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Back to DSL

Paul Westbrook | 20 January, 2005 17:48

I really liked Etheric.net as an ISP. When the connection was up, it was great. 1Mbs symmetric each way, great customer service. The problem was that they were having problems with the hardware in the tower. This has continued for several months. There were problems when the connection would just drop, or the latency got too bad to handle VoIP.

I have decided to go back to DSL. Instead of going with SBC, I decided to go with Speakeasy.
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Mac Mini in a Colo

Paul Westbrook | 18 January, 2005 14:02

atmaspheric | endeavors has a post on MacMiniColo.net. They will colocate a Mac Mini for you and give you access through VNC or Apple Remote Desktop. This is great if you want to setup a server that can be easier to maintain than a Linux distribution.

I wonder if they would install Mac OS X Server on it for you if you asked?

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Project Honey Pot

Paul Westbrook | 14 January, 2005 15:50

A while ago, I mentioned the Spam Poison web site. This site's purpose is to have the crawlers waste time crawling their pages, while getting bogus email address. The problem that I saw in their implementation was that once the crawlers stopped crawling pages from their domain, they would not be effective.

Project Honey Pot ButtonIt looks like Project Honey Pot has a better solution. Website administrators can include some script that runs on their web site that generates html code, that the crawlers crawl. Each of these crawling attempts are tracked by Project Honey Pot.
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Spam links through blogLinker.com

Paul Westbrook | 14 January, 2005 09:11

In my previous post, I mentioned blogLinker.com. This site has a great idea, unfortunately it has a lot of problems. The majority of people that are including my url in their blogLinker account are commercial sites. So it is free advertising for them because their links would appear on my site.

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Video of Microsoft CES demo

Paul Westbrook | 14 January, 2005 09:11

This is pretty funny.

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Fixing sender address with sendmail

Paul Westbrook | 13 January, 2005 20:16

I have been trying to send email on one of my linux workstations, but the sender address has the host name of my machine. This causes problems because the host name is not a publicly resolvable name. I found the solution on this page.
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