Interview with a link spammer
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.
Pointless movie questions
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?
G-PLAY Portable Media Player
Mac 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.
pLog 1.0
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.
Denon-Link approved
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.
Eyes on the Screen
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.
Apple Commercial Archive
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.
AppleScript to send Trackback pings
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.
Google and comment spam
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.)
Back to DSL
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.
