It seems that script kiddies are taking advantage of 'randhtml.cgi' perl script that comes bundled with MT. The perl script simply does as the name suggests; allows you to embed random HTML strings into your blog entries. If you have this executable script in /cgi-bin, and it is not critical for your site, I'd suggest that you remove it. At the very least 'chmod 600', as it seems to have been targeted for mischief. A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that some clever mind wanted to embed some weird HTML footer on some of my archive pages using a bit of PHP include file trickery. It seems that the footer would force a windows metafile injection, which redirects to some strange website. I wasn't to concerned about the .wmf injection, as I don't run a M$ OS( I believe that there is a patch to protect against the metafile injection vulnerability). However, it was annoying that .wmf download request.. Bottom is that these kiddies are looking for artificial page hits.
Pretty good article which accurately describes the thinking of another pre Web2.0 company. Apparently the board members of the AOL never read the Cluetrain Manifesto either..
I wonder how effective their carpet bombing marketing scheme has been over the years. Back in the days, I looked forward to getting that floppy disk in the mail so that I could format it and get an extra disk. Media was costly then. Since they no longer send out floppies, their 10K free hours stuff always finds its way into the trashcan.
I would venture to guess that I'm not the only one who follows this method. Regarding their user experience, I never really cared for that enclosed, sanitized environment that was AOL. Naturally, I always discouraged others from using AOL and Prodigy.
The Internet is flat; AOL just doesn't know it | By Neil McAllister
Well at least I think so. The culture has been very good to me. While in undergrad, I used the trade and business element to push mixtapes on the yard of FAMU. I really enjoyed sharing my culture in the dirty south. The locals and the various students really loved hearing Premo, Kid Kapri, Evil Dee and Mister Cee. Although, most of the people who copped these tapes on campus were not from the city, they appreciated the art to the highest degree. I often wonder how my life would be without it. Yes, I do have a have a huge sense of pride and disdain for what has become of the culture. That is I take pride in knowing that it was my generation and city which birthed/created all the nine elements of Hip-Hop culture. I still remember the SL-202 with pennies taped to the cartridges so that the needle wouldn't jump. Hanging out with the homeboys drinking Moet and making our own tapes. Yeah, if you're not +30, you might not understand, it's all good tho.
I'm also very saddened by what has occured in the last ten years.. The commercialization, buffoonery, and the resurgence of rap. Make no mistake, there is a big difference between HipHop and rap. One is a culture the other is financial vessel. One is diverse and dynamic, the other monolithic and static. I realize that everyone has to eat, I'm not knockin the hustle. However, creativity is of essence. There was a time that I could drive up I-95 and judging by what was being played on the radio, I could discern exactly what region of the country I was in. If I heard bass music, I was somewhere near FL. If I heard Go-Go, it must be DC. If I heard house music, it was either Chi-town or NYC. If it was HipHop or Reggae, it had to be NYC. Now, if you listen to the radio (which I don't), you really can't tell where you are in the states.. Everyone plays the same shyt. If you want to hear something unique you're better off staying up late to find a college station. Even that may not be a viable option anymore, as many of them have also gone mainstream too. There simply aren't anymore independent radio station or record labels.
Now back to 'I am HipHop'. It seems that statement can easily be misunderstood, in fact my brother KRS1 had to defend himself at a panel discussion in Stanford recently. Apparently, some intellectual types wanted to call him to task and debate him for his beliefs. I wonder why those same people don't debate some of the knuckleheads who aren't really saying a whole lot of anything (ie Eminem, 50, etc.)? Why not go after some of those commercial acts?
In my mind, Kris is the epitome of HipHop. His voice has been the most consistent over the years. I've always respected his teachings since day zero and would hope that others would choose to emulate his good works. Yes, he can be controversial as the audio reveals, but the streets are real. Ain't nothing changed.
Well, figured I'd share some of that good music for ya. Compliments of the Underground Railroad.
3D Set Pt.I
3D Set Pt.II
BeatMinerz
Lord Finesse
Enjoy
It seems that people have begun to use Friendster, Ringo, and other social networking vehicles to develop secure communities. I'm not sure that I am really convinced that these really work very well. What I believe happens most often is that you rely on a smaller subset of people to share and collaborate. More often than not, you discover that people who you invite, have no clue as to how this sharing should take place. Although, I used Linked-In, it is very rare that I happen to meet new people through that particular professional social network.
I have found that simply using Web2.0 tools (ie tagging, flickr, blogging, etc), I am more apt to create some semblance of a community (albeit loosely bound).
I actually went to the theatre to peep a film. A rarity indeed. The flick was pretty good. It didn't hurt that BlackStar member, Mos Def represented BK quite well. I believe he and Talib used to work in a bookstore on Flatbush Ave. He was an undergound MC from a few years back, now he has become mainstream, but he still spits conscious lyrics. It seems that more hiphop heads are embracing Hollywood. I don't believe Mos has visions of becoming a rapping Blair Underwood (that would be Will Smith), very confident that he'll maintain the street credibility. I wonder how long it took him to master that voice? I won't say anything more about it.
The producer made sure the film had its fair share of notable actors. Looking at an old overweight Bruce Willis, sparked images of Sylvester Stallone in CopLand. Dirty pigs always seem to be a good topic for a film. 16 Blocks certainly wasn't a bad film, but I think CopLand was much more riveting.
There seems to be no end to the constant barrage of blogspot spam blogs or 'splogs' as described by Mark Cuban. It seems that I must modify the rules within my .htaccess file almost daily. These splogs play havoc on your bandwidth. Ain't know free lunch here. Yet another reason why I despise blogspot and consider it to be the scum of the earth. If I could simply get the datacenter to drop blogspot traffic from their router I would be very happy. The only problem is that there is that 1% of legitimate traffic (I happen to correspond with a couple of those blogspot types). Google really needs to tighten the reigns on the proliferation of these ghost accounts.
Another problem that I have with the blogspot setup is that they still do not have an integrated comment/trackback mechanism. For whatever reason, they still use what appears to be third-party solutions (ie Haloscan).. It could be that Google owns Haloscan, but the blogger API has not made provisions for a seemless well integrated trackback solution. The IP addresses of blogspot and haloscan don't match at all. So if you're running RSBL against known open relays, and you receive a trackback ping originating from a blogspot domain, it will actually provide two different IP addresses. So if it's _really_ legitimate traffic it will never see my blog. Pretty funny stuff. Actually, RSBL works quite well, as I have had very few false-positives.
Another interesting development is the fairly new Googlebot 2.1, it seems to disobey everything in robot.txt Extremely aggressive bot, and it will absolutely index everything in its path. It seems to love indexing content that is of no value to search engines. Could this be another winning Google strategy? Who knows. It appears that others have asked the same question.
Bottom line is that I'm going to deploy a script to automatically modify .htaccess in docroot. Wordpress users already have a means dynamically build the .htaccess file. MT headz will have to hack as appropriate. Not a big deal tho.
It appears that some industry analysts believe the Redmond wooly mammoth growth days are long gone. I'm not at all certain that this is entirely true in all areas, but be assured that there really isn't much more room to grow in the desktop market.
ABC News: Silicon Insider: R.I.P. Microsoft?
I've been intrigued by VOIP. It seems like only yesterday, that we were using very inadequate tools to perform voice conversations over the internet(ie Firetalk, Netmeeting, Net2Phone). I suppose the thrust at that time was to avoid the exorbitant costs of stateside long distance carrier charges. Now that wireless technology has taken off, and cell phones are practically ubiquitous, cost isn't so much of an issue stateside. The next frontier is taking advantage of the bandwidth in your home. Perhaps 50% of computer users have broadband connections, and a segment of those are using some sort of softphone.
Enter companies like Digium, Skype, and Vonage, and you quickly discover that you can do more with your bandwidth, than simple websurfing and occasion BitTorrent use. Well Skype utilizes SIP, the open VOIP, for it closed source application. Vonage offers VOIP service for home users. Digium leverages the very powerful open source PBX (and much more), Asterisk for residential and business use.
Additionally, Skype has a couple more problems, as it is woefully inadequate when you're attempting to capture audio from two separate sources(ie podcasting). It also uses a supernode technology synonomous to some of the other P2P networks (ie defunct Kazaa), which begs the question, "Do I want constant ask to my hard disk?" Never cared for Kazaa's model anyway.
I believe they do offer a Linux client, but I never bothered with it based on my first experience.
I have chosen to use Ekiga (formerly Gnomemeeting), and I have been quite pleased with it. It has an active development community and it has been quite stable since Gnomemeeting 1.0. The only gripe I ever had with it was the fact that it was a GNOME based package and that spelled problems during the early days (esp w/GConf). Those problems have disappeared and it's quite easy to install from source. So, Slackware users, be encouraged :)
**Note** to Slackware users: If you built your kernel from 2.4 kernel headers, you may have problems building pwlib, as video4linux ver2(video4l2) expects to be built against 2.6 kernel headers. If you're using a webcam, video4l2 offers some enhancements over its predocessor video4l. Please be advised that you do not need to use a webcam in order to run Ekiga, it works just fine without one. Some other niceties is that it now offers an easy means to handle NAT without resorting to punching holes in your firewall. They have also replaced openh323 with OPAL. If you're using the Evolution email client, Ekiga also takes advantage of your contact list. So you could easily setup an audio/video conference with anyone in your contact list. Another nicety is that you can also make calls to POTS and wireless devices (ie cell phones). Very slick.
Because Ekiga doesn't have a built in mechanism to record audio, I had to deploy a work around. Using the alsamixer and ecasound, I was able to capture all the audio coming across my soundcard.
Although, it would be nice, you really don't need a nifty record button inside your application.
where would we be without open source tools.
As promised below are the shownotes from my discussion with David Cantrell.
Shownotes:
Hopefully, I have not forgotten anything.
Very interesting article about some students in West-Philly. It makes people wonder what the hell is wrong with our government and our auto industry. The obvious point here is that biofuel isn't crude oil, and the infrastructure of biofuel cannot be controlled. Crude oil is rife with corruption and kickbacks at the highest level of government.
Will we have to go back to the 70's and relive the gas crisis before we stop the foolishness?
One of my friends recently showed me a .NET smart client demo. I must say that it was truly impressive. However, I still wonder if the whole premise of smart clients doesn't seem to contradict the effort to minimize the role of the PC. I've mentioned in an earlier post, that the PC will eventually become another appliance and the 'intelligence' of the network will pushed out to the outer edge. That is, the mobile clients(ie PDAs, smartphones, webtablets, etc.). The whole idea of a smart client running with .NET hooks smells of vendor lock-in. It also seems to contradict the thought that the PC will no longer be the center of the universe. Have I missed something? If I'm way off base, someone please educate me.
Admittedly, I do not know very much about .NET, so my theory could be totally off base. However, I'm very glad that the Mono project (albeit ~1yr behind) is working very hard to make sure that the mindshare isn't cloistered by one company.
Nonetheless, I'm very interested in what will become of these smart clients. It appears that this work has not yet received mainstream adoption. Time will tell.
I've just made my site WAP compliant, so you can view the entries via your mobile device. I've not yet added a WAP and podcast chicklet on the navigation menu. I'll get to it eventually.
Yes, I've finally completed my 3rd podcast.
Once I figure out what is wrong with my feed, the audio will eventually be hosted by Odeo.
My Odeo Channel (odeo/752e2321a592e842)
It's no secret that China is quickly becoming a force to be reckoned with in the area of manufacturing and global commerce. One need not look any further than the collossal dam that is being erected.
Now their is increased activity in the automotive sector. Don't look now the Chinese expect to launch a vehicle that will retail for roughly $7000.00. I would imagine that the quality will be heads and shoulders above the former, Yugoslavian Yugo debacle, circa 1989. These vehicles are expected to hit the street in 2007-8.
China Seeking Auto Industry, Piece by Piece - New York Times