The pingback spec looks interesting.
Month: September 2002
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Film Gimp deserves Linux app of the day. It’s like photoshop (or the gimp) for moving stuff. Tres cool.
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Ya know, as of a week ago, I had never actually recieved a Nigerian cry for help in my email box. Over the past week I’ve been averaging 2-4 a day, often in pairs.
Really interesting.
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Sam Ruby hurts my head:
P.S. This post was entered in Radio, extracted using a batch file via some UserTalk, parsed using Perl, cleaned up by tidy and a C program of my own design, transferred to intertwingly using scp, and then ssh triggers unpacking on the destination site, where a shell script takes over: invokes indexing using Jakarta’s Lucene, and then a python script pings weblogs.com and blo.gs. The final product is viewable via three different versions of blosxom.
Yup, I’m a sick puppy.
Yes. Yes you are. It’s so sick, it’s evil.
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Until blog developers address the issues of archive classification and sorting, blogs can’t possibly live up to their potential.
I’ve been thinking about this for some time now, but I haven’t come up with anything concrete. Categories help, but having a spider index your blog and make it searchable, kinda like blogdex or daypop, but on a per-blog basis. This would make information more accessable. Perhaps pingback is the answer, maybe it’s not.
Weblog tools are still emerging out of nowhere and are maturing every day. We’ll get it eventually. [via EVHEAD]
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A Guid to Building Secure Web Applications version 1.1: I haven’t read it yet. Blogging via IE4.0 is not fun. I miss my wizzywig entry editor. [via Linux Security]
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The schedule for Web Services DevCon has been released. I’ll by flying in Wednesday evening and flying back out Saturday morning. You can still send them an email mentioning me and you can still get a 50% discount on the conference.
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Paul Prescod: “Mind the Gap: Web Services Lack a Key Feature.” [via Sam Gentile]
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Linux Orbit: TheKompany releases clean gui-based Ogg ripper. [via PCLinuxOnline]
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Jeremy Allaire thinks about wholistic web services.
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If you look at the front page of DPReview, it looks like film’s days are numbered. Their Photokina Roundup points to the latest cameras. Also of note is that Olympus and Kodak have put together a new 4/3 format.
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Take a pill, stay up all night. The Boston Globe reports.
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Morse Code Converter in PHP
I hacked around a little bit this evening and came up with a php script that converts plain text to morse code. The php file is here and a text listing is here. It is currently at version 0.0.4 and is open source according to this license:
Quick and dirty open source license:
You can use it, modify it, redistribute it, strap it to a llama,
or whatever you want, just give me some props. If you fry your machine
with this code, sucks to be you, I’m not responsible. I guess you could
consider this the CPL: Croydon Public License.The function textToMorse returns a string and takes a string as an argument. $string textToMorse($string). You’ll note that a “/” appears between words. I think this is convention, but I’m not 100% sure. I’ll try to complete the conversion from morse to text tomorrow, as well as clean up the quickly hacked together test form. It’s ugly.
This was something that I wrote down on a post-it note some time ago. I thought that this would be a cool set of functions to implement, then I can build two XML-RPC based web services around these functions. That’s the ultimate goal of the project. It may seem silly, but I want to work more with web services, and what better way than to deploy one?
Mental note: find a good php-oriented IDE.
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News.com: Sigma’s new SD9 high end digital SLR, with the foveon chip inside, is actually going to ship October 21st. Apparently. For those of you not in the photo world, this is much like Mozilla 1.0 shipping.
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Desktop Linux: A GNU Privacy Guard (PGP replacement) primer.
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Jeremy Zawodny has set up RSS feeds for ticker symbols at Yahoo Finance. Pretty cool! If used right, these feeds could be extremely powerful. I’m worried about Yahoo pulling the plug if it gets popular. RSS feeds are a drain on bandwidth and server resources without ad revenue. Of course you could always stick an ad in the first spot of the RSS feed, much like 802.11b News does from time to time.
I’m still extremely excited to see a company like Yahoo supporting RSS feeds like this.
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WebServices.Org: Combining web services for fun and profit. The article points to Cape Science, a great resource for web services developers.
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Cato Debate Followup
Cato Debate Followup
Before I get started on my follow-up post about the Cato Debate I attended last week, I’d like to point out an article that is mentioned at the bottom of James Miller’s Let Hollywood Hack piece. It is titled Hollywood Hacks Consumers, and is written by Sonia Arrison. As the link suggests, it is a counterpoint to Miller’s piece:
Hollywood wants Congress to pass laws protecting intellectual property against theft on the Internet. But Hollywood lobbying has gone too far with the introduction of a new bill that authorizes copyright holders to hack into peer-to-peer networks.
The Bill
The bill itself [pdf] scares me, but I’m not a lawyer, so there’s no way that I’ll be able to grasp its intricacies. Have you read it? What do you think?
Phil Corwin made an interesting observation during the Q&A section. His computer crashes all the time. How does he know if the crash was caused by Hollywood? If it was caused by Hollywood, and the damage caused is less than $50, there is nothing he can do. He questioned the secrecy that is built into the bill. Methods used by copyright holders to protect their works are kept secretly on file at the Department of Justice. Any claims made against copyright holders are to be directed to the Attorney General, and under the bill will likely never become public.
I think that the claim process outlined in the bill makes it extremely hard (perhaps intentionally?) for people to seek damages against copyright holders. From a geek’s point of view, you would have to log quite a bit of incoming and outgoing traffic to trace an attack from a copyright owner. This holds true for both legal (under the bill) and illegal attacks. It is unlikely that common computer users will do this.
The Economist
James Miller, an economist from Smith College, seemed to be the least important person on the panel. I was a little disappointed at his opening statement, as he basically read his paper, elaborating slightly. Perhaps he sat on the panel to make Mr. French and the MPAA look reasonable in comparison. Miller’s views on p2p piracy are extreme. He believes that having Hollywood scan our hard drives is a-ok. He appeared nervous throughout his opening statement. An attack on his ideas by one of the panel members provoked a childish defensive response out of him during the rebuttal.
The Missing Representative
Ed Cone is curious about the absence of Howard Berman, who was scheduled to be on the panel. One could chalk it up to business as usual, or perhaps the potential war in Iraq. I have a feeling that something else was at play. While John Mitchell of Public Knowledge introduced himself, he apologized if anyone had come to the debate hoping to hear Gigi Sohn’s opinions on the bill. After the debate, I overheard a few people discussing why Gigi did not make the debate. From the conversation, I learned that Gigi is apparently scheduled to testify in a hearing on the bill and did not want to show her cards. Could this be the real reason that Berman did not show up? Does he have more up his sleeves?
Speaking of Berman, I’d like to point out a link to his introduction of the bill ([pdf] or [doc]) from July 25, 2002. I think it should be required reading for anyone interested in this debate. The introduction does not seem consistent with the wording of the bill itself. From Berman’s introduction:
One approach that has not been adequately explored is to allow technological solutions to address technological problems. Technological innovation, as represented by the creation of P2P networks and their subsequent decentralization, has been harnessed to facilitate massive P2P piracy. It is worth exploring, therefore, whether other technological innovations could be harnessed to combat this massive P2P piracy problem. Copyright owners could, at least conceptually, employ a variety of technological tools to prevent the illegal distribution of copyrighted works over a P2P network. Using interdiction, decoys, redirection, file-blocking, spoofs, or other technological tools, technology can help prevent P2P piracy.
From the bill itself, it appears that copyright holders can do just about anything they want to as long as they file it with the Department of Justice. Then again, I’m not a lawyer…
Q&A
Marshall Eubanks (pardon any possible misspelling) routes packets for a living. He was particularly worried about the potential for sanctioned Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. Mr. French told him not to worry, because copyright holders and only protect their works. If they launch a DoS attack that affects anything else, they are liable.
John Albino, a local DC area photographer, raised concerns about individual content creators. He too was assured that the bill covered individual content creators. Mr. French also restated that the bill does not curtail anything except p2p networks.
Pat Ross of Washington Internet Daily asked a question comparing real property rights to intellectual property rights. The only thing I have in my notes about the response is: Libertarians. If I had .08 cents for every time Mr. French said Libertarians…
The Lunch
It was good. I had a sandwich (I don’t recall what kind), a cookie (chocolate chip) and a coke. There was some discussion going on, though it was mostly reporters talking to reporters, lawyers to lawyers, and so on. There wasn’t much conversation for a weblogger to engage in.
The Experience
Reporting to the weblog world and beyond about the event was a great experience. I learned that taking notes on pen and paper and translating to a weblog entry is time consuming and tedious. It was, however, well worth doing. I think the ideal way of blogging an event would be with a laptop in hand. This way editing can be done via cut and paste rather than transcribing. Perhaps it is time to upgrade my frail Pentium laptop.
At times the panel debate reminded me of a few high school debates I watched and participated in. When you don’t have anything else to say, just hammer home your point one more time (.08 cents!). Make a point that will provoke your opponent to react poorly. Make your opponent look like a criminal, then point out that criminals will attack my position by this this and this. Some things never change, do they?