I ran across this today on Lockergnome.

A company has developed software to convert DVD’s to Palm Video! That is right, rip a DVD, store it on your PDA, watch at your leisure.

Lockergnome Link

Software Link

Not a bad price for the software too.

OK, this guy has an interesting experiment going on (and yesterday he succeeded). He has a gmail account, and he wants to test the spam filters. He has asked everyone to sign up his email account for spam, to any mailing lists, and to advertise it on many webpages in an effort to collect as much spam as he can, and to see if he can fill it with spam, and how long that will take.

From his May 25th posting:

I’m beginning to think that a vulnerability to email floodings is going to be Google’s biggest weakness when it comes to email. 999 messages could do a lot of damage to someone’s email account, especially if they all contained attachments (the messages I received did not). What is Google doing to protect its Gmail users from mail bombs? I’m not sure, and they’re not likely to tell us due to security concerns. It may block some such attacks behind the scenes and we are not even aware of it. However, I would argue that this is one area where Gmail must have 100% accuracy if it is going to remain a viable service.


Now, I like his experiment, and I am sure many people are interested in the results, but you know what? Everyone is susceptible to mail bombs. Hotmail, yahoo, canada.com, etc are all susceptible to them. My domain is too. How should software determine what is a mailbomb, and what is not? 10 emails in an hour? 100? All the email with the same sujbect? I think it would be difficult to build a spam filter to detect a mailbomb. Build a filter, and the senders will get smarter. Some people have already proven that it is possible to defeat Bayesian filters, and they were supposed to be the spam saviour.

I think Gmail is only mildly interesting, and I don’t necessarily want an email address with them. Why do I want my 1 GB of email on someone else’s servers? The answer is I don’t. I don’t trust any of these “free” services with anything that I consider mission critical. That is what my personal computer is for.

The trickle down effect is interesting too. I have heard rumblings that some of the free email services will be upping their mailbox limits. All this because GMail exists (but isn’t even publicly available yet).

I am just helping out the cause here. The moron control board has been released, and it looks like some morons already found it. Too bad they don’t get it. Head on over to http://moroncontrolboard.org to check it out!

Friday I stopped at Office Depot to pick up a paper shredder that was on sale. I happened to browse the PDA aisle, and found a couple deals I just couldn’t pass up. The first was an SD card based Merriam-Webster Crossword Puzzles and Word Challenges. Regularly this used to be $30 or more, it was on blowout for $2.04

The other was Handmarks version of Scrabble for the PalmOS. That one used to be $40, and now it was on sale for $6.01! Such great deals cannot be passed on.

The crossword one is great, but I had to return the Scrabble. The box I had purchased was empty! Very dissapointing. I guess someone had ripped off Office Depot in the past, and noone noticed. It wasn’t a big deal getting my money back, but it was quite a shock when I opened the box!

Saturday was a lazy day! I geeked out most of the day and attempted to install Gentoo Linux on my new machine. It didn’t start well. I downloaded the CD image for installing, burned that to a disc, and installed a hard drive in the new box. Then I edited the BIOS so it booted from the CD ROM. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get the system to boot from the CD. Hmm, weird. I pulled out the hard drive, I checked the CD ROM, and saw that the IDE cable had been pulled out. Doh! I hooked that back up, put the hard drive back in and attempted to reboot. It booted from the disc just fine but now it wouldn’t recognize the hard drive. More futzing around, and I noticed I had forgotten to plug back in the power cable to the hard drive! Woops 😉

With the hardware working, I set out to get Gentoo running. I got pretty far actually. I think I did pretty good. Until it came time to configure Grub, the boot loader. I messed something up here, and no matter what I tried, I couldn’t fix it. I gave up.

I changed my mind, and went with Suse instead. I had a few problems determining what my network card was before I could do the FTP install, but once I got that sorted out, the install went pretty smoothly. Now I have a Linux host running Suse. Major geekfest, but pretty interesting. Some day maybe I will try Gentoo again, once I understand more of how Linux works.

As I said to a couple friends today, I know just enough to be dangerous. I think Suse is going to be a good stepping stone for learning on.

How will setting my browser homepage to MSN Home improve the MSN Messenger experience?

This is such a geek moment. If you can’t appreciate such a thing, you may not want to continue reading 😉 I was scrolling through my external referrer logs today, and came across three entries that just stood out like a sore thumb. They weren’t search engines, they weren’t friends’ sites, they had nothing to do with anything I have ever written about. They appeared to be porn sites. Why in the world would a porn site be in my referrer log. Then it dawned on me. A new form of spam!

Many people (most of them Moveable Typers) have complained about comment spam recently. Bots have been created that crawl the web and insert spammy comments on Moveable Type blogs. I haven’t had any instances of this on my site (go Drupal), but I have had a few slimy and nasty comments that I have ended up deleting.

Is this referrer log strageness a new form of spam targeted at site admins? Could this have been created by bots that were unable to spam my blog comments? I dunno, but it was one of my funny thoughts for the day.

There is something I have read online in a bunch of places, and it just doesn’t sit right with me.

RSS is a push technology.

I don’t get how that works. Coupling RSS feeds with my favorite RSS Aggregator, I get a more efficient way to see what is new in the world, and to quickly visit my “daily checks”.

My site has an RSS Feed too.

Again, I just don’t understand how RSS is a push technology. My site’s feed sits there until someone’s aggregator asks for it. Muddylaces.ca is not pushing it’s feed to anyone’s computer.

On the flip side, my aggregator doesn’t just accept random RSS Feeds. I subscribe to a feed, set the schedule I want it to poll the RSS Feed, and select the notification options when new content is ready. Nothing pushy there.

Someone please explain to me how RSS and its related technology is push related?

To me my aggregator is another tool for surfing the web. My web browser is used to browse web pages, my email client does the email thing, my IM client handles instant messages, and my aggregator aggregates RSS. What am I missing here? Let’s just call RSS what it really is: another form of content.