January 2005 Archives

I finally broke down and installed Yahoo Desktop Search, so far I really like it.

Yahoo! Desktop Search Beta is a free, downloadable desktop search application that enables you to instantly find any file, email or attachment on your computer. Yahoo! Desktop Search puts the power of Yahoo! Search on your computer, ensuring that you can always find what you're looking for - instantaneously.

What's great about desktop search for me right now is the ability to index and organize my email easier. Outlook's find functionality sucks, is feature limited, and is really slow. Now I have been able to do things like search for a keyword, and then search for the from/to, and then sort by date. It rocks, plain and simple. To get into the market quickly Yahoo basically partnered with and repackaged the x1 desktop search tool. Nobody has figured out how any of the search providers are going to make any money with desktop search. Speculation seems to be leaning towards; 1. using it to re-inforce brand loyalty, and drive web based searches originating from the desktop, and 2. giving a what's related advertisement to the search. My biggest concern is privacy and what the programs on my desktop are doing. Reason #1 for not installing the Google Desktop search tool. If I where to find out that Yahoo was secretly sending data off of my computer I would freak out.

So Apple's site will be a little slow today... Mac Mini

Live the digital life in stylish simplicity. Just 6.5 inches wide and 2 inches tall, Mac mini provides what you need to have more fun with your music, photos and movies -- right out of the box. And it boasts a miniscule price to match: Mac mini starts at $499. Inside its petite 2-inch tall, 6.5-inch square anodized aluminum enclosure, Mac mini houses a 1.25 or 1.42GHz G4 processor, 40 or 80GB hard drive, a slot-loading CD-R/DVD-ROM optical drive, 256MB DDR SDRAM and ATI Radeon 9200 graphics chip with 32MB dedicated DDR SDRAM -- all whisper-quiet. Mac mini Ports Connect your digital devices, such as cameras, iPod, printer, camcorder or keyboard to the Mac mini over USB 2.0 or FireWire. Built-in 10/100 BASE-T Ethernet and a 56K v.92 fax modem give you access to broadband or dial-up connections to the Internet. A headphone/audio line-out jack lets you listen to stereo sound.

iPod Shuffle

Time to mix things up. Meet iPod shuffle, the unpredictable new iPod. What will it play next? Can it read your mind? Can it read your moods? Load it up. Put it on. See where it takes you. Choose from pocket-size 512MB or 1G models starting at $99 and surprise yourself.

Jeremy Zawodny talks about the needs for his workstation and his decision to go back to Microsoft Windows from his Mac in a recent post. (See: I'm Joining the Majority by Putting the Mac Aside in 2005) I've struggled with this as well, actually I seem to be constantly struggling with this. There always seems to be something missing from Windows for me. I cannot exactly put my finger on it, but I haven't found what I am looking for in a Unix (Gnome, KDE, Enlightenment, XFCE, etc...) platform either. For a while I thought that the OSX platform would give me the best of both worlds. A good polished desktop with support for modern applications, and the Unix core that I end up constantly using. It just doesn't do the job. Jeremy is absolutely right with this statement, "On the Mac I always feel like they don't quite belong--they are second class citizens." On the Mac you are a second class citizen. The platform is not large enough to get the attention/resources of the commercial software houses. Sure there is commercial software for the Mac, but in most cases it has been ported, and usually not the latest and greatest. Apple is trying to combat this, and lately rumors are circulating that they will be releasing an office suite. Don't get me wrong the Unix support on the OSX platform is really cool. However, it is just not all the way there. Having to launch an X11 application in its own windowing environment sucks. Apple really needs to integrate this so when you launch an X11 application it loads in their window manager. And hence the second class citizen for the unix applications as well. Console applications work fine, but when you want to run a GUI, you just feel disconnected. And so what do I end up with... A laptop running Windows that I work primarily on, and a series of Unix based servers that power my environments. SecureCRT/Putty for an SSH client, and when necessary Exceed or Cygwin for an X client so I can export a Display. Not perfect, but it works.

Portion sizes in this country are so out of control. Christina and I went to the Daily Grill today for lunch. It is amazing how much food they serve you. More food than one person should ever eat in a sitting, in fact more food than one person should probably eat in a day. Not just the Daily Grill, but everywhere. Everywhere in this country restaurants serve way, way to much food. It's really no wonder why this country is so obese.

A great read for anyone running a web based application. This goes to show how important it is to validate user imput before executing it.

"SQL Injection" is subset of the an unverified/unsanitized user input vulnerability ("buffer overflows" are a different subset), and the idea is to convince the application to run SQL code that was not intended. If the application is creating SQL strings naively on the fly and then running them, it's straightforward to create some real surprises.

See: SQL Injection Attacks by Example

If you have a blog at some point you have received comment spam. If you are using MovableType chances are you have experimented with the MT-Blacklist plugin. MT-Blacklist allows blog authors to mark comments as spam, and share their findings with the larger community, so everyone using the MT-Blacklist can block the same comments automatically. Great project idea... start parsing the information provided by MT-Blacklist to create rulesets to block email spam? Chances are there would be some overlap don't you think?

For those of you unfamiliar with them, the part of the reason the Network Appliance (NetApp) Filers became so popular (besides their speed and ease of administration) is the ability to create a filesystem snapshot. A filesystem snapshot is a point in time copy of the filesystem state (done with filesystem metadata). Snapshots are incredibly efficient to create (they use a small portion of the disk), and very easy to restore from. For example on a NetApp with a snapshot of vol0, you would cd to /vol0/.snapshot/snapshotname/directory and copy (yes that's right copy) the file from the snapshot back to the desired location on disk. Pretty easy right? FreeBSD now support filesystem snapshots with UFS2 based filesystems (see: FreeBSD UFS2 Snapshots Management Environment. I need to start upgrading some of my servers to FreeBSD 5.0 to exploit this functionality.

Why is it that a search for Max Clark on Yahoo, AskJeeves, Dogpile, AltaVista, etc... all return what I would consider the proper result with my site on top, but a search on Google returns my mailing list postings and not my web site. I used to be #1 on Google, I need to fix this. What's really funny, is the site that Google lists first is a person who abbrievated his name just like I do.

This is a really big deal and shows how important this Blogging thing is. SixApart (MovableType and Typepad) have done a great job creating software and services for blogging, LiveJournal has done a great job at building a community. As any successful Internet site will show (think eBay), having a great service gets you 80% there, but if you can build a community, you will be a huge success. Congratulations Brad and Mena, you two really have come a long way and serve as an inspiration.

iBod: Portable photo technology puts Playboy’s sexiest models at your fingertips.

Portable MP3 players and other handheld media toys are this year’s must-have geek gadgets. The latest thing is Apple’s new-generation iPod — the iPod Photo — which does for pictures what the original iPod did for music. Now you can view individual images or entire slide shows in the palm of your hand at the tap of a button to beautify your dull commute or just to pass the time in the lecture hall.

Yes that’s right, you can download porn to your iPod.

So I sat down last night and started writing some PHP code again. It feels like months since the last time I have done this. Actually it is pretty embarrassing to look back at some of my old software code for references and examples and see just how good I was at one point, and how far I have regressed. The human brain is an amazing thing. The speed at which you can learn new things is equaled by the speed you can forget them. Software development is just like sports, you have to constantly practice to stay on top of your game.

So as anyone in Los Angeles could tell you it's been raining here. In fact it has been raining here a lot. So what does that mean? Well there is the good news that we really need it (droughts and all), not to mention that there is an insane amount of snow in the mountains right now. And of course the bad news... every time it rains in Los Angeles my phone line craps out. Why? Because of "severe weather". No I am not kidding, "severe weather" is the actual quote from Verizon. Last storm (Thanksgiving-ish) our phone line went out as well. I thought I was just isolated to me in my building, but after talking with several different people about it everyone was getting the same story. Last time it took me two weeks to get an appointment with Verizon for a serviceman to come out and fix it. This time I got lucky. My appointment is on Friday Jan 7th, between 8:00am and 8:00pm. Yes that's right, the appointment time is between 8:00am and 8:00pm. Honestly, why do they even bother giving an appointment time. Why not just say we will be there on Friday sometime. Or better yet, we will be there between the 6th and the 8th. I mean really. I have worked for enough service based companies to know that it isn't that difficult to at least give the customer a two hour window. Christina's decided that Verizon has us by the balls and is pissed off that we don't have any options to switch to a different company. I honestly don't even care about the phone that much (it seems the only people that call are telemarketers), what kills me is that I completely lose DSL when this happens. Sure I could get a cable modem, but with Adelphia being my cable company I would rather switch to dialup. Luckily one of my neighbors hasn't figured out what WEP means. I really need to get off my but and invest the money in a RF link.