Recently in Internet Category

A while back I contacted the top five or so vendors of home weather stations to see if they offered any product that would simply measure various atmospheric variables and allow the home user to poll the station for data via some sort of open API. My search came up empty. Most of the time I felt like I had just asked them if they made pants with four legs.

I know there is a segment of consumers want a weather appliance that sits on their counter and tells them the weather. There is another segment that wants to be able to work with and track the data (for which some vendors provide their own software, usually Windows only.) Still another segments literally wants to just have the information available through an API that I can interact with. That last segment is me; that's what I'm looking for.

If you have a weather station that will:

• provide basic weather information
  • temperature
  • humidity
  • dew point
  • wind speed
  • wind direction
  • barometric pressure
  • precipitation
• allow me to poll the weather station
  • when I want
  • for what values I want
  • from on open API from whatever computer OS I want

then I would like to talk to you about purchasing one of your weather stations.

You can reach me at speed-weat@transmit.net.

My kids won't know what life was like without the Internet, before computers were in every home. They'll never know what a modem is or the wonderful (yet grating) sounds it would make when you dialed a BBS. They won't know the joy of getting online 1200bps (and all the free time you had when you waited for downloads to happen.) Even their perspective on the Internet will be different. They won't know about Mosaic browser or text-based (only) browsing with lynx. They'll never know Prodigy or Compuserve. AOL is just a website. They won't know that Yahoo was a directory of links, or that Altavista, Excite, HotBot, and WebCrawler were once prosperous search engines with a large market share. They won't know that there were many years of Internet without Google at all...

They won't know of life before the convenience of microwave ovens.

They will think (rightfully so) that everyone has a phone and they are almost exclusively cordless or completely wireless. They won't know that at one time all phones were wired into the wall, that long distance calls were expensive and infrequently used. They will never know what a party line or a rotary dial phone was. They won't realize that phones didn't used to have cameras, games, music, and full QWERTY keyboards on them.

They won't know that people used to shave with just one blade.

Lightweight 27-speed mountain bikes with disc brakes and super travel full-suspension will be mainstream and affordable. They won't know the relatively low tech, heavy, inefficient bikes we had to ride. They won't realize that mountain biking was started in the mid-1970s.

My kids will never know what a caboose is for. They will only see them in train museums (and so we take them.)

Film photography will be some long-forgotten technique that people used to use before digital photography. They won't know what camera film looks like. They'll never know the growing pains of digital photography from low resolution to slow, delay-prone cameras. Everything will be high resolution, automatic, and instantaneous. It seems normal to them that you can store thousands of photographs on a memory card smaller than your thumbnail. Digital photo frames will seem normal to them. Static real photo frames will seem pointless.

They'll never know what a reel-to-reel, an eight-track, a vinyl record, a Mini-disc, or a cassette tape is. Even CDs are going to the wayside as things gradually swing towards completely digital music delivery, played on the all-pervasive MP3 player. Walkman and Discman will be largely historical and unfamiliar to them. They won't ever know about VCRs and Laserdisc players. They'll have always known DVD, Blu-Ray, HD-DVD and DVR. They'll think televisions were always flat and thin. HDTV will be the norm for what they are used to viewing. Their music will be all-digital and all multi-channel.

My kids won't know what a floppy disc was (8", 5.25", or 3.5") Wow! They won't know DOS (and I'm doing all I can to make it so they won't have to use Windows.) They won't know about daisy wheel printers, slow and noisy dot-matrix printers or fan-fold paper.

My kids will probably never know much measured in terms of 'megabytes' and will likely be more familiar with the concept of 'terabytes' rather than with 'gigabytes'.

I'm excited about the rapidly changing world they've been born into, but I'm sad they won't know the world as I do. I'll try to teach them what I can and maybe if I'm lucky they'll help me see their world through their eyes someday.

So I've been having a problem with my "Send To Flickr" Bookmarklet functionality on Flickr, and been in a foul mood about it. I finally got to the right person at Flickr who set me in the right direction and give me permission to post the javascript contents for the bookmarklet here.

"Send To Flickr" Bookmarklet Code:

javascript:t='';for(var n=0;n<document.images.length;n++){t+='<a href=/ onclick=\'document.f.url.value=document.images['+n+'].src;document.f.submit();return false;\'><img border=0 src='+document.images[n].src+'></a><br>'};if(t!=''){document.write('\<p\>Click an image to add it to your photostream\</p\>\<form name=f action=http://www.flickr.com/tools/sendto.gne method=get\>\<input type=hidden name=url\>\</form\>'+t+'');void(document.close())}else{alert('No images!')}

<20050906 Edit>How Do I Use This?

Highlight the text in this box and drag it onto your "Bookmarks Toolbar" (Netscape/Mozilla) or ":Personal Toolbar" (Opera.) Optionally, you can manually make a bookmark. For the 'Location' field (Mozilla) or 'Address' field (Opera) paste in the javascript from above. (It needs to be copy-and-pasted as one line.) Then go load the page with the picture you want to upload to Flickr. Click on the bookmark(let) and it will list all images on that page. Click the image you want to upload. Login to Flickr if it asks you to. Choose "Upload To Flickr" button. Voila! Your file should be uploaded into your account on Flickr.

To make this really useful, add the bookmark to your "Bookmarks Toolbar" (Mozilla) or "Personal Toolbar" (Opera) under View->Toolbars, so you can use your bookmarklet easily while browsing. If at this point, you can't figure it out, please wait for Flickr's new Bookmarklet coming to a browser near you soon.

</20050906 Edit>

I believe this is the exact JavaScript from Flickr (they wrote the code, not me), but I can't guarantee it. It works correctly and YOU can scan through the JavaScript, there doesn't appear to be anything untoward in the code. Flickr is reworking their bookmarklet upload function currently, so keep an eye on their Upload Tools page (you must be logged in to use that link) and be sure to use their new bookmarklet when they post it. (I'll modify this blog entry when they do...)

</20070323 Edit>

I've stopped using YahooFlickr, so I can't verify whether or not this still works. I'll leave it here for history's sake, and in case anyone finds it useful. As before, this code came from Flickr, I do not support it or provide any warranty to it working or working correctly for any of your needs. Your mileage may vary, use at your own risk/benefit.

I am currently using a Canon Rebel XTi DSLR camera that records onto Compact Flash media. I'm primarily interested in filing, categorizing and annotating my image files. Post-processing (raw conversion, adjustments, etc.) is usually minimal unless I really messed up my settings or am working commercially.

1. Transfer the images, as taken, to fileserver in a working directory. This is done via USB-connected Compact Flash reader attached to my fileserver (I'm considering adding a built-in card reader if my motherboard provides USB connections internally, need to investigate.) The files are written to a dedicated RAID 1 share on my Fedora Core 6 (currently) Linux fileserver.
2. Set the Compact Flash card aside, just in case...
3. From Unix shell, check that the file ownership and permissions are set correctly on the copied files. File permissions are all changed to 0544 for my purposes, so the files are read-only, but my automated system can access the files.
4. If necessary, renumber (rename) files. Canon stores 10,000 photos per folder, then automatically increments to the next folder. I prefer to append the folder number to the image number to form individual file names like so:
   DCIM/CANON101/IMG_2345.JPG becomes IMG_1012345.JPG. The little shell script I use to rename my files looks like this:

   for i in `ls -1`
         do
         j=`echo $i |sed `s/IMG_/IMG_101/g'`
         mv $i $j
         chmod 0544 $j
      done
   

   I currently keep all my photos in one directory (may rethink this later) so it is important for me to keep filenames unique.
5. Record the filenames of the new files in the work directory, move them to the production directory.
6. Process the photos through raw conversion using Bibble Pro
7. Process the new files (recorded in the previous step) through the script that loads the image records, vital statistics and meta data (EXIF) into the database:
   • sample the image and record the average color in HEX
   • record default values (photographer, photographer e-mail, photographer URL, file directory, filename, url
   • extract EXIF data with jhead and load that data
   • create appropriate .html files which call scripts via SSI and verify new .html file permissions
   • categorize photos where I can by date/time and other extracted information
8. Create test lightbox view of thumbnails
9. Correct any images that need their orientation (rotation) adjusted. Usually this is a rotate operation -90 degrees to counteract the camera being used vertically instead of horizontally.Now done in Bibble Pro, so not an issue.
10. Rebuild thumbnail files for new images. Other than thumbnails, all images are resized on-demand, real-time, and fed as a BLOB from my server to your browser. Neat tricks with Perl, Imagemagick, and Apache.
11. Rebuild category files to account for new files assigned to categories.
12. Verify that everything works correctly and looks sane/sober/kosher.
Format Compact Flash media.

At this point, I've got all the information about the image into the database and appropriate web pages have been built to index and display the photos on my online photo galleries. Now I can sleep restfully. Additional notation, categorization, sorting, filing, etc. is an on-going task (with 20,500+ photos and growing, it may never be finished.) The photo files and databases are backed up on a RAID 1 partition locally (to protect against hardware failure) and are also mirrored remotely (using rsync) so I'll always have a copy off-site (in case of local catastrophe (weather, fire, etc.))

I'm in a constant development process with this project, right now. The to-do list is long. Here are some details of the current implementation.

All photos have appropriate copyright notation and all rights are reserved. All photos are available for licensing. All photos are available in their original, unmodified resolution and format. Please contact me for specific information about licensing.

Anyone else out there tired of messing with junk video players that do everything but play the video you want to watch? They all work 90% of the time and leave you hanging the rest.

I've found the Golden Video Player: VLC Media Player

This thing has a library of useful features and supports Windows, WinCE, BeOS, and every version of Unix (Mac OS/X, Linux, Solaris, BSDs) you could ever want. It plays almost every format on one player, across multiple platforms, reliably. Wow! Did I mention it's free and the source code is available! As if this wasn't enough, it can also be used as a video streaming server as well.

The install on Windows platforms is absolutely painless. My install on Fedora Core 4 was a bit more challenging, but I finally got all the pieces together. I highly recommend using apt-get and making sure you've got the "dag" repository in your /etc/apt/sources.list file, then, as root, issue the command:
apt-get install videolan-client
(Note: not 'vlc'.) There will be a bunch of dependent packages that will tag along for the install automatically.

This is what Free Software is all about. This project sits on the shoulders of many other quality free and open source software efforts. No contribution is required, but if you'd like to contribute your time, materials, skills, or anything else the VideoLAN team, I'm sure they would appreciate it.

I've had my own domain since 1994 and always ran my own personal web and e-mail services on a personal server. Running a public server on the Internet requires some technical expertise and a whole lot of patience. You will be bombarded with spam, you will face script kiddies scanning your services trying to 'hack' your passwords, you will see the underbelly of the Internet that most ISPs effectively hide from their users. I particularly enjoyed running my own e-mail server and quickly implemented RBLs, spamassassin, pyzor and razor to keep the good mail flowing and the spam headed to /dev/null.

All has gone well for several years until my ISP decided suddenly to block incoming traffic on port 25 (SMTP) to my connection. Everything froze, all my personal e-mail was blocked from my server, all my friend's e-mail traffic to their domains I was hosting stopped. I don't run a high-volume e-mail server, but nonetheless the messages traversing it are very important to me. I never was given a good explanation for why my ISP suddenly decided to do this, but their fix was that I'd have to upgrade to a commercial account ($70+/month instead of ~$35/month) in order to run my e-mail server on my Internet connection. I capitulated to their extortion while looking for an alternative e-mail hosting solution. This is strictly personal e-mail, not commercial/business related in any way, so the $20/month to $50+/month solutions I was finding really didn't fit my needs. Recently, I caught wind of a hosted e-mail service that Google has been developing and would be beta testing. Bingo! Sign me up!

I've been beta testing Gmail for your domain (Google's hosted e-mail offering) for a little over a month now on my personal domain, and am very pleased to say it works great. It's based on their Gmail infrastructure and interface, so Gmail users have almost no learning curve. It offers the same great feature set (excellent spam blocking (it has caught 1,000 spams in the last two weeks, with no false positives), easy e-mail content searching, rich text composing, AJAX interface, the Web Clip bar (which can be disabled)) as Gmail with some capabilities to customize the GUI for your users (by inserting your logo instead of the Gmail logo.)

Setup was very easy, some changes are required to your DNS MX records (remember your password for your account with your registrar?) for your domain to point e-mail to Google's servers. Once this has been completed (and propagated) you can log into the management interface, setup e-mail accounts, e-mail lists (think aliases) and make some minor changes to the interface (choose a background color, include your logo.) Once you've created the accounts everything is ready to go, it works just like Gmail. If you have a larger domain, you can use the account import feature so you can batch create your user accounts by uploading a CSV spreadsheet of your usernames and passwords.

The Gmail model has been to offer free e-mail service by displaying relevant(?) ads on the right hand side of your screen according to the contents of the e-mail you are currently reading. They still do this, I still find it minimally intrusive personally. I'd like to know what kind of revenue Google gets for clicked-through Gmail ads in a year (click fraud notwithstanding.) When you open your Spam mailbox, the Web Clip bar displays Spam Recipie links. French Fry Spam Casserole, Spam Breakfast Burritos, Spicy Spam Kabobs, Spam Quiche. I don't touch the stuff, but I like it when a corporate giant like Google doesn't take themselves too seriously and can still have a little fun. When in the Trash, the Web Clip bar displays recycling tips...

Wish List for "Gmail for your domain":

• For the beta test, each mailbox is frozen at 2GB, that's a lot of space, but why not let the mailbox size grow like other gmail accounts? That is one of your strongest features.
• Allow for pattern definitions in e-mail addresses. (I prefer to use "speed-[sitename]@example.com" when registering an e-mail with a third-party website. Right now I'd have to define each and every e-mail address I create instead of saying deliver "speed-*@example.com" mail to my Inbox.) This is one of the benefits of having your own domain name. Google has mentioned they are looking at doing this.
• Allow for a "catch all" bucket for all those "other" e-mail addresses that I have used over the years. Mail coming to my domain, unless it is determined to be spam, should be delivered to me. As it stands now, if I don't specify an e-mail address in my Google configuration, mail sent to the unspecified address (@mydomain) bounces. "Gmail for your domain" now offers a "catch all" e-mail address for your domain, an excellent example of the responsiveness of Google to their users' needs. It can be configured under "Domain Settings" once logged in to your administrative account.
• Especially during the beta test: put a link to the support e-mail on every page! (I had to go back and re-read my beta testing agreement to figure out what address to post feedback to. Isn't this the point of beta testing?)
• Announce your pricing structure for the future. It's a wonderful offering at it's current free price level (while beta testing.) How much will you charge afterwards? Keep in mind some of us are hobbyists, not commercial entities with big budgets, please.
• Put back the "invite a friend" links on your hosted e-mail offering
• Settle the issue of whether or not you will give user account information out to third parties and on what terms.

Right now Google's offering is in beta testing. They do have an "I'm interested" link at the bottom of their Google Hosted E-mail FAQ page. I've had the pleasure of telling my ISP where to stick their pricing and I've dropped back down into the reasonable price bracket (as opposed to their $70+/month commercial-account-because-your-host-your-own-email pricing.)

Overall, the offering looks excellent to me. It's been easy to use, as reliable a Gmail, and Google has been responsive to improvement suggestions. There are still some privacy concerns as to how and who Google shares their users' information with. If you run your own domain and are looking for e-mail hosting specifically, check out Gmail for your domain. Consider setting it up as a subdomain if you just want to test the service, so you can just direct mail from users@subdomain.example.com to "Google for your domain" while testing. This may necessitate signing up for the service twice if you decide to use it for your entire domain later, but gives you flexibility.

testing google spamfilter input review offering suggestion hosted comments email opinion domain spam betatesting tested suggestions private beta hosting service knology gmail for your domain e-mail changes results gmail

Several of us at work have taken to walking for exercise and as seems to often happen, we start to compare notes on routes/times/etc. A few people went out and got pedometers, some of us haven't. I was curious if anyone had worked out a way to measure distances on Google Maps and was very pleased to find the GMaps-Pedometer site, a Google Maps hack that let's you lay out your route, will give you distances in miles/kilometers, shows an altitude graph, and if you include you weight, it will estimate your calories burned on your walk. On top of that, you can create a permalink that will store the route you entered so you can refer to it later or e-mail it to a friend. Definitely a fun and useful Google Maps hack.

pedometer googlemaps google maps hack exercise trails paths mapping tracking estimating calorie altitude distance metric standard walking running walk run calculating

I read about the "next generation" of job posting/searching sites and in particular was interested in one, mkt10.com, which purported to be taking a new, more effective approach to matching potential employees with employers. They've got a nice site with some basic Web 2.0 (AJAX) functionality, but when I tried to use the site, I started having problems. From my e-mail I (unsuccessfully) attempted to send to them:

I keep getting trapped in dead ends in your interface while trying to fill out the questions in "Step 2."

Please consider making your user interface more user-friendly by offering at least a "None" and "Other" option at each decision point with a chance to further explain the "Other" response. Forcing people to choose bogus responses to questions that aren't applicable or answers that aren't correct only muddies the waters of your database.

For instance your "What standards/methodologies did you follow" question lists a selection of standards and methodologies that I haven't used. I can't indicate "none of these" or "I have used Six Sigma" and am forced to stop answering your questionnaire completely (i.e. you lost a potential customer/user) or I can choose a bogus answer in order to continue to the next question.

Your site seems very interesting, and I'd like to list myself on it, but when I get stuck on the question flow with no way out, I'm just going to abandon my efforts to use your site.

This is a basic user interface design. You should never force a user to enter invalid data in order to successfully navigate your interface, it invalidates your data and frustrates your users. You should also always leave a user an easy way to opt-out or pass on optional questions, not force them to choose a provided, default answer when it is not applicable.

I tried to use the "Contact Us" link on their website to provide this feedback, but the e-mail address ( admin.mkt10@mkt10.com ) linked from there bounced my mail back with the following error message:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

admin.mkt10@mkt10.com

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 12): 550 5.7.1 Requested action not taken: message refused

Oh yeah, you should also make sure you "Contact Us" link works so people can provide feedback. I hope this is just a beta site that is still under development. It looks promising, but has a couple significant road blocks to fix before it is ready for prime-time...

job search opportunities engines posting resume career employment employer employee candidate userinterface user interface annoyances bad design ineffective feedback broken navigation optional mkt10 mkt10.com cuttingedge cutting-edge new hot web2.0 ajax

[Originally published July 12, 2005]

OK I've bumped into a few people from Montgomery and surrounding communities that blog. Anyone keeping a list of have or have some others I need to check out?

Vitriolic Humor (Mine - speedeep)
http://blog.transmit.net/ (RSS Feed)
General interest, tech, IT , Linux, digital photography, programming, LAMP development

JohnTracy.Com (John Tracy)
http://www.johntracy.com/(RSS Feed)
Technology, information, local news, and rants.

JayDavenport.Net (Jay Davenport)
http://www.jaydavenport.net/ (Atom Feed)
Local happenings, media, sci-fi, moblog

Insert Witty Title Here (Charles Presley)
http://cfpresley.blogspot.com/ (Atom Feed)
Stories of life in Montgomery

Eating Montgomery (Charles Presley)
http://eatingmontgomery.blogspot.com/ (Atom Feed)
Dining experiences in and around Montgomery.

Montgomery DINKs
http://mgmdink.blogspot.com/ (Atom Feed )
Restaurant reviews and life as a DINK (dual-income, no kids) couple in Montgomery.

Inner View (Ethan Thomas)
http://thomaseth.blogspot.com/ (Atom Feed)
Local events, opinions, tied to onlinemontgomery.com.

http://www.theworldaroundyou.com/ (Kristopher?)
http://www.theworldaroundyou.com/ (http://www.theworldaroundyou.com/feed/atom/)
Local politics, news, and happenings in the Montgomery area.

More blogs below the break...

In the battle of e-mail users vs. spammers, the spammers have again raised the bar slightly with an elegant new solution to bypass spam blocking engines. Note that the charachters appear to be random so there is no pattern matching defense to this issue. They also format the message to look like a valid failure notice to a non-existant e-mail on my domain. Maybe it's time to add some more restrictive DNS RBLs again. Sigh...

27265888  79     42    775    11548488  59     98    235     733955  25    55           
25     89 69     96   89 42   66     55 168   427   26 26   46    62  18  63
44     22 88     68  98   84  88     52 4349 7281  65   53  33         9542
49223943  127257493 61     95 56548777  62 211 17 59     64 79          37
63        85     34 447778224 65   36   18     86 389413719 98          56
66        75     45 73     19 49    76  21     92 65     75 88    14    65
96        67     18 73     21 72     95 12     59 68     41  423983     91

http://their.link.here/xmasdrugs

Anyone worked out a good approach towards blocking this?

email spam attack spammer spamming prevention blocking spamassassin e-mail mail annoyance evasion