I just took out a one year ad in the back of my local church’s weekly bulletin. I didn’t want a whole year but that’s the only way I could buy it. Wish me luck! I bought the ad from my new friend Ben I.
But that was my idea! Instant Live et all
But that was MY idea!
Yesterday I opened up EMedia Magazine, saw an ad for an industrial multi-CD burner and again thought about an idea I had a while ago. Use fast CD burners to make a live recording of a music concert just minutes after the show is over. I had this idea maybe a year ago while looking through a similar magazine. So last night I went out to my local music house, The Stanhope House, to spec it out.
Perfect. The place held about 150 concert goers. I guessed that maybe 10% of concert goers would spend the money on a CD… That’s 15 CDs…. such a burning rig would cost under $2,000… working 3 or more nights a week, it could make money. The Stanhope House already had a good permanent mike setup. I could tap into that. There wasn’t much room in the soundboard area…. hmmm… and it wouldn’t be cost effective to have me come out and mix the album for just 15 sales. I could make a small box with 2 or 4 burners, a mini PC, maybe running Linux with special software and just a few buttons on the case. Buttons for “Start recording”, “Stop”, “Next song starts here”, “No music here”. The sound engineer could make the CDs. But what music licensing when a band plays a cover? Ah. The Harry Fox Agency is all about music royalties. For just $0.08 per song, we can burn a CD of a cover… Figuring out the exact royalties to be paid is a technical task…. But well suited to the computer: it could keep track of every song burned and at the end of the month export a list of who gets paid what. But that means the track names (and authors) have to be inputted into the computer as it’s being burned, to give proper credit. Hmmm. The sound engineer might need to have a keyboard and screen, tied to the Harry Fox music database. That’s ok, it’s doable.
I called my sister, asking about Greatful Dead bootlegs (she knows about such things). She offered good advice (except for the part about my idea being dumb and unworkable, but hey.)
I was getting ready to call the owner of the Stanhope House today or next week to talk about my plan. I called up TJIC to mull the idea and maybe look for programming support. He said, “Oh yeah. I read about something like that in the New York Times a while ago.” ERK! What? No. It’s MY idea. So I go online and…. fuck.
- The NY Times article (I think it is anyway… close enough) (local version)
- Instant Live from Clear Channel
- From Rolling Stone (local version) This article cinched it for me.
- Newbury Comics Instant Live Category
…the Who jumped on the idea and wound up grossing $1.2 million on live CDs from their 2002 tour. Early this year, Phish made every 2003 show available — within forty-eight hours — on livephish.com; the band has sold more than 150,000 of the recordings and earned more than $2 million.
There is probably room for me in this industry. I could probably even make a living at it if I worked hard at it. But it isn’t my idea.
Backups, continued from yesterday
And then there’s Farsite (from the dates on the website, the project appears dead), xFS (dead and not what I’m looking for), Oceanstore (did I mention that already?),
Toothache: Damn Referred Pain
I had something stuck in my teeth for about a week. It was driving me crazy and it was starting to ache constantly instead of just when I was chewing. So I broke out the dental floss, the toothpicks, the fancy dental pick, I scrubbed with my toothbrush, I fiddled with my toothbrush…. but NOTHING. You see, I could feel exactly where the thing was stuck in my teeth: between my rear and second from rear left lower molars. So I worked at it and worked at it. But I started getting suspicious when a serious dental flossing turned up nothing at all. So I tried something different. I tried chewing on my toothbrush handle, feeling out exactly which teeth were unhappy.
Now mind you, I could feel EXACTLY where this piece of junk was stuck in my teeth so I was just humoring my curiosity. But low and behold! It wasn’t my lower teeth that hurt, it was my upper teeth! Damn referred pain! I took dental floss to the space between my UPPER rear and second from rear left molars and found junk and blood. Today, a few days later, my teeth are feeling almost back to normal.
It’s kind of spooky about that referred pain. Dentists have told me about it before but I didn’t -really- believe them. But here I am… I felt I could point exactly where the problem was but I was wrong… about my own body. Weird.
Excellent Reading: GRC.com DDOS
Read The Strange Tale of the Denial of Service Attacks Against GRC.com. (local PDF copy) Find out detailed information about the seedy underbelly (whatever that means) and lots of great and very specific info about IRC DDOS attacks.
Buying a Safe
Sentry safe A5889 (2 cubic feet, electronic lock, water resistant, 2 hr fireproofing) , MSRP $561.88. Staples price $309.99. Staples rebate -$50. Staples coupon -$15. Staples Teacher Rewards 10% (-$24.50). Shipping (on a 206 lb safe) $0.00. Amex miles earned 220 (value about $2.20). Total price paid: $218.29
Got No Love Today
|
chris smither |
no love today |
drive you home again |
hightone records |
10 Minutes ago |
|
Search-It> artist title album |
||||
They just played the above song on WNTI again. The first time I heard it, on my way to Rochester and to meet Marah vividly jumps out at me. It’s all about new beginnings, not giving a damn about the things that don’t need giving a damn about, foot stomping, and singing loudly in the car. I turned on the radio as I left the house and really got what I was listening to just after passing the clubhouse. Just after I passed the gate, I was so happy that I knew what the song was making me feel.
I got DIBS!
Finding what you are looking for is all in the keywords. I’ve been looking for a way to exchange backup space with my friends for a while now. “I’ll give you 5 gigs on my machine for 5 gigs on yours”. What I wanted was secure (likely encrypted before leaving the premises), low bandwidth (think rsync), and automated (choose files–>zip–>scp–>remote site is a pain). Tonight I was seriously starting to think about building this myself. So I did just ONE MORE internet search for it. Just to make sure it didn’t already exist. I was into my 5th search or so and about to give up when I plugged in to Google “backup encrypt remote distributed”. And there it was almost at the top of the list. DIBS, The Distributed Internet Backup System. Now I’m not positive this is it. But it’s looking very promising. I’m excited.
…
…
:-( It’s not ready for prime time. The code is in Alpha… You have to know the exact name of the file to recover it. The “Recover_All” feature hasn’t been implemented. I wish I were smart enough and had enough time to help out with such projects.
Maybe Hdup can do it. Other possibilities: Hivecache, The OceanStore Project, Freenet, Travis Reeder’s proposal for a Distributed Backup System,
Malware for my trophy case: 2_0_1browserhelper2.dll
The short form:
2_0_1browserhelper2.dll is a nasty adware toolbar with no UI. See my 3-19-04 journal article at http://lee.org/journal. It took me 2 friggin hours to figure this one out. It mangles Google search results in IE and sticks ads for the “websearch toolbar” in the results.
Kill it by removing the BHO 2_0_1browserhelper2.dll
——————
I was at a client’s house cleaning off spyware and I came across some particularly insidious malware. I’d do a Google search and the results would take a long time to come back. But more importantly, half of the search results were crap. They were ads for some “websearch toolbar”, directing me to www.websearch.com and such. The worst thing was that the Google results page looked almost normal. It almost looked like Google had sold out to these Websearch people.. allowing them to flop 1/2 of their content toward Websearch.com.
So I downloaded Netscape and made sure that Google hadn’t sold out. a search for “Prussian medals” on Internet Explorer returned about 50% junk while the same search in Netscape looked just fine. IE was being hijacked.
Now I just had to find what was doing it…. 2 hours later, bull’s-eye. Here’s the low-down:
The www.websearch.com toolbar is bad news.
Here’s an excerpt from their Terms of Use:
By installing the Service you understand and agree that the following changes may be made to your Internet Explorer browser and that the following functions may be performed by the Service: install a Search Toolbar in your browser which may (i) block certain pop-up ads and pages; (ii) display links to related websites and keywords based on the information you view and the websites you visit; (iii) store non-personally identifiable statistics of the websites you have visited; (iv) redirect certain URL’s including your browser default address bar search, DNS error page and Search Button page to or through the Service and; (v) automatically update the Service and install added features or functionality conveniently without your input or interaction unless you have chose to be notified of such update in advance.
The Terms of Use also says how to uninstall the software. (”When the Add/Remove Programs Properties window opens, locate the listing for ‘Search Toolbar’ that you would like to uninstall from the list of installed programs.”) But, like any good malware, the uninstallation instructions didn’t work.
Spybot Search and Destroy shows this software as a BHO
Spybot-S&D Browser helper object report, 3/18/2004 9:26:07 PM
{83DE62E0-5805-11D8-9B25-00E04C60FAF2}
Class file: 2_0_1browserhelper2.dll
Path: C:\WINDOWS\
One reason it took so long to figure this out was that this BHO, which normally shows up as an IE toolbar has no visible user interface… Jerks.
All you have to do is disable that BHO in Spybot and you’re good to go. Another way is to rename c:\windows\2_0_1browserhelper2.dll. You might have to reboot into Safe mode to rename the file.
I’ve got another client with the same malware. It’ll take 5 minutes to get rid of her Websearch malbar (to coin a term).
The bubble game
I found this at http://www.chratnox.de/swf/bubble.swf Thanks to http://keithdevens.com/weblog/archive/2004/Mar/14/bubbles for the reference.
And now on to the game!
Play me!
I got a Suspension
This happened last month, on 2-13-04 but I thought it was funny enough to mention….
You remember that last month, I flooded the boys room… Well, this month, I got suspension at the middle school. I had to sit in the library with my desk facing the wall all day long. There was nothing to do but some stupid homework and a test that was really easy. And you know why I got suspension? Because I didn’t go to detention. Stupid. And I didn’t go to detention because my mom couldn’t pick me up after school. (Of course, in retrospect, I should have tried to work this detention thing out with school and my mom but hey…) And I got a detention because I wrote “Suck” on some kid’s notebook. I guess I shouldn’t have done that.
Well, actually you should replace “I” in that last paragraph with “my student”. But it was almost as awful for me. I had to sit there and watch him all day, making sure he wasn’t going to get in any trouble and that he didn’t talk to anyone and stuff. Bleck.
So, I got suspension.
Outlook 2002 Was Built for Thieves
Outlook 2000 had a tiny little feature whereby when your mouse hovered over a web link, the target would appear in the status bar down at the bottom of the window. Outlook 2002 eliminated this feature, making forged emails like this (at right. Click
to enlarge) possible.
The link on that email takes you to this web page (at left). Everything appears to be all on the up and up, right? Wrong. Look closely at that web page… at the top of the email. The address is “http://63.203.30.222/registration/Verify.htm” That isn’t a Paypal address. It’s a thief’s address.
If Outlook hadn’t gotten rid of that little feature, it would have been harder to pull the wool over people’s eyes on this kind of scam. Hmmm…. I’ve been hearing how Microsoft is pushing for an email postage/verification/something system lately. Am I just a wacky conspiracy theorist by suggesting that Microsoft is crippling their own program in order to make their new email verification system more necessary? No, that’s crazy.
Rant about CSS standards
TJIC told me “the timestamps in your blog kinda freak me out. They look like small hovering clues, as if I’d moused over something…and am being given suplimentary info…”
That didn’t jibe with any of my style sheets so I looked into it. Apparently, Netscape and IE treat the Float: tag differently. Here’s examples:
| Internet Explorer 6.0 |  |
| Netscape 7.1 |  |
(note: the date is an <H2> tag, the text that begins "Outloo.." is an <H3> tag)
I’ve since tweaked it a bit so it doesn’t look so terribly noticeable. The problem seems to lie in how the two browsers let CSS margins affect floated text. They do it just a little bit differently. They still don’t look perfectly the same, but they’re good enough.
| Internet Explorer 6.0 |  |
| Netscape 7.1 |  |
SpamAssassin, CRM114, Brightmail
I’m chasing my tail spamwise. SpamAssassin kinda works but at a conservative setting (I have it at ‘8′) it doesn’t block enough spam to make it worth me having to scan two spam folders, one for Cloudmark and one for SpamAssassin. I’d love to try CRM114 but even if I got it going well, it has to live on a Unix box, which makes it a slight pain for me (having succumbed to the succor of Windows). But if any friend of mine wants to set up CRM114 and let me filter my mail through them, I’d shower them with gifts and Jean Nate after-bath splash. Do you remember those commercials? I do. Oh yeah…
So, I’m going to try and push all my mail through my optonline.net account. It occurs to me that they run Brightmail. We’ll see how that goes. But just to be pesky, optonline just put up notices saying that their spam-buckets won’t be available for some unspecified amount of time. That means that mail counted as spam gets immediately deleted. Hurumph. that’s no way for me to do a test! I’ll wait.
Oh and it’s cool to note that CRM114 is built by a friend of mine. Hi Crash!
RSync
I haven’t used Perl in a long while. But it can be fun! I scripted up a tiny little RSync script to backup the important parts of my hard drive to another drive. Trouble is… my script sucks. But that’s ok. A rudimentary BASH script works better. RIBS is supposed to be this snazzy backup helper but it’s just a no-UI front end for a command line… I suppose it could save me some keystrokes but I’ll play with my own command-line scripts for a while.
DDNS, Dyndns.org, and the D-Link DI-624
I tried in vain for weeks to get the Dynamic DNS system on my D-Link DI-624 router to work with Dyndns.org. I gave up and decided to use DynSite instead. It does the job nicely.
More About Cloudmark Spamnet
Spamnet isn’t perfect. It correctly blocks about 40 spams a day of mine. But it also incorrectly blocks about 1 non-spam per day. That’s a big pain because it means I have to sift through my spam list every week or so looking for mistakes.
I’m going to try using dual filtering. I’ll set my ISP’s SpamAssassin to a conservative setting and keep Spamnet. The idea being that SpamAssassin won’t have any accidental hits. That will reduce the number of emails I’ll have to sift through.
As a side note, I just found out that Spamnet uses the same spam identification network that SpamAssassin does. SpamAssassin uses Vipul’s Razor for fingerprinting spams.
A new CSS
You’ve probably noticed that my journal page changes it’s look at every load. I welcome you to peek in the source code of this page to see how I do that. It’s easy. I just added a new random style sheet today.. journal3.css
@import “journal.css”;
/* This CSS inspired by http://razor.sourceforge.net/css/default.css */
body {
font-size: 12px;
}h2 {
width: auto;
border-color #4e7aaf;
color: #000000;
background: #cde6ff;
float: left;
}h3 {
background: #cccccc;
padding: 4px 10px 4px 10px;border-style: solid;
border-width: 1px 1px 1px 1px;
border-color #4e7aaf;
}.quote {
border: #4e7aaf;
border-left: none;
border-right: none;
background: #cde6ff;
float: left;
}
The Awful Forums - My mother is insane (~5M of photos)
This really freaked me out. (local archive)
I think it bothers me for a couple reasons…
- A part of me is capable of falling into this
- I sometimes see this tendency in others… friends of mine.
- Some of my friends actually do this full-bore.
That last one bugs me the most. It’s kind of a “guilty by association” thing. Maybe this form of insanity is contagious? (oh and a note to PPG: No, I don’t count you as a person that does this)
