Tag2Find

I haven't used this app yet, but the review on  TechCrunch looks very promising.  I signed up for the beta on their website, and expect (hope?) to hear back from them soon.

Other than the name (which I truly dislike), this looks to be a very valuable product.  I would gladly embrace the concept of tagging any object (be it email, file, calendar entry, etc.)  I kind of do something similar with categories in Outlook (for mail, contact, and calendar items).

I believe the real win here is to take a product like Tag2Find and have it utilize the native containers as opposed to keeping all the metadata in a separate db.  There are inherit pros and cons to this, but overall I like the concept of storing my tags in the keywords field of my Word document - not to mention products like Windows Search and Google Desktop could index off it as well.  For all I know, this thing does this now.  Until they email me an invite, I can only guess.. (hint, hint)

Join tag2find Beta

Get your SPF on!

So who woulda thunk that Microsoft would have a very slick SPF Record Setup Wizard up on their site.

If you're not familiar with SPF, or Sender Policy Framework for long, then give a quick read to this article on MSExchange.org.  Basically, SPF is a kludge of the DNS to try and provide authentication for where email is allowed to come from on a per domain basis.  Why is this ineffective, because I can buy my own domain name as a spammer (myspamname.com), send email from that domain (imaspammer@myspamname.com), and tell the world that the servers I'm spamming from are legit. :sigh:

I'd still recommend that any of you that own your own domain names setup your SPF entries to (help) ensure that your mail gets through.  I've used Google's GMail as a nice test bed for my SPF implementations as it is fast and will easily show you the full mail headers (including the SPF headers).

The 50 Worst REAL Video Game Names Of All Time

Thanks to the guys at GameRevolution.com who assembled the more than mildly amusing 50 Worst Video Game Names Of All Time.  Good for a 5 minute detour out of your busy  hectic  boring day.

This could easily be a picture of me...

So this little three year old kid wants a SpongeBob SquarePants doll, and decides to get one however he can.  Two minutes later his grandmother can't find him - oh wait, he's in the machine.  The picture here is priceless.  Good times.

The real bitch here is that he didn't get the damn doll.  At least not for lack of trying.  I'm assuming they gave him something, they just didn't have a SpongeBob doll (and Elmo wasn't cutting it). 

Running DOS on Vista?

So I was asked today if DOS would run on Vista, as both a consultant and staff IT manager stated that it would not.  My gut was to say "Yes, of course it will run," but I wanted to make sure my gut wasn't lying to me.  So here's how I wasted an hour of my day:

Microsoft says:

Q: Will my MS-DOS applications continue to run under Windows Vista without modification?
A: Yes, they will.

Great, thanks a lot Redmond.  But still, that’s a good start.  Since there will be two flavors of Vista architecture, 32-bit and 64-bit - and as I have heard rumors that there will not be an included cmd emulator (DOS emulator) in the 64-bit version (and I could see this being true, but I do not believe that MS will turn its back on DOS apps, not yet at least) I've worked up some options.

1. Stay on XP/2000.  XP Pro was released on 12/31/2001 (here), and their policy is 10 years of support (here) which keeps you fine until the start of 2012.
2. Move to Vista and run dosbox.  dosbox has been used by gamers to run old dos games for quite sometime, and works on Vista.  The guys at ExtremeTech did a write-up on it back in May 2006, and the only issues they found then were with graphics drivers (that legacy, non-gaming DOS apps wouldn’t require in most all cases).
3. Move to Vista and run DOS in a VMWare (corp site) or Microsoft Virtual PC environment. Most thorough compatibility chart evar, here.
4. Use one of the numerous other virtual machines that supports DOS.

That’s about as thorough of an analysis as I could pull off in less than 60 minutes of wasted time I don't have.  Looks like both their consultant and the staff IT guy are falling a bit short  a bit off the mark  mental midgets.

Scripting the World's Most Frustrating App: iTunes

So in a fit of frustration on a flight to Detroit last week (before I caught my nasty, nasty Michigan cold) I started banging around the iTunes COM SDK a bit with .NET.  I was able to hammer out some really cool functionalitiy (to me, an idiot that is).  When I went looking for some resources I found the following that I wanted to share with you, the Google Spider (the one sole reader of this blog).

iTunesKeys is a neat little app that runs in your system tray and allows you to set hotkey for common iTunes actions.  I use it for setting ratings as songs play.  It doesn't seem to bog down my keyboard interface either, which is a serious plus.

The Known iTunes for Windows Plug-Ins thread over at iLounge contained some interesting stuff too.

There were some iTunes Javascripts here that were mildly interesting.

Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes has a small Windows section that I found resourceful (it's where I found most the above links).

'Experts': Ban Won't Stop Online Gambling

"It has put a terrible scare into people," said I. Nelson Rose, who teaches gambling law at Whittier Law School. "But it won't by any means wipe out Internet gambling."  Going on later to say that: "The regulations are clearly going to prevent banks from doing electronic fund transfers to gambling sites, but that is no big deal."

This is exactly what I've been saying for years.

As this article notes, we will see a move to ewallets and other non-U.S. based payment processors.  It'll be very interesting to see what Neteller decides to do. In the meantime, who wants to get in on a pool of when we see big gaming in Nevada step into this newly created online gambling void?  I'm thinking 18-36 months, you?

DoubleTwist's Secret Sauce: A FairPlay Smash-and-Grab

Remember Jon Lech Johansen?  The 15-year old Norwegian that brought DeCSS and QTFairUse into the world?  Well he's still free and still up to his reverse-engineering ways - but now with DoubleTwist Ventures up in SF, CA.

Their pitch is very interesting.  They are selling "iTunes-compliant" Apple DRM (Fairplay) so that you can protect your content - but with the rub that you do not have to go through Apple.  It is a concept that I considered a year back but dismissed due to my concerns around legal ramifications.  I’m not sure they won’t get slapped (enjoy the double negative) with a TRO and C&D from the get go.  I see no reasonable and viable way to achieve this without reverse engineering Apple's work - which normally would be legal - but in this case, runs afoul of the DMCA (IMHO).

Presumably there is a link embedded in FairPlay protected content that instructs the player (iTunes) where to get a license from.  DoubleTwist embeds their own link, auths the user (within iTunes or independently through a web-session), and determine which license, if any, to send.  It's all fine and dandy until our Apple Overlords get all litigious.

Apple's DRM licensed to others by DVD Jon
Jon Lech Johansen’s Blog

ithmb: an iPod kludge (sponsored by Seagate?)

So today my good friend Larry (aka: Larmo; ArcaneC5; Lawrence of Polesmokia) brought the iTunes photo cache kludge to my attention. 

What iPod photo cache kludge you ask (as I did)?  Well according to Google, no one is talking about this.  According to Larry, everyone is too busy kissing Apple's ass.  I believe them both.

Apparently the folks at Apple, in their infinite knowledge of how to create amazingly functional products decided to store each and every image uncompressed.  Not once or twice, but four times.

That's right, each and every image on your iPod has four versions:

1. The first thumbnail is 720x480 and in YUV 4:2:2 format, interlaced.
2. The second thumbnail is 176x220 and in RGB 565 format.
3. The third thumbnail is 42x30 and in RGB 565 with swapped bytes.
4. The fourth thumbnail 130x88, RGB 565 with swapped bytes.

So when Larry took his 1,848 images and scaled them down to 640x480, he had about 130MB of JPG's sitting on his hard drive.  After copying them to his iPod using iTunes, his cache folder for those pictures was a whopping 1.5GB! That's a 11.5x increase in size above and beyond his low-res 60kB source files - meaning each photo takes up about 800kB worth of thumbnails on his iPod for display to a silly 320x240 screen.

Maybe my brother was right.  Long live the Zen Zune.

(ty ipodlinux.org)

Bruce Schneier talking at USC

Bruce Schneier, of international security fame, is speaking at USC tomorrow, Tuesday September 26th @ 7pm.  I'll be there...

What is a Hacker?

Absolutely fantastic essay written by one of my favorite technologists, Mr. Bruce Schneier.  If you know me, or you know technology, I urge you to read his essay that appeared in the Summer 2006 issue of 2600.  It summarizes my exact view and beliefs of many things, including what must be one of the most dynamic technology-related words: 'hacker'.

Jelbert GeoTagger

The Jelbert GeoTagger is a very cool device that fits into the flash shoe of your favorite SLR.  Once on, it records the precie location and direction of every photograph you take.  It gets even better when thought of next to the Microsoft's Photosynth product.

Yahoo Gives Users a Reason to Buy Viiv

So it looks like Yahoo! launched their Viiv service yesterday with an initial focus on providing fantasy football information to those rabid fantasy football fans.  Looks pretty cool.

Yahoo Gives Users a Reason to Buy Viiv

Sudan Man Forced to 'Marry' Goat

Good times in the Sudan!

"A Sudanese man has been forced to take a goat as his "wife", after he was caught having sex with the animal."

From BBC NEWS

It's Raining ... Batteries?!

According to this ad, 970 trillion kWh of energy (sunlight to you non-nerds) goes unused everyday.  I for one would like to start using it. In the meantime, here is the very cool ad for German Solar Power 'Pioneers' Solon.

BugMeNot: Complete with Firefox Extension

 So BugMeNot.com is a great little service that provides you with a general, 'public' username and password for sites that require registration.  That, in and of itself, is pretty cool.

But couple it with the Firefox extension that I found today, and logging on to all those annoying news sites becomes trivial.  It even reduces context menu clutter by only showing you the BugMeNot option on username and password fields.  Thanks much Dmytri!

The DoJ's War Against Online Gambling

 I stumbled upon (thank you Google Alerts!) an interesting and seemingly complete synopsis of the current legislation used in prosecuting those involved with online gaming, as well as information about those that have been prosecuted by the US.

My favorite snippet is probably this quote from John G.Malcolm, Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division, United States Department of Justice on 2003.06.11:

"Broadcasters and other media outlets should know of the illegality of offshore sportsbook and Internet gambling operations since, presumably, they would not run advertisements for illegal narcotics prostitution, child pornography or other prohibited activities. We'd appreciate it if you would forward public service message to all of your member organizations which may be running such advertisements, so that they may consult with their counsel or take whatever actions they deem appropriate."

From bettingmarket.com: The Department of Justice's war against online gambling.

ars technica

I've found more and more stuff on the ars technica website that I've liked and enjoyed; and less and less of the garbage that infiltrates most blogs (like this one).

Carbon: The Gift That Keeps on Giving
"Planet Earth seemed to have a pretty good system going. Carbon [...] got used as the building block for all life on earth. [...] Eventually, the carbon would make its way deep underground where heat and pressure worked their magic, creating coal, oil, and natural gas. All well and good. Then things started to go wrong."

Open-Source OCR Tool: Thanks Google and HP
Built on top of 10-year old shelved HP technology, Google is releasing this OCR Tool to the open-source community.  Printed documents are no match for the Google Brain-Trust Bulldozing Machine.

WiFi Uniqueness is not skin deep
A Carleton University researcher by the name of Dr. Jeyanthi Hall analyzed a dozen or so devices, and found that due to manufacturing variances each WiFi stack gives a unique fingerprint that is accurate to within 95% during her testing.  Pretty cool.

GPL: GPL's Pro Lawsuit
So IChessU is dedicated to teaching chess to the masses.  That is all well and fine, but apparently they have trampled on the GPL in the process, which is a general no-no.

MS XML Notepad 2006

So Microsoft released a cool XML viewer editor that was written in .NET 2.0.  Supposedly it will be available on Codeplex with full source in the near future...

Check it out:
XML Notepad 2006

Live Writer Addon for Firefox

So Can Erten has whipped together an extension for Firefox called Live Writerfox that will allow you to easily blog pages that you browse through Firefox using Microsoft Live Writer.

How easy is it to hardware hack a Voting Machine?

The answer: Easy.

This is a very interesting piece that I came across today regarding our current state of voting machines here in the states.  Apparently Diebold still hasn't learned from their ATM mistakes of years past (remember the cash door that could be lifted just enough to retrieve your money, but not trip the switch?).

Cracking a Diebold
“A couple of untrained 54-year old women from Black Box Voting bought $12 worth of tools and in four minutes penetrated the memory card seals, removed, replaced the memory card, and sealed it all up again without leaving a trace.”

Many thanks to the continued great work on Bev Harris’ Black Box Voting site.  Donate some cash today, they'll appreciate it and so will I.

Found on The Raw Feed .:

Microsoft Wants A Patent For Conjugating Verbs

Our friends over at Techdirt reported that Microsoft wants to own the concept of conjugating verbs.  While I'm sure there's more to it (like some cool software that does a better job of it then our Indian call center friends), I have yet to read it and really like the headline.  :)

Techdirt: Microsoft Wants A Patent For Conjugating Verbs

Sweden: A Nation Divided Over Piracy?

So the piracy war wages on in Sweden.  On the one hand I understand what their intention is, and what their issues are.  I do not hide the face that I believe the DMCA is a horrible piece of legislation, not to mention half the shit in the Patriot Act.  But at the risk of invoking a dedicated Carnivore server to my blog and laptop, I shall cease ramble.

Regardless of your persuasion and thoughts towards copyright, I suggest reading up on what's going on up around the arctic circle. These pieces in Wired really caught my eye:

A Nation Divided Over Piracy
Wired's overview of the piracy camps in Sweden

Secrets of the Pirate Bay
Background on the Pirate Bay.

Faces of Sweden's Pirate Wars

Letters between the MPAA and a Swedish Politician

Did I mention that I like the Swedes?  FWIW, if I were a registered Swedish voter, I would most likely be a card-carrying member of the Pro-Pirate party - even if their approach is a touch misguided.

Windows Live Writer

So all my posts today have been entered using Microsoft's new beta of the Windows Live Writer.  So far I'm quite impressed.  It is a very cool tool that immediately adapted to my blog (on blogger) and gave me a very easy WYSIWYG local environment for blogging.

And since they don't (and most likely won't) support Firefox, it might just be enough to make an IE7 user out of me...

I'm burnin', I'm burnin' for Dell...

So appearently Dell's burn.  Dell's burn good.  A little while back one caught fire at a conference in Japan.  Bad times.

Last month some poor midwestern office worker ran back to his office to find his coworkers dousing his Latitude with flame retardant goodness from their underused fire extinguishers.

I returned from lunch to find my old Latitude (D600) running quite warm.  The battery was too hot to handle.  I called Dell, bitching, got them to replace it.  That day they announced a recall of 4.1e6 laptop batteries - made by our friends at Sony.  Good times for Sony.  Maybe they can use the recalled parts in 2nd Gen PSP's or PS3's as 'spark simulators'.

HTC MTeoR: A ball of confusion and lies

So apparently HTC’s marketing department isn’t talking to the engineering team.  I’ve been following this thread for awhile (as I was excited to get one of these phones), but alas it looks like all those hopes are gone due to a simple typo.

The skinny is this: the MTeoR does NOT support UMTS 1900 or GSM 850 – both of which are important for any US user (especially if you pay a stipend to Cingular).  Many guys are returning their phones to their providers and resellers.

Check out this review from Unwired (it's a long one), and the links to the HowardForums posts that I've been following:

Unwired Review
A post with a reply from HTC Customer Service
The HowardForums Thread that I’ve been following

Anyway, it is a shame, but I guess the HTC TyTN will have to do as my only phone.

Yipee! US is still #1 in Call Center Jobs!

"...62 percent of call center jobs are located in the U.S. and 6 percent in the United Kingdom. Canada and India each have 5 percent of the total market."

Does anyone really believe this? I can't count the number of nice folks I've talked to in Canada and India representing Microsoft and Dell - 4 this week actually. Personally, I don't mind them. I talk fast enough for the Indians, and I always bond with the Canadians when I heckle whatever Canadian hockey team they are fans of. Except for the Senators perhaps, I like them (which Uncle Moore should appreciate).

Call Center Jobs: The U.S. Is Still Number One

ASUS Wireless Router will run your Torrents

I normally wouldn't glorify shitty ASUS hardware on my prestigious blog, but there is something about grabbing torrents to a "device" with "remote ordering" that I think is still pretty cool.

Did I ever mention the shitty ASUS hardware I bought 8 years ago?

New ASUS wireless router has Bittorrent and hard drive built in

Online Marketing: CPM's for Dummies

Nice article from our friends at the Economist explaining a bit about the online ad word - past, present and future. While not complete, it's a good overview for all you non-nerd technophiles (of which exactly zed read this).

"John Wanamaker, a devoutly Christian merchant from Philadelphia, who in the 1870s not only invented department stores and price tags (to eliminate haggling, since everybody should be equal before God and price), but also became the first modern advertiser when he bought space in newspapers to promote his stores. He went about it in a Christian way, neither advertising on Sundays nor fibbing (thus minting the concept of “truth in advertising”). And, with his precise business mind, he expounded a witticism that has ever since seemed like an economic law: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted,” he said. “The trouble is, I don't know which half.”

The ultimate marketing machine

Researchers using waves to write on water

One of the cooler things I've seen today. I'd love to be able to spit out a unicode character to my pool and see a huge letter 'c' right at the surface...

So Wednesday night I went to the unveiling of the new Tesla Roadster. It is a very, very cool platform - 250HP, making 230 ft/lbs of torque from RPM 0 - 0-60 mph in under 4 seconds. And when you realize that batteries are just getting better and lighter each year, you realize that there is some real potential here for this to be the future of performance cars. They will actually be building these cars on the line with Elises in Hethel, England.

www.teslamotors.com

A group of people losers recreate the classic game Space Invaders using stop motion and people.
Human Space Invaders Recreation

A Space Invaders rug by Polish artist Janek Simon called Carpet Invaders is a perfect fit for any high-class collecting retro gamer with money to spend losers.
Carpet Invaders


And by losers, I mean people like me. :)

As an American that would like to see more legalized gaming (on and offline), I've found this week's events with BETonSPORTS and Mr. David Carruthers very disheartening. Is this really our biggest problem right now? Is this even a problem at all? I gotta believe that the Red States needed a distraction - a bone to chew on - and this was it.

I really feel bad for David - sitting in an orange jumpsuit in a Texas prison. The week before he was explaining the importance of regulation - how bringing gaming (especially online gaming) into the world of regulation is a good thing for everyone. For operators, punters, the US government, and our tax base.

Don't eat the bologna David - that shit will kill you.

An American Hypocrisy? Bet on It.
Sports Betting & Online Poker News Wire
Sportingbet could face US court
Online gaming shares seesaw as BETonSPORTS plot thickens

Prenatal effect hinted for some gay men - Yahoo! News: "Men who have several older brothers have an increased chance of being gay"

Well, I only have one older brother. So does that make me a metrosexual?

Slashdot | How to Win on Ebay: Snipe

This is what I have been saying (read: doing) for years. 3b4y l33t!

So I went and saw Internet legends Hurra Torpedo last Saturday at the Roxy in Hollywood. I wasn't going to go at first - didn't think my girl would be into it. Alas, I didin't want to let Fred down though, so I went.

Good thing I went - it stands out as my favorite live show ever. Better than Metal Skool (at the Viper Room, Roxy, or Key Club). Better than Tool at the American Legion in Hollywood. Better than NIN at the Hollywood Bowl or at the Cal Poly SLO Gymnasium (although this NIN show is still my favorite live music performance).

Check these guys out. Looks like they are done in the US for awhile, but the next time you are in Oslo... :)

Total Eclipse of the Heart
Previous Roxy Showing, Tour Promo
MySpace Page
All The Things She Said

New Scripps Study Reveals San Andreas Fault Set for the ‘Big One’

Bad times. Remember, drink from the top bowl of your toilet first.

Some of you (ok, none of you) may remember that I posted back in 2004 about a cheap kludge to get around some Earthlink DNS bullshit. Well, it turns out that it may not be Earthlink's fault so much.

I'm not going to take the time to vet the blame here, but it seems that if you
configure Exchange to use your ISP's DNS servers (and not your internal Microsoft DNS server) the problem goes away.

Start Exchange System Manager, select Servers->(SERVER NAME)->Protocols->SMTP. Open the properties for the Virtual SMTP Server, select the Delivery tab and click on the 'Advanced...' button. Then clicking the 'Configure...' button and add the IP address(es) of your ISP's DNS server(s) here.

Special thanks to Ian Griffiths, as his blog tipped me off to this solution.

IanG on Tap: Exchange, Earthlink, and SMTP 550 Errors on SBS 2003