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)