noise to signal:
Living the 'net life

I'm guessing not.

Well, that was unfortunate.

I'm a big fan of Yahoo's Launchcast web radio service -- in a nutshell, they play music, I rate music, and that influences what they play. At this point I've rated over 13,000 items, so it's pretty well tuned to my tastes -- it plays a lot of songs I already like, and a lot of music that's new to me, almost all of which I like.

I'm not sure how the algorithm works, but Launchcast plays music in clusters -- several jazz tracks in a row, for example.

Sometimes those clusters are a little unfortunate, though, as demonstrated by the last two tracks it played.

First, Richard Pryor's painfully funny Supernigger routine:

'Look- up in the sky! It's a crow! It's a bat! No - it's Supernigger! Yes, friends, Supernigger! Able to leap tall buildings with a single bound! Faster than a bowl of chitlins! We find Supernigger with his X-ray vision, that enables him to see through everything except whitey."

That track was followed by Tennesee Ernie Ford's "Hey, Mr. Cotton Picker". A cheery little number about how much fun the cotton pickers have in the fields.

Uh... yeah.

(I can't guarantee it'll be offensive, but you can listen to my station if you like.)

Um... OK, that's pretty bad.

You Are 88% Evil

You're the most evil person you know. The devil is even a little scared of you!

Hey, look, I'm source material!

One of the hazards of posting pictures on the web is that it's so easy for them to be swiped and repurposed.

And occasionally... occasionally you stumble on someone doing just that, like this repurposing of the beautiful Darty Kangoo in the current Worth1000 contest, Evil Animals 5:

I'm just sorry it's not a better submission, like the creepy bunny.

My fortune is made

Bring the benjamins, baby!

The Nigerian spammers are getting more specific

Checkitout... this one goes way beyond the usual "dear friend" e-mail one sees in a Nigerian scam:

From: BARRISTER LOUIS MBANEFO [mailto:barristerlouis@louismbanefochambers.org] Sent: Saturday, September 17, 2005 3:44 AM Subject: Dear Edelstein

FROM: BARRISTER LOUIS MBANEFO(SAN)
MBANEFO CHAMBERS ,
30 MUSA YARADUA WAY,
GARIKI,
LAGOS-NIGERIA.

EMAIL: barristerlouis@louismbanefochambers.org
PHONE:+2348037466421

Dear Edelstein,

It is with heartfelt hope that I write to seek your co-operation and
assistance in the context stated below, I am BARRISTER LOUIS MBANEFO,The personal Attorney to the late Mr. Larry Edelstein. I got your contact through the help of my sister-in-law that works with the American Chambers of Commerce and Tourism, though I did not disclose to her my humble intention for an honest foreigner like you.

Having noted the confidence reposed on your person by the sponsor of the recommendation. My late client was the Chief
Executive officer of {Morkin Development Company} for 15 good years and he was retired on the 30th day of september 2000. After a month, My client and his entire family died on their way to a Conference in a car accident on the 30th day of October 2000. Before their death my client Deposited the total sum of $20,000,000.00 In a Finance House hoping of transferring the fund to his country as soon as he comes back from the conference.

Since I have been unsuccessful in locating the relatives for over 4 years now, I seek your consent to present you as the next of kin of the deceased since you relate to his name {EDELSTEIN}.I agree to pay you 40% of the fund, 40% to me and While 20%can be also paid to you as the next of kin and incase ifyou spend any money for an {AFFIDAVIT OF TRUE NEXT OF KIN}.Further more,Kindly furnish me with your following Details.

{A}.YOUR FULL NAME.
{B}.YOUR CONTACT ADDRESS.
{C}.YOUR TELEPHONE/FAX NUMBER.
{D} YOUR IDENTIFICATION AND YOUR OCUPATION.
(E).YOUR AGE.

As soon as i receive your details, I will write an application to the
Finance House for immediate payment.
Thanks and God bless.

BARRISTER LOUIS MBANEFO.(SAN)

This of reminds me of a story someone told me last year about a friend of theirs who almost deleted an e-mail because they thought it was a Nigerian scam, only to realize that it was actually a legitimate e-mail from someone who had seen them speak at a conference -- apparently the style of these scam e-mails is just the style of a formal letter in Nigeria. Go figure.

More on comments and blog spam

All right, here's the summary. Regular readers, feel free to skip :-)

A couple of months ago, I received e-mail from my host, Lunarpages, saying that the script Movable Type uses for comments was chewing up near 90% of the CPU on the server I'm stored on. Because of that, they were disabling that script, killing comments on my site.

Since I was getting thousands of pieces of blog spam a week -- mostly blocked by the wonderful MT-Blacklist -- that didn't surprise me.

I conferred with Lunarpages, and after I closed comments on most of my old posts and upgraded to the latest version of Movable Type, they re-enabled the script.

Earlier today, I received another e-mail from Lunarpages, saying that I was still using 90% of the CPU on the server with the same script, so they shut it down again.

After doing a bit of research, I realized that although I had shut down comments, the blogspammers were still hitting that script with thousands of requests -- and even though it wasn't responding, it did have to wake up long enough to deny the request.

The solution came in the form of this excellent post, which (in summary) recommends changing the name of the mt-comments.cgi script to... something else. No, I'm not going to say what I changed it to. You never know who's listening.

Anyway, what that should do is prevent the blogspammers who have that URL in their database from being able to find it again easily, thus preventing server load, thus keeping both my esteemed hosts and you, faithful readers, happy.

Comments are back

Looks like Lunarpages shut down commenting on my site because of the high server loads the comment script was generating. We have some disagreement about what's causing that, but they have graciously restored the script as long as it doesn't become too much of a load.

In an attempt to give blog spammers a smaller "surface" to work with, I've installed David Raynes' simple and to the point plugin mt-close.

All it does is allow you to close comments on all entries older than a certain date. I, for example, decided on 30 days. That means that on my site, out of ~850 entries, comments are only possible on the last 12. Which should make my blogspam drop off considerably, reducing my server load.

The only thing it doesn't do, unfortunately, is run automatically. But hey, that's a small price to pay.

Comments hosed

Lunarpages appears to have shut down commenting on my site. More news as this develops.

Watching the detectives

Really lovely:

Surveillance Works Both Ways

... In an attempt to establish equity in the world of surveillance, participants at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in Seattle this week took to the streets to ferret out surveillance cameras and turn the tables on offensive eyes taking their picture.

Following wearable computing guru Steve Mann into a downtown Seattle shopping mall, about two dozen conference attendees, some of them armed with handheld cameras, snapped photos of smoked-glass ceiling domes in Nordstrom and Gap stores, which may or may not have contained cameras...

Which is big fun. Then he got philosophical:

In the stores, as conference attendees snapped pictures of three smoked domes in the ceiling of a Mont Blanc pen shop, an employee inside waved his arms overhead. The intruders interpreted his gesture as happy excitement at being photographed until a summoned security guard halted the photography.

Mann asked the guard why, if the Mont Blanc cameras were recording him, he couldn't, in turn, record the cameras. But the philosophical question, asked again at Nordstrom and the Gap, was beyond the comprehension of store managers who were more concerned with the practical issues of prohibiting store photography.

My favorite part of the article, because I (heart) surrealism, was the description of some of Mann's related projects that I hadn't heard of:

Mann said that duplicity is often necessary in order to mirror the Kafkaesque nature of surveillance.

He has designed a wallet that requires someone to show ID in order to see his ID. The device consists of a wallet with a card reader on it. His driver's license can be seen only partially through a display. And in order for someone to see the rest of his ID, they have to swipe their own ID through the card reader to open the wallet.

He also made a briefcase that has a fingerprint scan that requires the fingerprint of someone else to open it.

AIEEEEEEEEEE!!!! THE ORACLE IS SILENT!!!!

Guess who stopped by yesterday?

That's right, Bruce Sterling stopped by to say hi yesterday.

And of course, he had to deal with the psychic trauma of being surrounded by us by meta-blogging. Check out post 1 and post 2.

I got there late -- I was having lunch with an old friend -- so I had to sit waaaaay over on the side. Which was OK, because it meant I was one of the few people who got to see Bruce's cool shoes.

Search strings

You may or may not know that when you get to a site by searching for it on many of the popular search engines, the search engine passes on to the site the exact search string you had entered.

I'm not actually sure why the search engines do this, but it provides for some pretty disheartening reading on my part:

The number one way people get to my site is by searching for "cute animals"?!?! Boy, are they going to be disappointed.

(That chart, by the way, is part of the logging package that comes with my totally awesome site host, Lunarpages.)

That's a pretty good one

Here's a charming trojan horse e-mail I got this morning:

Dear user, the management of Davidadam.com mailing system wants to let you know that,

Your e-mail account will be disabled because of improper using in next
three days, if you are still wishing to use it, please, resign your
account information.

For further details see the attach.

Sincerely,
The Davidadam.com team http://www.davidadam.com

And there's an attachment (TextDocument.pif) that I'm supposed to click on.

Of course, I'm the management of the davidadam.com mailing system. And I don't recall sending this to myself...

An experiment

If this works, I've successfully posted wirelessly via my new pocket pc phone (issued by work) using Pocket SharpMT. I'm so fricken' nerdy it makes you sick, yeah?

Moving a blog

At the risk of being painfully self-referential, I thought it might be useful to the community as a whole to talk about some of the issues around my recent blog move. Those of you looking for the usual photos and weirdness, just move along, you don't care about this.

Why the move?

Earlier this year, I was paying for two Earthlink starter sites -- this site, and my photography portfolio site (sadly in need of updating). Earthlink isn't a bad host, but there were a few things I wasn't happy with.

One was that they didn't have all of the PERL libraries that Movable Type (the software that drives this and many other blogs) needs to be totally happy -- in particular, I wasn't able to send automated "trackback" pings to let various sites know that I had updated my site, and some image handling stuff didn't work either. When I contacted Earthlink's customer support, they told me that (although the individual support techs were sympathetic) there was no way Earthlink was going to update their PERL libraries for me.

The other issue that concerned me about Earthlink is their policy on bandwidth overages. If you're hosting a site with Earthlink, and you get slashdotted, they'll just keep serving up your pages as you pass your allotted bandwidth -- and then bill you for it at your overage rate. As some people have found (including Tom Tomorrow, to the tune of $3800), those overage charges can be hefty.

Then a friend pointed me to Lunarpages. Without being an actual ad for them, I'll just say that their deal (800mb of storage and 40gb of bandwidth a month, for $7.95 a month) was much better than Earthlink's (200mb of storage and 10gb of bandwidth, for $19.95 a month).

The two other benefits Lunarpages had over Earthlink were these: First, if I ever manage to exceed their very generous monthly bandwidth allottments, they won't just bill me -- they cut off the site. If I want to pay for more bandwidth, I get to make that choice and do that explicitly. No surprise $3800 bills. (Not to mention that their next higher hosting package, with 80gb of bandwidth, is only $22.95 a month)

Second, they allow add-on domains -- essentially a second web site sharing the storage space of the first site -- for $2.50 a month. So instead of paying $39.90 a month to Earthlink, I'm now only paying $10.45. Saving $353.40 a year on my hobbies was very attractive.

What don't I like about Lunarpages? A couple of minor nit picks -- logging in to and using their "control panel" is a little obtuse; also, their usage statistical reports aren't as nicely designed as Earthlink's Urchin reports. They also only allow one mailing list per account, instead of the 30 or so that Earthlink allowed me. Still: minor issues.

The problem

Moving davidadam.com to Lunarpages was super easy -- copy over files, re-establish e-mail accounts and mailing list, etc.

But when I tried to move Noise to Signal over, I ran into a significant snag.

The underlying problem was that my Movable Type (MT) database had somehow gotten slightly corrupted -- not so corrupted that I was seeing problems on the actual site, but corrupted enough that I wasn't going to be able to do a clever under-the-hood database transfer. There was another way for me to transfer the records -- using MT's "export/import" feature -- but there was also a major problem with that method.

When I started Noise to Signal, I used MT's default archiving style, where each individual page is saved as something like http://www.noise-to-signal.com/archives/000001.html, where the 000001 refers to the actual record number in the MT database.

The problem was that if I used the clumsy "export/import" method of moving the MT database, there was no way to insure that the records would maintain the same number in the database. Which meant that when I built the new site, what had previously been 000237.html might end up as 000235.html.

And the problem with that, my friends, is Google. Say you were searching for "haupia bread pudding". Record #237 on my old site, it turns out, is the first hit. So you click on the result in Google, but because I've moved my databases, instead of a recipe for a tasty dessert you might get the former record 235, photos of an anti-bush protest. Or if you had actually been searching for those photos of an anti-bush rally, you might get a picture of my cats. They're cute and all, but not necessarily what you were looking for.

And that was it. I was stumped. Dead in the water for four months. Still paying $19.95 a month to Earthlink that I didn't want to be paying.

The solution

I ran across the solution while wandering around the TypePad site looking for some info for a friend who was considering using their service. TypePad, briefly, is a all-in one blogging solution, built by the same people who built Movable Type, with a slightly newer UI and without the hassles of installing software on a server, which is more than most people want to do.

On the TypePad site was a list of external resources, including an article by the very clever David Ely on Redirecting your Movable Type permalinks to TypePad. As I read that article, I realized that David had solved my problem, as well.

I'll let you read his article for the full technical writeup, but in brief the solution is this: While the default archiving style for MT is the previously mentioned /archives/recordnumber system, you can define your own style. TypePad's default style, for example, is to use /year/month/first fifteen letters of title -- so this post, for example, would be /2004/01/moving_a_blog.html. And this is possible in MT, as well. Switching to this kind of URL system gets rid of the entire problem of 000237.html vs. 000235.html -- whatever the record number is, the titles stay the same.

The second part of David's solution was to use MT to automatically generate redirect pages for each of the old numbered pages. So, for example, if you follow that Haupia link from Google -- http://www.noise-to-signal.com/archives/000237.html -- you will briefly see a redirect page, and then you'll jump right over to the page in the new, slick archiving style: http://www.noise-to-signal.com/2003/08/haupia_bread_pu.html. Brilliant.

I was delighted. I offered to re-name myself after David (until I realized we already have the same name).

The gnarly technical bits (as if the preceeding paragraphs weren't dull and technical enough)

So here's the process I followed:

1. Safely back up my current template for the individual pages.
2. Replace the template with the redirect template.
3. Rebuild the entire site with the redirect template in place.
4. Restore the normal template for the individual pages.
5. Change the archive style in the MT config page.
6. Rebuild the entire site again with the normal page template, but the new archive structure.
7. Copy the old archives directory from Earthlink to Lunarpages.
8. Export the posts from my Earthlink MT site and import them into the lunarpages site.

There were two key bits of the redirect template. First, a pair of meta tags in the <head> section:

<meta 
   http-equiv="REFRESH" 
   content="2; url=http://www.noise-to-signal.com/
   <$MTEntryDate format="%Y/%m"$>/
   <$MTEntryTitle dirify="1" trim_to="15"$>.html" />
   
<meta 
   name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />

The first meta tag is the actual redirect; it tells the browser to wait two seconds and then send the user to this new URL, which is autogenerated by MT based on the date and title of the entry.

The second meta tag tells search engine spiders to not index this redirect page, and to update their records with the page I'm redirecting them to.

Then, in the actual text of the redirect page, I used the same technique to tell people where they're about to go, and give them a link to the page if their browser doesn't support redirects:

The new address of this entry is: 

<a href="http://www.noise-to-signal.com/

   <$MTEntryDate format="%Y/%m"$>/

   <$MTEntryTitle dirify="1" trim_to="15"$>.html">

   

   http://www.noise-to-signal.com/

   <$MTEntryDate format="%Y/%m"$>/

   <$MTEntryTitle dirify="1" trim_to="15"$>.html

   

</a>

The MT code in there should look just like the code in the refresh meta tag, above.

Finally, the MT archive "template" -- where it should store individual archives -- looks like this:

<$MTEntryDate format="%Y/%m"$>/

<$MTEntryTitle dirify="1" trim_to="15"$>.html

Which should again look familiar.

Lessons learned

I suppose the biggest lesson I learned from this was that if I was setting up a new Movable Type install for someone, I would definitely use the year/month/title archiving style; if I had done that to begin with, it would have obviated all of this hassle, because I would never have been tied to numbered entries in the first place.

I hope all of this turns out to be useful for someone else; if this has helped you to solve a similar problem, I'd love to hear about it!

The joys of having a public web site

I seem to get a lot of e-mails like this, regarding either this site or my photography portfolio site.

From: Randy Smith
To: dae@davidadam.com
Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2003 12:15 PM
Subject: Request for linking to us from your resource page.

Good Afternoon:

Please consider adding a link to us on your resources page:

http://www.noise-to-signal.com/

We are Foodservicedirect - a leading online supplier of restaurant supplies including cookware, glassware, bar supplies and paper supplies.

Thanks for your consideration!

Randy Smith
Marketing Services
Foodservicedirect.com
27 Forest Ave.
Locust Valley, NY 11560
Telephone: 516-759-9000
email: randy@foodservicedirect.com
url: http://no.i'm.not.going.to.link.to.you.com

They've clearly harvested a bunch of e-mails and sites and haven't bothered to target it in the least -- semi-personalized spam asking me to give them free advertising.

Which probably sounds good to a testosterone-drunk marketeer, but makes me think they're just an idiot.

Does anyone else get these asinine e-mails?

Still alive...

Well, it's taking a little longer than I had hoped to move to my new site. The crux of the biscuit is that one of the database files that contain the content for this site seems to refuse to upgrade; suggesting, possibly, corruption in the database.

I do have ways of exporting the data, and re-importing it on the new site; however, the problem is that I can't be sure that the numbers of the entries will be consistent between sites. This is a fairly annoying problem, since the "permalink" for each entry is based on the entry number in the database.

So if the entry numbers changed, someone could have a link on their site to my post on the Designer's eye, and that link could end up being a dorky picture of Edgar.

All of this will work out, I'm sure, and I'll write an extended post about the process -- as well as all of the other things that have been going on (lots of work in the yard today!).

I'd like to put in a plug for my new host while I'm at it: Lunarpages. I'm only on the $7.95 a month plan and their tech support people have still been working hard to solve my problem. Thanks guys!

Anyway... Sooner or later the problem will be solved, I will transfer the site, and this will all be behind us. Until then... I beg your indulgence for a little while longer. Keep checking back!

Audblog

Hey, this is kind of cool.

Audblog allows you to post an audio clip to your blog from a telephone. Talk about letting your voice be heard by the world...