Saturday May 22, 2004

If you want to have the appearance of having lots of attention on the net, the barrier to entry is not terribly high. Install some blog software, setup a five or six blogs that link to your site about lonely, sexy milfs in your area, octane booster for your libido and deals-of-the-century for mortgages and [badda-bing!] make a thousand DNS entries for each of these blogs. Then, whenever you update your handful of blogs with your wonderful content, programmatically ping all of the wonderful recipients of update notifications and.... [drum roll]

Ta-da!

You've spammed the blogosphere.

It's my considered opinion that this problem is going to continue to swell as more spammers catch on. As anyone who's had a friend descend into a Mister-Hyde's-gone-AWOL-on-a-heroin binge dirtball can attest, low life scumbags are often quite resourceful. We've already seen that demonstrated contending with comment spam. The underlying problem is that the event capture engines promiscuously accept anything into the stream. It's as bad as having an open relay in the SMTP universe... millions of mail servers in Asia and Eastern Europe can't be wrong!

Blog posts can be fingerprinted and checked for duplication but next thing you know, we're going to require bayesian filters -- I can easily imagine how to defeat the duplication checks; to catch a criminal, you have to have the capacity to think like one, I suppose. Weblogs.com already makes sure it doesn't take a ping for the same blog too frequently within a duration of time, but that doesn't address any issues concerning authenticity.

Anyway, the underlying problem with SMTP is that you can pretty much claim to be anyone and send mail to everyone when the SMTP server is an open relay. By extension, the ping stream suffers from the exact same problem.

I propose that the ping services become a network of trust. Pings should be identified with secure tokens; one way cryptographic hashes with regularly expiring keys would keep just about everyone except the NSA from anonymous pinging. Those found abusing the ping stream could have their ids revoked. That way, the only events making it into the ping stream would be known and identified entities. I believe that the earlier this is put in place, the sooner the blogosphere can wall itself off from purveyors of canned pork by-product products. ( May 22 2004, 05:32:34 PM PDT ) Permalink


UFO tribute a la Pearl Jam Some of my favorite noise is old UFO, and apparently I'm not alone.

Last week (May 14, 2004), according to a report from The Umlaut, Mike McCready from Pearl Jam gigged at The Showbox (Seattle, Washington) in a tribute set that included classic Aerosmith and UFO:

1. Doctor Doctor
2. Lights Out
3. Too Hot To Handle
4. Shoot Shoot
5. Loser
6. Rock Bottom w/Spinal tap tease
7. Sick As A Dog (Aerosmith)
8. Nobody's Fault (Aerosmith)

Sounds like an old time style Headbangin Hoe-Down! ( May 22 2004, 09:47:02 AM PDT ) Permalink

Friday May 21, 2004

Bill Gates stood before a crowd of top CEO's and waxed on about where he see things going. Now, if you'd read any of his drivel (like The Road Ahead) where he positions himself as a technocaster, you know that at least half the time, he's full-o-crap. But that doesn't matter when you're the richest schmuck on this rock, does it?

"Another new phenomenon that connects into this is one that started outside of the business space, more in the corporate or technical enthusiast space, a thing called blogging. And a standard around that that notifies you that something has changed called RSS."

What would Bill blog? Posts about how great SCO is? How much he hates Mac OS X cause it's so much better than anything he'd come up with? ( May 21 2004, 02:21:27 PM PDT ) Permalink

Thursday May 20, 2004

Neifi Perez has only hit five home runs since 2001. I mean, he's a great infielder but perhaps the threat of having Pedro Feliz become the everyday SS was enough to awaken his inner-slugger. This was their game to lose and for a while there, it looked like that might be the it was gonna go. But here ya go:

Does the blogosphere need a "report this url as spam" service where any blogs that link to it are immedately suspect? Perhaps a points system... if a blog has legit URLs than the links to spam that have managed to get inserted into the content will should score as strongly. Perhaps this is case for Vote Links as my colleague Kevin Marks will assert. ( May 20 2004, 11:50:08 AM PDT ) Permalink


Blog Index Spammers Must Die! What will they think of next? I wrote a little application to keep an eye on what's under discussion in the blogosphere on a particular topic and next thing ya know, some bozo has posted hundreds of clone blogs to stuff the search index.

Last night at the Technorati Developer's Salon I showed off something I wrote that uses Technorati's API, Who's Talking About The San Francisco Giants, Powered By Technorati. It uses Technorati's search and bloginfo APIs and orders the most recent results by the blog's rank. Lo and behold this morning, there's some bastard who owns the mooseblogs.com domain who has hundreds of aliases pointed to the same blog postings for buying/selling tickets. Among the events mentioned are tickets for the San Francisco Giants, thus killing the usefulness of the search index. The whois specifics for this bastard looks like this:

Registrant:
   WAI
   10105 W. 126th Terr
   Overland Park, Kansas 66213
   United States

   Registered through: GoDaddy.com
   Domain Name: MOOSEBLOGS.COM
      Created on: 02-Apr-04
      Expires on: 02-Apr-05
      Last Updated on: 04-Apr-04

   Administrative Contact:
      Walls, Tom  twalls@kc.rr.com
      WAI
      10105 W. 126th Terr
      Overland Park, Kansas 66213
      United States
      9134848289      Fax -- 
   Technical Contact:
      Walls, Tom  twalls@kc.rr.com
      WAI
      10105 W. 126th Terr
      Overland Park, Kansas 66213
      United States
      9134848289      Fax -- 

   Domain servers in listed order:
      NS1.ABAC.COM
      NS2.ABAC.COM

Wednesday May 19, 2004

It's about time the Giants show some life in their play. Sad that it was still only a one-run game, the offensive anemia long ago crossed the threshold into patheticness. Thank goodness the Dodgers have dropped five in a row; the Giants are only seven games behind them in the standings! Someone tell Alou to get a clue: ditch Dustin Mohr or Deivi Cruz and bring Brian Dallimore back in the line-up! ( May 19 2004, 09:36:40 AM PDT ) Permalink

Tuesday May 18, 2004

But it's still funny to see it captured in a snapshot. Wondering what he's thinking about, "Maybe if virii were written with a portability layer, these suckers would get infected too... hrm" ( May 18 2004, 03:36:35 PM PDT ) Permalink


Keep It Real, JBoss The blogosphere is abuzz with the apparent exposure of the JBoss groups' shadowy marketing tactics. Are they really skulking around pretending to be a fan base when in fact they were posting about themselves?

The signal to noise ratio on TheServerSide's Forum have never kept me glued to the conversations but they recently outed users who share locations, which hopefully, by reducing anonymity, will raise the signal level a bit. Though recently enriched with a $10M investment from Intel, the JBoss group may have to spend some of the funds earmarked for engineering on PR instead. There's certainly no shortage of bile being offered for one of the most ambitious open source J2EE code bases, is there? "Anonymous Fakers!" declares Mike Spille. Lots of downloads evidently doesn't translate into lots of love.

Is this a redux of the fraudulent reviews on Amazon thing?

I'm wondering now if the comment-throughput on all of these blogs hosted on jroller.com have crashed their server; those blogs were inaccessible for a while today. Ya know, JBoss can run embed Tomcat as its web container (the server identifier says "Apache-Coyote/1.1" which in all likelihood is Tomcat). Hah, maybe they're running on JBoss!

OK, probably not. But nothing is shocking, is it? ( May 18 2004, 03:20:33 PM PDT ) Permalink
Comments [1]

Sunday May 16, 2004

There are tons of books from all of the usual suspects (O'Reilly, Wiley, SAMS, etc) about how to program with PHP but leveraging its crude support for OOP and employing best practices around that is seems to be pretty thin in all of the literature I've reviewed. The discussion I've seen on the web about object oriented PHP have also seemed weak; the commenter's who snivel about how complex OOP with PHP is underscore how toyish the use of PHP seems to be in many projects.

Before sending mail or posting comments insulting me for not appreciating PHP's simplicity, make sure you tell your Perl programming friends as well. I've been an adherent to OO in Perl for a number of years (though admittedly fell out of practice while my work was J2EE based) -- my gripes about prevelant practices amongst Perl programmers would be similar the above critique of PHP. In Perl, if you have a big blob of data and you want to find out what the heck is in it, you pretty much have to rely on Data::Dumper or, in PHP, print_r and then pick-apart the output to suss the structure that was created. Perl's man pages have several entries about lists of lists and and a data structure cookbook and so forth but the value of defining objects that provide a structural representation of the data (and of course, semantics) are too often overlooked in real software projects. If the changes I'm currently working on implementing had been using an instance of a class, I'd be looking at the object interface and making changes to the method calls. Instead, I'm looking at a big tangle of opaque data structures.

I could go on and on about how must PHP literature closely binds business logic and UI logic and the hideous morass that that creates, but I guess I already griped about that sufficiently in my high level rant about J2EE versus PHP. <sigh>

The code base I'm currently working on has a long way to go before the business data is captured in clear class definitions and there's a greater level of transparency into the relationships of the things within the application, but we'll get there. ( May 16 2004, 09:46:10 AM PDT ) Permalink

Friday April 30, 2004

As of Perl 5.8, there's a module in the standard library with a boat load of things you need to with a list from time to time. It was nice to stumble upon the List::Util class; it's got a method called shuffle that does the trick. Here's an example of getting a randomized list using shuffle:

use List::Util 'shuffle';

my @list = ('a'..'z');
my @shuffled = shuffle(@list); 
# @shuffled is randomized, @list is unchanged
print "@shuffled\n";