<buzzword-compliant />

I was thrilled when Userland's Jake Savin announced a WYSIWYG Radio and Manila  in-browser editor for Mozilla.   That was, until I realized “Mozilla” didn't include Safari, and I would have to use Firebird to really take advantage of it.

Don't get me wrong–I like Firebird.  Or at least, I like Firebird
when it works.   But Firebird on Mac OS X is a little flaky
sometimes, and doesn't behave like Safari in some important ways.

One of them is the last page cache–particularly in the case of the
WYSIWYG editor.  In Safari, if I accidentally click on a link or
launch a new page in the window I'm typing in, I can back-button to it
and the content is still there where I left off.  Not so in
Firebird. (Or at least in the WYSIWYG editor in Firebird.)

For instance–yesterday, while typing a fairly long post, I clicked on
an entry in my browser history to check for the URL.  Whoops, it
went to the page.  I arrowed back, and 20 minutes worth of typing
was gone.

Now I know why Dave always fixes his posts after he publishes them.

So, I cut my last ties with Toadnet
yesterday, removing my last domains from hosting there.  So far,
it hasn't been pretty; they deleted my email accounts there while DNS
was still mapped to them, so most of my inbound e-mail is
bouncing.  The DNS change seems to have only partially rolled out
so far, so I'm still in the dead zone; I'm sure everybody on the
mailing lists I was subbed to are just loving me right now.  I had
been hoping to keep things set up there until the transition was
complete–I had paid them for service through September 22, after
all–but now I've just shut the whole shebang down completely.

Meanwhile, I've had to do some cleaning up of the website heirarchy on my remaining web host,  Powweb.  
Since  I now essentially have  five domains pointed at the
same server, I had to reproduce the PHP magic I'd used on Toadnet to
host multiple domains with their own directory structures.  That
meant moving the buzzword-compliant
weblog to a new directory and recoding the root home page; I preserved
a copy of the archived pages of the weblog in their original place in
the heirarchy so that permalinks would still work (as if anybody's
actually permalinked to that content); I'll probably deprecate that
configuration in a month or two when I decide I need the disk space for
something else.

Over the weekend, my disk quota on my hosting and mail account with Toadnet mysteriously exceeded its ceiling. And rather than just shutting down uploads to the site, the host overwrote any files that were already on the site that had been changed with blank pages. In other words, my weblogs on that host were essentially wiped from existence.

For this, and dial-up access from the road, I've been paying $50 a month.

So, the time has come to completely pull the plug. I just redirected my domains to a new domain name server at my bargain-basement hosting service, where my disk quota is larger by more than a factor of 10 and my hosting bill is $8 a month. I will no longer suffer in the name of supporting locals. As soon as the DNS refreshes, my move of all my weblogs (except for the one hosted by Userland) will be complete.

…and that, apparently, is what SCO CEO Darl McBride is building his company's long term strategy on–rendered pig fat.

McBride, who a just a year ago was pimping for UnitedLinux and hoping to use SCO's installed base to push Linux into the small and medium business markets in earnest, is now claiming that all his former friends in the Linux community of being orchestrated by IBM in their attacks on his “poison pill” strategy for profits from Linux.

As the “evidence” presented by SCO of infringement on its intellectual property starts to fall apart slowly in the light of day, McBride has resorted to dumping piles of press clippings on stage at SCOForum to prove how relevant the lawsuit has made SCO. And rumor has it that some customers are considering filing racketeering charges against SCO for extortion of licensing fees prior to proof of their case.

So the question is, just who is going to have to use that lard that Darl's throwing around to grease up and bend over?

I was the victim of some bizarre spam yesterday directed at my work e-mail account. Someone used the neo-con spin site NewsMax' article-forwarding feature to send me an article about how the Democrats in California were assaulting the Constitution, with the message, “Spam this f**kboy.” I'm guessing the sender meant the author of the artilce and not me…or maybe they were referring to my anti-spam column?

In any case, the return address the culprit used was the e-mail for The Randi Rhodes Show,a “liberal” talk-radio show on ClearChannel's WJNO in West Palm Beach, Florida. I somehow doubt Ms. Rhodes herself sent me the message…it smells more like someone who'd want to embarrass her. Or maybe she's that stupid? I don't know, really, or care.

What's more interesting, or disturbing, to me is the potential for abuse of sites like NewsMax for spam attacks. While this one was pretty much a blunt-force approach, as far as I could tell, it wouldn't take an amazing piece of coding to create a robot that could be pointed at a site like NewsMax's article forwarding feature to churn out e-mails using harvested e-mail addresses for both the sender and target address. Some script kiddie could wack out something like that in Visual Basic in fifteen minutes, I suspect.

Stopping attacks like that would require webmasters to be able to link the source IP addresses of the spam, and not the sending e-mail address. Some straightforward code could limit the damage–say, limiting article forward requests from a specific IP address within a single day. (Also, having user authentication as a gateway to using article forwarding would reduce the likelihood of a spam engine assault).

It looks like the Packet Rat's ideas for dealing with Microsoft's continuing security problems from last year are still a good option.

Last night, as we were settling in from our trip home, I started applying the backload of patches to my eldest son's Windows XP PC that had accumulated during the month it sat idle. There were 9 “critical” updates, 16 “recommended” updates, and 7 updated device drivers.

Since everything else in my house (well, at least since the security patch reboots killed my Compaq server) runs on Mac OS X, the security patches on the single XP machine have become a disproportional administrative burden. So has the general upkeep of the machine–deleting off all the crap software my son inadvertently downloads, ferreting out spyware, and getting rid of the pre-loaded garbage that HP shipped on the hard drive have been an ongoing distraction.

And I'm a guy who's administered Windows and Unix networks. Imagine what it's like for Grandma when she gets a Windows XP PC and a cable modem for Christmas. The security patch feature has to be made more simple–and more automated–for home users, or every new vulnerability in Windows will turn Grandma's PC into a member of the legion of undead PCs trashing your network.

After following the drama of personalities that is the debate over weblog syndication strategies old and new (RSS 2.0 vs. RSS 1.0 vs. Atom/Pie/Echo/Whatever the hell they've decided to call it this week), I've decided that it's time for someone to launch a truly open and unfettered syndication standard. I've decided to call my, oops, our new effort in openness and semantic web goodness RASH (Really Awful Awsome Syndication, with Hypertext).

The great part about RASH will be that you can get a RASH feed without even subscribing to it. All you have to do is visit a RASH-inducing weblog, and you'll instantly “catch” its RASH content. In fact, anyone visiting the weblog of anyone who's visited a RASH-enabled weblog–or is just in their FOAF file– will probably catch it too.

That's right–rather than being opt-in subscription-based syndication, RASH is opt-out syndication–you have to do something to get rid of it.

The result will be a boon to bloggers' log files–the hits to weblog.rash files will make any site's logfile look like Instapundit's. Inverviews with Chris Lydon, instant Internet fame, and power over the fate of nations will immediately follow launching syndication in the RASH format.

To opt out of a RASH feed, users will have to use a file similar to robots.txt, called “ointment.rash”, with explicit refusals for each feed they do not want to receive–much as they must currently do with unsolicited e-mails. While this may seem to put an inordinate burden on those on the receiving end of a RASH, it guarantees the RASH source a rapid growth in readership–even if readers are only trying to figure out how the hell they caught the RASH in the first place.

Soon, the whole Web will break out in RASH.

Details to follow…

Once again, I wish Ray's guys would get around to porting their software over to Mac OS X. Perhaps that money they got from Microsoft hasn't run out yet.

I stumbled across an interesting site today: Eliyon Technologies' CorporateAlumni database. Apparently, Eliyon's spiders have crawled the web connecting people with their past and present employers, and the company has put the results for about 15.4 million people into a search engine accessible by previous employer.

It's just a little bit creepy.

Some of the results, however, are quite amusing.

Now, I figured, what with my bio out there on publication sites, there might be an entry for me. And there is–a little incomplete, with a few rough edges on the parsing of the data, but it's there. So is my boss. There are some glaring holes in their content based on the sites they've apparently scanned, so their AI is still a work in progress…but like I said, it's creepy.

As a journalist, I can see this being an interesting tool. But it also raises questions of privacy, and of copyrights (especially if they plan to sell this to people). How much of your life is public record? Punch in one of your former employers, and find out.