Are We There Yet?

We've all got goals in life. Some of them will be reached tomorrow (if a good meal is your idea of a goal) and some won't be reached for several years. I've been using computers for over 10 years now and have never established an online presence of my own. I guess this blog is my first step towards that goal.

I've never been one to go with trendy things, especially when it comes to technology. I'd like to think of myself as a bit above all the hoopla that gets generated over the latest "thing" for the web. But, I must admit that the appeal of a blog was too much to resist. I don't have a ton of free time on my hands these days, but using this handy software from Blogger.com has made the overhead of having a blog practically zilch.

Lucky me.

So, what's the point of this?

Well, I'm a bit of an intellectual at times and spend a good deal of my day just thinking (usually about work and my projects). But even when I'm not at work, I'm still thinking about stuff. Sometimes it's important (the Cubs play the Astros tonight for the lead in the NL Central) and sometimes it's not so important (what am I going to eat for dinner tonight?). Like most healthy humans in this day and age, we all need an outlet for these thoughts. I like communication as much as the next guy, but I wouldn't dream of torturing my wife with ramblings about the latest Cubs acquisition (Tony Womack?!) or my current Neal Stephenson novel (Cryptonomicon). That's where you come in to play.

Lucky you.

I've been using an excellent RSS aggregator lately from Nick Bradbury (original author of HomeSite and current author of TopStyle) called FeedDemon. I've found that this program is like liquid caffeine for my news addiction. It's still in beta right now, but the latest feature is integration with w.bloggar so you can use FeedDemon to keep you up to date with your favorite blogs as well as to update your blog.

Since I've just started this thing out, I downloaded w.bloggar to give it a spin. While Blogger.com seems to be great, especially since you can blog from anywhere through their web interface, I like having a Windows GUI from which I can blog as well. I use Mozilla FireBird as my browser, so I don't always trust every web site to fully support me. Especially when it comes to doing the kinds of advanced things with HTML that the Blogger.com web site does. I've also heard horror stories from others about their login to Blogger.com timing out while writing longer blogs causing them to lose their post. My parents have been known to suggest that I give the Reader's Digest version of stories from time to time, so the thought of this happening to me didn't sit well either.

So far so good, I think. This is my first post with w.bloggar, so we'll see how things go. It's certainly a pretty slick looking program and I like having an integrated spell checker.

I was listening to Steve Czaben on Bob and Brian's morning show this morning and he brought up the Sobig virus that is currently running rampant on the Internet. His take on things is that email is dead and this virus has killed the Internet. Steve is funny and makes my morning drive worth it every morning, but thank God he only does sports. The only thing he got right in his entire rant was that it's due to people that just don't THINK when they get email with file attachments.

I've got a ton to say about this, but I'll try to keep it short and to the point. There is NO REASON IN THE WORLD that ANY corporate mail server should allow mail attachments that can be directly executed. This includes .pif, .scr, .exe, .vbs, and the whole remaining list of executable extensions. Period. You have now solved 80% of the problems with a virus. You've reduced the corporate cost of these things while reducing the chances of it infecting large networks. Our mail server doesn't accept these attachments and we're not infected. In fact, I haven't even received a single message infected with this virus because our mail server drops them before delivery. Strangely enough, I've gotten several infected messages to my Yahoo! email account, which is the first time in at least 6 years that I recall getting an infected message through Yahoo's servers.

If someone wants to send you one of these attachments, they can ZIP it. Can a virus ZIP itself as well? Sure. But you're injecting another step in to the infection process and making the virus more complex. Making things longer, more complex, and injecting more steps in to a process is the formula for failure for two reasons. One - it's tougher to code and get it right which should cause most poorly written virii to fizzle and die before they get anywhere. Two - I have no faith in the general public as computer users. Take a sampling of people off the streets and ask them what a ZIP file is. Most won't know what to do with it. Even if they have WinZip or WinRar installed, they still have to extract it, find where they extracted it, and execute it. You get the general picture.

The worst side effect of the virus is, of course, the massive email traffic it generates. But frankly, spam is so rampant these days, I see no reason why a virus should add any more strain to mail servers than the latest Viagra mailing.

I've seen two sites I frequent complain about the Sobig virus in the past couple of days. One of them simply slogged through the junk deleting each individual message. The other adjusted his SpamAssassin threshold to be lower and ended up blocking legitimate email.

It frustrates me that people complain sometimes without examining all of their options to see if there is anything they can do to fix it on their end. The home user doesn't usually have control over their mail server, so my previous rant on Sobig doesn't apply to them. But the most popular email clients I know of are Eudora and Microsoft's Outlook and Outlook Express. All of these mail clients support message rules. Since successful propagation of an email virus isn't an everyday occurrence, using message rules to control them is a feasible solution. An email virus is usually pretty small and has a finite quantity of message subjects and bodies that it can use. You can go to any anti-virus web site and find out what these are once the virus has been examined by the popular anti-virus people (Symantec, McAfee, and TrendMicro).

Once you know what they are, you open up your message rules (or filters as my email client calls them) and setup a filter that moves all messages with a specific subject (the subjects the virus is known to use) to a special folder. Voila. When your mail client gets mail, it runs these message rules on each one. As soon as one is triggered, it executes the action you told it to. In this case, it will find a message with a subject that is a known virus message subject (usually something generic like "Re: Your document") and moves it to a quarantine folder you have setup. You can then quickly scan this folder to see if anything that looks legitimate ended up in there (not likely). You can even have the message deleted right away if you're confident no one will send you email with one of these subjects.

Frankly, if someone sends me an email titled "Re: Check out this cool screensaver", it can go to the trash even if it's not a virus.

Incredible. I've only been calling radio stations for years trying to win free stuff. For once, I did.

Every night at 8pm, Lazer 103 runs something called the Krash Test. Two bands pitted against one another. After hearing each song, callers vote on the better song. The winning song is put up against another song the next night until it loses. The first song to reach 11 votes wins. The caller that makes the 11th vote wins some free stuff.

Tonight, it was a terrible song by the Deftones (whom I usually like) called Hexology and the latest from Marilyn Manson. I voted Manson (making it a six time winner). What did I win? Two tickets to a moto-cross event, two tickets to see Hoobastank at the Rave, and a copy of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers on DVD.

w00t.

Through 8 innings tonight, Carlos Zambrano has held the Arizona Diamonbacks to ONE hit and no runs. He's also only walked a single batter while striking out four. He has so far lowered his ERA to 2.91, which is second only to Mark Prior's 2.54 ERA for Cubs starters. What a gem of a pitcher this guy is. Prior to this game, Zambrano is 2-1 with a 1.23 ERA this August, a complete game shutout, 23 K's, 8 walks, in 22 innings. Wow.

The really amazing part about it is that Zambrano has done this with 72 pitches, 49 of which were strikes (68%). Talk about working fast. Someone find out what they've been feeding this guy and give a double serving to Kerry Wood.

Oh, and that "other guy" Zambrano is pitching against tonight? That Curt Schilling guy? He's got 14 strikeouts through 8 innings. Unfortunately for him, when they're not striking out, they're hitting them out. Sosa has 2 home runs and Aramis Ramirez has one as well.

[UPDATE:] With 2 outs in the 9th, Zambrano walked pinch hitter Carlos Baerga, gave up a single to Luis Gonzalez, then a double to Raul Mondesi to lose his 2nd career shutout (and 2nd one this month). Alex Cintron then grounded out for the third out giving the Cubs a 4-1 win. Houston lost to Cincinnati 4-3, which means the Cubs are 1/2 game back of the NL Central lead. St. Louis also lost, so they remain 1 game back.

Is there anything that takes more out of you for doing less than driving for hours?

It was a good trip though. We spent some time at a park on Saturday that was absolutely gorgeous. There was plenty of shade which made the sun a moot point. If someone could just figure out how to inform the catering business that there's more to catering a get together than cooking the food and running, we'd be all set.

The Cubs lost a chance to snatch the lead in the NL Central from the Houston Astros getting blown away by the Diamonbacks yesterday. I don't know how I expected anything less with Shawn Estes on the mound, but as a Cubs fan I am an eternal optimist when it comes to the team, so I can't help it I guess. We'll see how they do tonight. I also saw that Tony Womack is injured. Boo hoo. Someone should tell Jim Hendry that the money was wasted either way.

I took down the comments system. I couldn't get it to work right on my web server with PHP writing to the files locally. I know there's a way to get it working and if I figure it out, I'll put it back up. Otherwise, I'll probably write my own. I might even write my own anyway because it sounds like fun.

I watched the game from the 5th inning on.

• The umpire crew was using coins to call the game.


• Aramis Ramirez is a waste of baseball talent. No wonder Pittsburgh didn't want to pay his salary. What good is a guy that can hit who doesn't think and only plays when he wants to?


• Damian Miller deserves at least half of Joe Borowski's save.


• The Cubs win demonstrates how crucial yesterday's loss was. They remain a half game back as both St. Louis and Houston won.

[14:05.34] FutureViperOwner: I'm too poor to pursue MMO anymore......
[14:06.03] AIMBuddy: actually so am I
[14:06.10] AIMBuddy: but I can still get excited that it is progressing
[14:06.20] AIMBuddy: I think if it hits critical mass
[14:06.22] AIMBuddy: the price will fall
[14:06.27] AIMBuddy: (thats my hope)
[14:09.47] FutureViperOwner: my faith in the game publishing industry to realize the financial situations of their target audience is equivalent to my faith in the general public's ability to intelligently use a computer.
[14:10.06] AIMBuddy: put that in your BLOG
[14:10.09] AIMBuddy: on MMRPGs

I've got a lot more to say about massively multiplayer online computer games, but it would take to long to write about now (I AM at work). Perhaps I'll say more once I've had a chance to organize my arguments a bit better.

Oh...and you're welcome, Ian.

Remember when all the rage in the scientific community was finding the so-called "fat gene"? You know, the gene that you're born with which means you'll be overweight some day and there's nothing you can do about it?

Well, 3 years ago they found the fat gene and the scientists then discovered what the general populace already knew: finding a fat gene only gives an excuse - not a solution.

Demonstrating yet again that responsibility is dead in today's society, we are in search for yet another excuse. Except this time, it's political:
From Fark.com:

The Left: The food industry and advertisers are big bullies that practically force feed people with gimmicks and high-calorie treats. The Right: You're fat, your fault

Until I see McDonald's start posting shotgun toting Ronald McDonald's by the trash bins in their restaurants, I don't think the "left" has a notion to stand on. Unfortunately, this is just the type of ammunition litigators need to clog our court systems with more frivolous, big money lawsuits as they attempt to right the wrongs done to their clients that can't say no.

Symantec and all the other major virus sites haven't caught on to it yet. I got this from a reliable source of my own, however. It's an especially devious one because there's no file attachments, so it will get through most mail servers. I hope you read my earlier post about message filters.

The email will look something like this:

"You have just received the Amish virus. Because we don't have computers this virus works on the honor system. Please delete all the files from your hard drive and manually forward this virus to everyone on your mailing list. We thank thee."

I've searched out and tried no less than 5 different solutions to syndicate this blog in to an XML feed so RSS aggregators (such as FeedDemon) can read this blog. None of them have gotten the job done for me.

I did find one, called RSSify, that seemed to work when running the script on their server. But when I ripped out the PHP script they made available so I could run it on my server, I started getting all sorts of weird PHP errors. I don't know a lot about PHP, so I wasn't able to fix the problem. IMO, it's a heck of a lot easier (and more informative) to write your own under these circumstances since debugging a language you're not too good at can be an exercise in futility.

I've found some great resources on the format of an RSS 1.0 XML feed, so I guess that's the direction I'm headed in. I guess writing a comments system will have to wait for now, because I'm more interested in doing this.

Hooray for string parsing.

And still on my list of things to do with this blog is update the template to something a bit more original and more my style. I'm a better coder than graphics or layout artist, so who knows when that will happen.

So it turns out that there is a bug in IE6 where certain HTML elements aren't read properly by the IE6 engine. The end result is that IE6 cannot tell how long some elements are and ends up truncating at what appears to be an arbitrary length. As such, anyone using IE6 to view this blog up until now has seen as much content as a Texas legislature meeting minus a dozen Democrats.

I inserted the fix in to my template and republished the entire blog. I see there's still some quirks with IE6 (odd indentations of the first few paragraphs), but I'm not going to worry about something as minor as that right now.

There are few things more amazing than seeing someone else discover something entirely new for the first time. We live in a world so complex that things such as HarleyFest can be "organized". It's pretty easy to take some of the simpler things for granted, especially once you learn a little bit about the world. Even if you've never taken a single chemistry or physics course, you still know more about these things than you could learn in at least the first few chapters of each textbook.

Last night, I was giving my one year old a bath. She was enjoying the water as usual and likes to show off these days by putting her mouth up to the water and blowing bubbles. I took the cup we use to pour water over her and started pouring a thin stream of water in front of her. Of course, she doesn't know about the four states of matter (although they only taught 3 when I learned them) and what they mean to our world. She just knows she can sit in the tub when it's full of water and she can pick up her rubber ducky to chew on his beak. So as this thin stream of water is hanging in front of her like a thick, glistening strand of silver thread, she does what any of curious baby would do.

She tries to grab it.

But of course, you can't grab a liquid as it's being poured. So she holds her hand in it for a while, almost as if she's trying to decide for herself if it's really there. After a few moments of alternating between "grabbing" at it and letting it splatter against her hand, she looks at me with a question on her face. I can only smile and tell her it's water.

It doesn't make much sense to a one-year old though, does it?

Thanks to Ian for the heads up. From Shacknews.com:

The recent reaction to the upcoming Call of Duty demo has caught us here at Activision by surprise. We're appreciative and excited about of the high level of enthusiasm the game has received throughout the gaming community. Due to the tremendous demand for the demo we are answering the call by not only making the demo freely available to all gamers at the same time, but early This Friday Night - just in time for the long weekend.

What kind of marketing genius comes up with these types of ideas? Call of Duty is from a new development studio that is composed of the majority of developers and producers of the highly successful Medal of Honor: Allied Assault game. MOH:AA caught the gaming world mostly by surprise and it's continued success is evident in the number of expansion packs released and in the works for it. Activision need only remind everyone of who is making CoD to drum up excitement and publicity. They do NOT need to manage the distribution of the demo file with an iron fist that would der Führer beg for mercy.

So why did Activision think they could release it exclusively through a download portal known for its exorbitant wait times (unless you want to pay a monthly fee to get free downloads)? FilePlanet is one of the most HATED entities amongst gamers for their wait times. I recall the last demo that was released exclusively through FilePlanet (Rainbow 6: Raven Shield from UbiSoft). Yup, I recall the little window telling me I was #1500 in line and was going to wait 8 HOURS just to START downloading.

I can't think of a better way to motivate gamers to not buy (or even pirate) a game than make it harder for them to get the demo. Exclusive game play videos? Fine. Exclusive beta downloads? Fine. Exclusive demos? Not on your life. Hopefully, Activision and the rest of the industry has learned their lesson.

I spent a little over an hour driving from Oconomowoc to Milwaukee this evening due to two accidents, both involving motorcycles. In case you're hard of hearing or live in a hole, you should know that it's Harley-Davidson's 100th anniversary this year and they like to make sure that everyone who owns a Harley knows they're invited. What that means is that the Milwaukee metropolitan area has been flooded with literally tens of thousands of Hogs this past week. During my drive this evening, I had some time to reflect upon this.

• Harley's like to rev their engines when going under an overpass to hear the growl echo.
• It's very tough to hear your stereo over a pack of Harley's on the interstate.
• The sheer volume of motorcyclists on the interstate has highlighted some of the stupid and sometimes dangerous things motorcyclists do in taking advantage of their size during traffic.
• You can hear a Harley when it's in your blind spot. Thank God it's not Kawasaki-Fest or something...
• It's tough to determine what lane a motorcyle is approaching in when you want to change lanes on the interstate in the dark.
• Police officers don't seem to care what speed the Harley's are riding at this week.
• I pity the guy that pulls up to a stoplight riding his Ninja next to a group of Harley's.
• It's tough to appreciate the sheer volume of motorcycles on the road right now when they can (and do) pack 10 or 12 of them in to the space of a single tractor trailer.