Adam's Blog

Lost has been my favorite show for some time now. The incredible mythology, the spooky orientation videos, the crazy overlapping backstories, they are just incredible! But last night really let me down. More after the break.

On a normal day, I might point you towards links like this one, which demonstrates that The White House has removed quotes by Dick Cheney from their website. Or maybe this one, which claims that not a SINGLE member of George Bush or Dick Cheney's family has served in this "honorable" war and set foot in Iraq as a soldier. I would explain that these are families of cowards, who continue to make this country worse each day they live, continue to decay our country and its framework, continue to increase the hatred for our once noble country. But instead, today is about good news. This weekend, I won the Corporate Office Employee of the Year award, which was a tremendously validating experience. Combine that with the fact that my wife is newly pregnant and this was the first event that people have known about it, so they showered her with affection. And I'm so-close-I-can-taste-it to feature complete with OSNews version 4. So many cool features it makes me excited just thinking about it. I'll detail several of them in a subsequent post. Anyway, today is a GOOD day, and I will leave it at that.

This morning, I checked my Gmail and found that I had received 203 comments on sethadam1.com last night. In case you don't realize how odd this is, I typically get 1-2 comments a day max, unless a particular discussion gets moving, and then it might be 10 at best. These 203 comments were generally grouped, about 30 to a group, with identical information. The name was some kind of drug spam (you know the typical Viagra, etc) and the IP was blank (which I may soon require to comment). But the odd thing: it was almost like it was custom written for my blog: the thread kept changing, the parent comment changed, the content changed, and it passed the captcha... or so it seemed! So I changed my captcha. I think I might have found a bug in it whereby if your browser wouldn't begin a session, it might pass the captcha. So that's fixed. Plus I added several little checks to the comment page. It will not only reject lots of comment variants (all of which are unlikely to occur with real comments), it will actually ban some users automatically if certain strings are found, etc. It's kind of...

There is a new trend out there, one that hasn't received much coverage, but it's a big deal, and it's getting bigger. As user generated content becomes more and more prevalent, we have a new type of spam out there: trackback spam. On my blog, beneath all of the entries (above the comments), there is a section that shows you the user agents that loaded that page as well as the refering pages. I recently discovered something: people gaming the system. Read on...

I booted up my QNX OS and tried VNC to my AIX box. Just then, I noticed a BSOD on my NT PC, which explained why I couldn't RDP to it, but my data was probably safe thanks to VSC. "ic" someone wrote me on IM, and I quickly typed "BRB." I jumped into my BMW to get to an ATM, and I drove through KFC. When I got back, I booted up my BSD machine and logged into KDE to check my files stored in UFS. It looked great even though I wasn't using AIGLX, my ATI card showed my GTK and Qt apps looking A-OK. I sat down and decided to write a program - but should I use ASP with VB or PHP? How about JSP? It didn't really matter, because I was going to export into XML so I could use a DTS and SQL to import into my db. Since I was running BeOS, I decided that it would best to write my code in C with XHTML, so I just had to choose an IDE that worked with the API I had chosen. But my friend J.R. the MCSE told me he wanted it...

I had a bunch of things I wanted to write about - Lists of Bush's impeachable offenses, the ridiculous controversy over Price's "phallic" halftime show, a billboard that reads the "Hoohaa" Monologues, because, apparently, the word "vagina" is now offensive. But instead of yet another rant, I want to share some good news. Earlier this week in New York City, a somber Trey Anastasio gave an in-depth interview that discussed his music, his plans, his songwriting, his drug use, and even Phish. It's great to hear Trey coming back around and feeling good about music. Trey's new stuff is still great music, but I think we all wonder if he has another "Guyute" in him. We all wonder if, should Phish ever reunite, whether he's more likely to come up with another "You Enjoy Myself" or another "Jennifer Dances." Songs like "Pebbles and Marbles" and "Scents and Subtle Sounds" demonstrate that he and Tom Marshall can still write fantastic, epic music. Songs like Mexican Cousin showed that Trey was interested in writing short numbers with a platform to launch a melodic jam session. But songs like "Undermind," while not bad, per say, were not the same quality, didn't have the...

I have reviewed Superbowl ads before, and I decided to reprise that practice this year. The Good 1. The ad that made me laugh first was a Taco Bell ad with two tigers. The tigers are chatting while spying on campers, and one gets focused on saying "carne asada" with a rolling r. It was humorous, and got me to chuckle. 2. There was a Coke ad that was clearly based on the Grand Theft Auto video game series. In it, after a crime spree, a character grabs a cold Coke from a cooler and starts doing nice things. More important than the content of the ad was that it copped the song "You Give a Little Love" from the Bugsy Malone soundtrack, one of my favorites as a kid! Great song, so the ad passes go, collects $200, and secures its spot in my tops list. 3. Third ad that made the cut was another Coke one. There was a white mutt who sees a parade and a dalmation, and uses an ill-timed mud puddle splash to costume himself and secure himself a spot in the parade. Touching. 4. There were a few ads that touched on Black History...

Today, when I logged into Gmail, I found a surprise - Gmail now lets me open some office documents directly in Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Here is the screenshot:

First, the most incredible winter driving video I've ever seen. If you've ever driven in ice, you know that sometimes, when the road is just wrong, you are literally helpless to do much more than brace yourself for a semi-controlled spin. This road must've been completely iced over. Whatever this case, you will probably cringe like I did just watching one person after another get into this mess. Secondly, a promo for Windows 386. The first 7 minutes are completely boring, but skip to about 7:10 in and the chaos begins. You will never believe that someone actually thought this would sell Windows. The only thing is does is convince me that promo directors in the mid-80's must've done A LOT of cocaine.

I've been doing a LOT of coding for OSNews version 4 lately. It's really brought up a lot of interesting thoughts about Web 2.0 websites. I intend to write something of length about that in the next few days. Suffice it to say, there's a lot of new ground we'll be treading with OSN4. It's pretty exciting.