Paul English explains carefully how to set up two wifi access points if you need to cover a broader area…

He also has a nice appreciation of David Brudnoy, the long-time Boston-area radio talk show host who was opinionated without being stupid or obnoxious. I only heard him a few times, but his movie reviews were the best thing in the Boston Tab newsweekly.

3 Comments »

Scott Kirsner points to the loads of creativity the Boston area is applying to the TV tech. (The link will break soon.) Of special interest:

Jeremy Allaire’s new company.
In the mid-1990s, Allaire’s first company, Allaire Corp., helped to simplify the process of building and maintaining a website. Last year, Allaire joined the Cambridge venture capital firm General Catalyst as technologist-in-residence. Now, he’s starting a company with backing from General Catalyst. He won’t say much, but he’s interested in what he calls the democratization of video. “We have this situation where the number of people who can produce video programming is poised to explode, with inexpensive digital cameras and editing tools, and the existing distribution systems can’t support it,” he says. “You can’t have 100,000 people producing shows for cable television. The only thing that can support it is the Internet.” We’re all familiar with the Internet of text. Coming soon: the Internet of video.

3 Comments »

Adam Kalsey of Pheedo volunteered to help me through my recent MovableType upgrade spasm. Comments were showing up in the “pending approval” pile even though I’d configured MT to not require moderation. He talked me through installing the upgrade to MT-Blacklist (Jay Allen’s commentspam-fightin’ superhero). When that didn’t do the trick, Adam figured out that although I’d renamed the old MT-Blacklist files, I hadn’t renamed the extensions; MT was still loading mt_blacklist_old.pl because it loads anything with a .pl extension. Thus, MT was using a version of Blacklist that didn’t know about moderation, screwing up MT. I deleted the old Blacklist files and now my blog accepts comments.

Thank you, Adam, for your time and your expertise. And it was great to have a chance to talk with you outside of a textbox.

1 Comment »

Would you please allow me to be dumb in public? Again? Thank you.

I use Movable Type and have yet to upgrade from 2.66, but I ask the following not only for practical reasons. I want to know how comment spam works.

A few months ago, I tried installing some cgi stuff that was supposed to generate a graphic of random numbers embedded in swirly shapes; if you didn’t enter those numbers into a box on the comment form, your comment would be rejected. But I couldn’t get the graphics library installed correctly, so it didn’t work and uninstalled it.

No, I’m not looking for help installing the graphics library. I want to understand why it wouldn’t work simply to ask commenters to type any particular string – the same for everyone – into a box on the comment form and then reject any submissions that leave that box blank. In fact, why would I even have to make people type in a number? Why not just set a hidden value in the form? Do comment spammers actually note the parameters embedded in the <form> or do they simply find the address of an MT blog entry and assume that all MT comment pages use the same paramater names and values? Or am I way off in my understanding?

I tried experimenting with this yesterday, adding code to comments.pm to have it look for an extra parameter, which would explain why if you tried posting a comment on my site yesterday afternoon you got back intense mounds of gibberish.

(Note to self: Possible new Joho tagline: Generating intense mounds of gibberish since 1999.)

18 Comments »

To help me fight comment spam, I really need to be able to programmatically open all selected messages in Thunderbird and process the contents. I had a script in Outlook that did this, but I can’t find or figure out how to do it in Thunderbird. The hard part is opening the selected messages. Anyone have a code fragment or two that they can post or point me to?

Thanks!

6 Comments »

Jeez, what an interesting day.

I spent the morning at the the Jupiter Inside ID conference. Then I had lunch with six folks from the Library of Congress who have a variety of interests and deep, passionate expertise. We talked about if, when and how the Library’s 150M objects will be digitized and how that will change the institution, research, knowledge, authority… It was completely fascinating. Then I got a tour of the Library’s 100-person conservation/preservation division. May I use the “fascinating” word twice in one paragraph? I’ve been mightily impressed by the people I’ve met there.

Now, after a spicy Indian dinner with my nephew and a friend of his, I’m in a hotel in Providence that promised free wifi. Instead I get messages about out of date certificates and about reaching the redirection limit as it tries to connect with the wifi service provider’s home page. I’m using dialup for the first time in a looong time and feeling just a tad cranky about it.

7 Comments »

While downloading mail, Thunderbird reported that it failed to properly close some file because of a problem with one of the msg filters. Msgs in my inbox now were uniformly blank. TB asked me to delete inbox.msf and start again. I did. Didn’t help.

The msf file apparently is where header info is kept. The msgs themselves are stored in files without extensions that mirror the names of the folders you’re using within TB. And, sure enough, my inbox file showed a happy 7MB, about right considering I’ve only been using TB for a few weeks.

Unfortunately, my inbox file is 7MB of zeroes. So, it looks like I’ve lost all of my email for the past few weeks. Unless someone has a bright idea.

I am a backup fanatic. But I hadn’t gotten around to figuring out which TB files to back up. So, the msgs are just gone gone gone. Well, at least back to Nov. 1 which is when I did my last image of my drive. And that mail file is all of 7K.

I’m sunk. Sigh.

16 Comments »

Now that X1 indexes Thunderbird, I have switched from Outlook, at long last. (I’ve been using TB as my mail client on my laptop for months.) TB has imported all 150,000 msgs from OL and I’ve re-created most of the dozens of message filters I was using in OL. As soon as I figure out how to de-sync my Palm pilot from OL and train its beady eye onto TB, I’ll be almost done.

Just one thing remains…

I wrote a bunch of VBA scripts to help automate some tasks in OL. I’d like to recreate them in TB. But I don’t know the JavaScript that will let me access selected messages in TB. Nor am I sure how to attach JavaScript code to TB in the first place. I’ve had no luck finding documentation about how to do that. (Once I can get at the messages, I’ll be ok writing the little string-handling routines in JS. Probably.) Anyone know of some documentation?

3 Comments »

I’ve got the beta of X1, my favorite desktop indexer, and it’s back indexing Thunderbird, the almighty Mozilla email client. Woohoo! Give it a few weeks to go live…

3 Comments »

Voice over IP is a misnomer. It only looks like voice now because it’s replacing a voice-based technology. But it’s really about calls.

Why assume that phone calls have to be audio only? That’s an artifact of the current infrastructure. If you were starting from scratch and didn’t have lines that only knew how to carry sound but could carry any type of bit you’d build something far different. It’d integrate with other applications on your phone device. It’d know who’s calling from where and spin up a web page to show you the relevant information. It’d link to everything the Net knows. It might assume an open mike — not a two-person conversation — as the default. It wouldn’t assume that each phone call is essentially separate from every other; it would assume they can cluster into threads the way emails do. Or perhaps it’d find a more natural lumping than threads, including joining with other types of communication. It’d provide IM as a backchannel for multiperson phone calls. It’d give you visual bits as well as audio ones. It would do things that no one can predict because the genius of the market hasn’t yet invented them. But it is in the process.

8 Comments »