A dose of reality...
Current mood: curious
Category: MySpace

OK not really a surprise, but I've been on the friendship building cruise again. I suspect that in the next couple of days I'll end up going over 2000 friends. I don't expect anything super fantastic to happen then, or for that matter anything really different. There may be another change in what shows up in my view of my profile, but I'm not too worried about that.

And that's not really what this blog entry is about.

Nope, this one is about 'reality' or the lack there of in entirely too many people's lives.

I've seen a few different profiles lately. Hardly a surprise there is there. As an observation, Most guy's profiles are fairly basic. Oh, they've been customized of course, colors, backgrounds, the usual stuff, but it's still the basic MySpace layout.

Actually that's the case with most women's profiles as well. However once we get past the something over 'half' that makes 'most' women's profiles basic, you start to see all sorts of diffferent things. A small percentage have the columns flipped. I.e. the user's profile picture is on the right rather than the left. A bit more than that have some sort of a content management flash ui. So instead of seeing the different blocks with their associated information embeded in them, that information is presented by the flash interface as the viewer moves the mouse over different things, or clicks on them. Oddly enough, this group presents a worse problem for me than the really small percentage of people who only want to add people they already know. The problem is that not every flash viewer makes the interactive elements interactive. So the 'Add me as a friend' button doesn't 'click' and you can't send an invite to them.

Oh, well, a loss, but that's OK.

The next group of people that I find having some incongruity in their profile are the 'bi' women who don't want male friends. The reality of the situation is that they have established a myspace profile as a lesbian, but don't want people to think of them as lesbians. That's OK too. I happen to prefer women myself, and have no problem with women who have an interest in women, even if they may never have an interest in me. In all honesty, the only subset of this group that concerns me are the women who bury a note in their profile saying that invitations from guys will be flagged as spam. Personally I have finer grained conditions for flagging an invitation as spam, but if a woman wants to tag any guy who happens to think she's attractive, and might be worthy of being considered a friend as a spammer, I guess that's her prerogative.

The 'odd' profiles are the 'Official' or 'Real' profiles of people. How many profiles are there of Pam Anderson? How many are 'really her!'? I'm reasonably confident that there are 'several' Pamela Anderson profiles. (Probably a few Pamela Andersen's as well.) It wouldn't surprise me all that much if there was a Pam Anderson (or en) behind the majority of them. The ones that people get concerned about are those of the Celebrityh Pamela Anderson. There very well may be a few 'Official' profiles of her. And don't question her about it either, she's liable to get upset and flag your question as spam and try to get you kicked off MySpace for even doubting that this is her profile.

OK, Whatever. First of all, most of the fraudulent profiles are related to people who've found pictures of the celeb, and who've decided that making those pictures available to others is a good way to get attention, and build friends. OK. I don't happen to think it's a very worthwhile method, but then if you need a way to get a vector for some computer infection gets around, I suspect that it will work.

In any case, what makes the page 'Official?' Is there some judge or appraiser who has stamped their certification on the page and made it 'official'? Nope. It's almost universally 'official' because the user claims it is their official page. They edit their profile, and add the words 'Official MySpace Profile of...' or words to that effect. So if there is no governing body vetting you from adding it to your profile, what's to prevent the fraud from putting it on their page? Nothing. In other words claiming that your profile page is the one and only official MySpace page for you is probably the silliest thing you can do on MySpace. Well, OK, that or hold the camera in front of your face when taking a picture of yourself in the bathroom mirror, but that's a different matter.

I've been asked how many of the people I have as friends on MySpace have I actually met. I have not even met all of the people on my 'top' list. (Though I would love to sit and chat with every single one of them.) If I meet 1% of my MySpace friends in real life, I would be very surprised. Oh, I have plenty of friends who I don't have as friends on MySpace, but some part of that is the fact that I have lots of online friends who wouldn't think of setting up a MySpace page for whatever reason. So it balances out at some level.

There are also people who ask how many of my friends profiles are really of them? Again, it doesn't really matter. Are there celebrities who've had fake profiles set up? Sure. I would suspect that less than 1% of my friends profiles are 'fakes'. Now that doesn't mean that there are not a significant number that don't have the reported person actually behind the profile. As an example, the Playmate and Pet profiles that have a common 'Add Me' theme in their 'contacting ...' block, I suspect are 'managed' profiles. The odds of actually getting a message from the Playmate or Pet, using that profile are pretty low in my opinion. Likewise profiles with hundreds of thousands of friends are likely to be managed at some level. It may be that the user has farmed out approving comments and friend adds to someone else, but is handling all the messages themselves. But if you get what sounds like a canned response, you begin to wonder.

As an observation on a couple of those points. If you find that I've added a profile that's using your pictures to present themselves as you, feel free to take up the matter of misappropriated pictures with the MySpace people. I have no control over those people, and I'm just as likely to include you in the people that I drop if you ask me to drop them as a friend. Here's why. As with the 'Offical' or 'Real' tag on a profile, I have nothing immediately available to verify that the person requesting that I drop someone is any more likely to be the 'real' or 'official' person than that the profile is for the Real person. Additionally I am being a bit indiscriminate in the adding of people, so I'll probably be indiscriminate in purging them as well. It's not something personal. For the vast majority of my friends, it can't be personal, as I don't know the person in the first place.

Well, that's going to do it for now. I think it's time I got some sleep.

06:58 - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Nice Ride...
Current mood: exhausted
Category: Life

Got another late start today. Ended up being up till 4 this morning, on one thing or another, and had to make a ride into downtown to pick up my cell phone (which I had left at work.) I had been thinking of doing that last night as well, but I'll admit that driving into downtown Mpls at night right now doesn't appeal to me all that much. There was not a lot of traffic this afternoon, but I heard more than enough chatter on the radio last night to suggest that it was a trip I didn't need to make.

So, I hit the road about 3:30, or effectively 4:00 pm I'll see about doing something even earlier soon, but it won't be today. (obviously.)

I was curious what the roads were like to the south, which for me means either 52 heading towards Rochester, or 169 towards Mankato. Since I have taken highway 52 to a variety of locations for many years, I decided 169 would be interesting. I got past Chaska, and realized I was going to need to fill up. Should have done that before I got started today, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to go a ways first. I ended up filling up in Jordon, MN, and while I was there I picked up a sandwich at Burger King in the Holiday there. I realized I was not going to make the turn at first, so I took a right (you need to take a left to get to the gas station from southbound 169, and turned around to cross the highway. I noticed that there was a state park off that way some place, and stashed the info for later consideration.

After filling up, and picking up some food, I got back on the highway, and continued south. Saint Peter sounded like a reasonable destination. I could have probably gotten to Mankato, but without scheduling a full day to take a good look around, I didn't think it was a good idea. Before I got there though I saw a sign for a rest stop in the Le Sueur vicinity. Stopped there and ait my sandwich, and used the facilities. While I didn't order fries with my sanwich, apparently the people at BK were concerned enough about the fact that I had waited a fair amount of time that they threw them in for me. I ate about half the fries. Being diabetic, I decided I really didn't need all that much in the way of starches right then.

One of the reasons I stopped there was that as I was riding, I was being hit pretty hard by cross winds. It's a bit disconcerting to be taking a broad right hand sweeping turn and the bike is leaning to the left to compensate for the wind. It really doesn't feel right. Also the buffeting felt a bit like someone beating up on me.

As I was leaving the rest stop, I decided to go ahead down to St Peter, and once I got into town I could turn around.

In case you are thinking 'I've heard of that city, what from?' it was hit by a tornado in 1998 which destroyed nearly half the town, and ended up killing one child. It is also the final resting place of William B. Dodd who built 'Dodd Road' from Mendota Minnesota, (just south of St. Paul) and St. Peter. The road is unusuall in the sense that it was privately funded at a time when most roads were being built with public funds. (I will have to remember to try that road one of these days, though it does not follow the same route that it originally did.)

It was well after 5 by the time I got to St. Peter, so after riding around a rather small part of the city, I got back on the highway and went home. I have to do something about this permit thing I suppose.

Remembering the State park I had seen the sign for as I was approaching Jordan, I decided that I was making good enough time to take a bit of a detour to have a look see. The state park was not quite as close to the highway as I was expecting, but still within reason. I stopped at the entry house, and did a quick review of the situation. They have two types of passes for the park, (well actually close to 10, but only two of which caught my eye as being potentially useful to me.) The first was a day pass for $5. the second was a motorcycle anual pass of $20. Not really being prepared for either, I picked up a map of the state parks in MN, and read a bit of the history behind this state park.

The Minnesota State Park Lawrence Division is sited on the original plat, and surrounding area of the community of Lawrence MN. Lawrence was lain out as a city on the Minnesota River. The founder built a home at what would have become the center of town, and it turns out that ultimately no one moved in. It is now part of the Minnesota River State Park.

I finished my Diet Mt. Dew, and pulled the liner out of my biking jacket, then got back on the road, and ultimately got back home.

A couple of riding notes as well. As I say, I felt pretty beat up before I got to the point where I turned around. The weather is to the point where I will need to look at getting a different jacket soon. The one I"me ridng with now is designed for hot weather, and suits that variety of riding just fine. I have a few minor complaints about it, things like the sleeve gathers not being very impressive, but over all it's not too bad. I've worn a textile jacket in the past, though I blew the sleeve zipper out on that, and I think it's really only good for a costume at this point. (which it very well may become.) I haven't quite decided what jacket I will be buying, but I'll have to make that decision this next week or so, before the weather starts cooling off much more.

Part of the buffeting is also due to the fact that this bike doesn't really have a wind screen. At one level it does. there is a small windscreen in front of the instrument panel, however this is not designed to protect the rider who is sitting upright on the bike. I note that riding leaned over the tank gave me a much smoother riding experience, however I'll also admit that I wouldn't want to do this for very long rides. That's mostly because holding my head in a position that makes visibility of the road possible at that point is very likely to end up giving me a pain in the neck.

Well, I suspect that I will feel pretty beat up tomorrrow, though I may sleep well tonight. We'll see.

Next blog over on my home blog at http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/blog

Have a great day...

01:46 - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Where I’ve been, what I’ve been doing...
Current mood: accomplished
Category: Life

Last blog entry was June 24th here, but that's far from my most recent blog entry. We'll get to more on that in a little bit.

As a couple of friends have noted, I tend to be fairly prolific when it comes to writing. Either I write a lot of short entries, or I occasionally write some long blog entries. Have to admit that I don't recall all that many short entries, but there are quite a few longer entries here.

In any case, I've been working on a number of projects, and it turns out that the level of categorizations, and 'tags' available are rather limited here. It's nice to have the Smilies but if I want to tag a blog entry so that people looking for CVG2008, or CONvergence can easily aggregate my blog into their system, it's rather difficult. Specifically the tag function doesn't exist, though I could format tags into the body of the blog entry and hope that the indexers can figure out what they mean.

As a result, and because I may decide to stray into topics that even MySpace may not be comfortable with, I've decided to set up my own blog. I have done this in the past, and used SimplePHPBlog, and other very basic software, but the king of the hill for blogging is WordPress, and getting it running gave me the tools to do some other things, or at least reminded me of what I need to do in the future.

In any case, there will be a lot more about that, identi.ca and other things over at my new blog. I'll still write here from time to time, but since I own a domain (or 4 or more) and have it pointed at my own server, I suppose having traffic there would be nice.

For more information, and to follow the blog, go to http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/blog. There is an rss feed there, and you can even attach that to your myspace page. Or you can open a google reader page and read from my blog there. That's also handy for dynamically adding other blogs, and rss feeds when I refer to them.

I'm still learning about the setup, layout, and how to do different things, such as back linking, and using my blog to comment on someone else's blog, but I'm hoping it works out well for anyone who's been reading this blog here.

Thanks for the responses everyone. Hope to see you at the new location as well.

14:59 - 1 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Friend Requests...
Current mood: curious
Category: MySpace

I see it's time to discuss friend requests again.

I have not had a request that I've been able to just out of hand declare is a spam request for over a month now. I think that is at least in part because of the captcha that I now request that people enter. I hope that there have been other efforts made to filter out those accounts, such as watching for profile updates that put a transparent image over the entire page that links to a third party site, but there may be other issues that not even I am aware of involved.

So why the new blog entry? I've run into a somewhat different type of an invite that concerns me. Requests from 'private' profiles that don't have a greeting message.

Don't get me wrong on thinking I don't want you to maintain your privacy. I'm perfectly happy with that. There are several reasons for doing so, as well as a few different methods of making sure that it happens. Again, perfectly happy with that.

As an example, my profile is private to people under 18. If I could set the age to 21, I probably would. The really reason for doing this is to discourage seemingly random 'friend requests' from 'minors.' I'll grant that this is only as effective as the 'age' field in a user's profile, but one has to start somewhere. I don't need the headaches of having to deal with people suggesting that I'm attempting to corrupt our youth, and I'm old enough that there are some people who would think that I was attempting to do that even with my profile set up the way it is.

I'm also not opposed to people sending invitations without an accompanying greeting note. I do that all the time as well. We often assume that the person we are sending an invitation to has no more time to check on who we are than we do to check on them.

One thing to remember though is that when you send an invite from a private profile, there is no way for the person receiving the invite to know who you are, except by the information around your profile picture. I.e. they don't get to see who your friends are, who each of you may have as mutual friends, or any of the related information.

For some accounts, this is not an issue at all. I seriously doubt if Bobby Billiard, Tilia Tequila, or any of the other accounts with over a million friends spend a lot of time 'vetting' their friend requests. I could be wrong, but I suspect that they have people who help with account management who have other techniques to check if a friend request is legitimate. I'm a bit of a fan of at least looking at a prospective friend's profile and seeing what sort of comments they are leaving on their friends web pages.

As a worst case I would love to know who we each may have as mutual friends, but even this is not available until after I accept a friend request.

The simplest solution of course, if you want to keep your profile private, is to leave a quick note in the invitation saying 'I saw your comment on ... picture" or "... seems to think very highly of you." just to give the recipient some idea of why they are getting an invitation from you. Or 'I saw you at ... and you said to say Hi! here.'

But that doesn't happen all that often. So we'll see if the accepting of the friend leads to issues. Fortunately once a friend is added, they go into the 'New Friends' list for a month, and you get to see mutual friends of each of you. It can be fun to find out who you already know.

Be well.

07:40 - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Birthdays...
Current mood: mellow
Category: Life

As you can tell by looking at my home page, I got a few happy birthday greetings this year. And if you dig through my comment history, you'll see it's a few more than I got last year. I'm kind of happy about that. I know I don't get out there every day and wish all of my friends a happy birthday, and a few of you could probably note that I've missed yours. Sorry if I have.

Did I have the happiest possible birthday? Well for a lot of people, if you saw what I did for my birthday, where I spent it, and so on, you would probably say that I did not have a particularily happy birthday. That's OK. In my book it was a good day. Things that needed to get done, some got done. There will always be more that needs to be done, but when that ceases to be the case, I'll probably cease to be as well.

My immediate family (parents, siblings, children) have either moved away from here, or have passed on. About the closest family I have in the area is a niece going to college in the TC area, and I think she went home for the summer. Everyone else is at least a cousin in family depth. At that point, the people I work with are esentially closer to family than almost everyone else, and I spent about half the day in their company.

Did I get anything 'good' for my birthday? Well, the Lexus didn't show up, and I ended up driving into work in my own car. I got to watch the Discovery space shuttle land, granted it was on TV, but I honestly can count the number of times I've seen even that much of the event on both hands. I think I've seen more launches. The best thing I think I got though was the greetings from my friends on MySpace. I gave myself a PS3, but I don't think it compares. Especially as I won't be able to watch or game on it till the cables and stuff come in. On the other hand, the greetings will be there and welcome for some time to come. Thank you.

I was up till about 1:30 or so, then awake at about 5. I was actually 'up' at 6, so I don't know whether I should consider that hour part of my rest, or part of my day. I certainly wouldn't call it sleep. But that's hardly unusual. I understand that some people wake up and Boom they begin their day, and everything goes grand. Not really the case for me. I do spend some time contemplating what I will be doing, but most of the decisions are not made till a bit later.

I should have ridden in to work Friday night, Saturday morning looked like a great morning to ride. And I'm thinking I may be kicking myself again for that, as today looks like another great morning. The prediction I saw before work yesterday was that from about now (7:00 am) to about 10, there would be scattered thunderstorms. Now 'partly sunny' or 'partly cloudy' for the next 24 hours... Oh well.

What was my greatest wish for my birthday? It doesn't happen all at once, but I wish all of my friends the very best. I know that some of you are going through troubles that you thought you had either evaded or that was going to be different this time. Regardless, I really do wish you the very best, along with all my other friends here and elsewhere.

For me there is little difference day to day when I turned 44. Not really expecting all that much when I turn 45, or 50 either. For some people a Birthday is another great opportunity to have a party. I'm not really 'big' on parties, though I'm involved in planning what I consider to be one of the best parties, with some of the very best people to party with. I'm not opposed to drinking, but Anhiser-Bush hasn't been getting wealthy off of sales to me either. (Or Miller, or Daniels, etc.) I am pretty solidly against Smoking, but I do have friends who do smoke, and I'm not interested in trying to force changes upon them. In any case, since I'm not very interested in drinking, the 'parties' that relly upon alcohol, don't hold out much attraction to me. I'm older, and in 2 years I need to get my drivers licence renewed again. If that sounds dull to you, that's OK.

By now you should know that I write on a fairly wide variety of topics. You are welcome to disagree, or not as you wish. I'm not saying that I'm going to be right in my writing. Mostly they are my 'observations' and can very well be wrong. Feel free to speak up. Einstein pointed out that 'Common Sense' is what we learn before we are 3. Something that I may be missing entirely is easily not 'common sense' for me. So let me know when I am dead wrong.

Thank you, and since it's Father's Day, and can not be my birthday any more, in the words of the Mad Hatter, "Happy Unbirthday to you!"

06:48 - 0 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Life and stuff...
Current mood: busy
Category: Blogging

It's been a couple of weeks sinc I last blogged here. Time to write a little bit before I go off to work.

Things are getting busy with preparations for the convention coming up in July. Oh, some people are more interested in the September Republican National Convention, and I wish them well, but I have other things on my mind.

I'm working on a small project that I hope will have two outcomes. The first is a usable projector screen for the convention, then after the convention I hope to make it work at home. Finding a projector screen these days isn't a big problem, so long as you don't mind spending a couple hundred bucks for the screen. Oddly enough, I do mind that kind of an expense, so... I picked up some 2'x4' 1/4" hardboard. At one time I was able to pick this stuff up with a whiteboard surface, but I can't find that at the moment. So I also picked up a can of white paint and a paint roller. The paint went on yesterday (before the weather turned wet) Whiteboard paint is about twice as expensive as what I'm prepared for at the moment, and I don't really need the glossy surface, so flat white is what I went with. For support I am going to go with a couple of pieces of 1"x4"x4' pieces of melamine. OK, it will probably be 3/4" thick, but that should be enough. I'll carve in a 1/4" or 3/8" kerf in an arch that the boards that are painted white will fit into, leaving about a foot of board extending on both ends. Then a dowel at both corners in the back, and a bungy coard (for now) between the dowel and the screen back surface to hold everything together through tension. (If I can't find good bungies I can either pick up the cord itself, or I can use a strap and ratchet system. We'll see.)

Not a lot of riding these days. Rain and other things getting in the way.

Besides painting yesterday I emptied about 200 gallons of trash. When I moved (and along the way before then) I filled up 35-55 gallon storage containiers with stuff that has been sitting in my garage now for over 3 years. I need some of that space back to work on my bike and do other things in my garage. So I spent a couple of hours parsing the contents. One container had cookware in it. I don't know that I will use it again anytime soon, but it's stuff that I think is worth holding onto. A couple of containers had uniforms and stuff from when I was in the service. I was able to combine those. I don't think any of the containers were completely full when I started, but I did empty two 55 gallon storage containers, 3 40 gallon containers and a 35 gallon container. 4 35 gallon trash bags made it to the dumpster, and I have a few things that I'm going to have to decide if they go back into storage, or if I have the opportunity to sell them. (I may donate some of the sweatshirts and sweaters to charity, but I need to wash them first. (3 years in storage did not do much good for them.)

Now I have to go through the stuff from my folks and transfer them from cardboard boxes into the storage containers and re-pack the garage. Once that's done I think I will have space to work on the bike and stuff.

Bikd mirrors are getting to be a bit of an issue for me. I ordered up one set that I thought were the right set, only to find I had ordered two of the same side for a different year. then I ordered up the next pair which should have been right, but the mountings look nothing like what my bike needs. So back to the store I go.

Work tonight though, so time to get cleaned up and going. Have a good one, and ride safe.

13:43 - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

The New Helmet...
Current mood: busy
Category: Life

As I noted a while back, the helmet I was originally riding with is a little bit small. It's a size Medium which is the size that the chart they seller had suggested, however I think I was basing my starting size upon a value that may not be a standard hat size. In any case with the face module locked down and the helmet strapped snuggly in place, the chin module was pressing against my chin. Even with all the vents open, simply breathing in my helmet would cause it to fog up. Not a great experience, and it makes it difficult to ride with it. So off I went and bought another helmet.

This time I picked up a bright yellow modular helmet, and added a smoke face shield to the order. Oddly enough even with the face shield down, it works better for me to wear protective glasses (sun glasses, safety glasses, the like) as there is enough air moving past my face at highway speed that it bothers my eyes when I am wearing contacts. (Glasses would do also I'm sure.)

Of course the first thing I did with the new helmet is replace the face shield with the smoke one. I'm going to have to pull out a flat blade screw driver again though and check out the assembly as I am getting a lot of wind noise on my right side. Some also on the left, but I have also noticed that if I don't have the face shield snapped down to the chin module, there is a significant amount of movement on the right side that I'm not sure should be there. Also the chin module does not seem to want to stay up if the face shield is snapped to it.

I'm also going to have to start watching for wind reports I think. A 25 mph cross wind with 35 mph gusts is really noticeable when riding. And going 'faster' doesn't necessarily help. (A heavier bike might though, but I'm seriously not ready for that.) It got to the point yesterday where when I got within a couple of miles of home, I got off of the freeway, just to get out of the wind. Frontage roads there had good wind breaks in the sound barriers and difference in level for the road. Additionally it got me out of highway mode which is probably good.

The Ice Breaker question at the convention committee meeting yesterday was 'What is one thing you will be doing the weekend after the convention?' Lot's of responses of 'sleep' but even though I'm far from the only person who rides a motorcycle, I was the first person who said 'hopefully riding on a highway some place.'

Ordered up a Tiny Tracker 4 for my bike. I have been rooting around in my junk boxes, and have not located the tiny tracker 3 that I built for riding on a bicycle. If I find it I may use that instead, but there are some advantages with the 4 for riding. Telemetry, and it will talk to my etrex and other aprs users in the area will show up.

Even more for the bike, I ordered a pair of turn signals, a pair of after-market mirrors and a few other things to go on the bike. After seeing what happened with the right front turn signal, I can see why the earlier owner may have wanted to use the handlebar mirrors on the end of the handlebars, but I'm not as comfortable with them to tell the truth. Part of it is just getting things tightened down I'm sure. The mirrors want to turn away from where I position them at this time. But a bigger portion of the problem is that to look in the mirrors, I have to turn my head away from the road by a large angle. I'm really not happy about that.

Later folks. Pups need some attention.

Currently watching : Elektra (Full Screen Edition) Release date: 2005-04-05

14:01 - 2 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Think I need to get a ’beater’ bike....
Current mood: irritated
Category: Life

Riding on the streets so far has not been a problem. Even in parking lots, and so on. No big problems. However the bike I have seems to me to be too big for practicing in the lot that the Minnesota Motorcycle Safety Center (MMSC) has set up for practice, training and evaluation.

The problem is really not the size and maneuverability of the bike, I've successfully negotiated the turns within the box and guidelines properly. The problem I'm encountering is maintaining consistency in my performance. Today I dropped my bike while doing the figure 8. I had completed the first turn of the figure 8, but ended up waiting till I was in the second part of the turn before I adjusted my position on the bike, and was not going fast enough to maintain the turn.

No damage to me, but I will be replacing a turn signal housing on the bike. (Right front.) No damage to the bulb, but it is white, and the housing lens was what gave it the amber color. I think I can get an amber bulb while waiting for the replacement housing to show up, but Long term I would rather have the housing. I would rather have the factory (apparently optional) rear view mirrors as well, but that's a different story.

I think that part of the problem is that I am afraid of damaging the bike, or worse being thrown by the bike. (There are a few things in turns that can do that, though the likelihood of encountering them in the test environment is rather low.) In any case I think getting more comfortable with making the turns in larger areas, then moving to smaller, and smaller areas would probably help. As would having a smaller bike to practice on, one that I am not worried about hurting.

Well, that's enough for now. Back to work.

20:34 - 4 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

Weekends...
Current mood: curious
Category: Life

I wonder at times if anyone has ever considered how much work is actually done on 'weekends' compared to the hours spent 'at work.'

Take 'Home Improvement' as an example. There are a large number of things a home owner can do that will improve the value of their home, but do not introduce a significant cost in terms of materials, that get done 'on the weekend.' Extensive re-modeling may require the assistance of a contractor, and won't be something you will do over the weekend, but there are still a lot of things that 'you' can probably do. Things like painting a room, or the siding, 'refacing' the kitchen cabinets, and perhaps putting in certain types of flooring. Each can change the visual appeal of the property in ways that can 'increase' the sales value far more than the cost of materials. The difference in value between the cost of materials, and the change in value for the home is a measure of what your time may be worth. Take painting all the rooms in the house. If you spend $200 on the paint and tools (brushes, rollers, trays, etc.) and then spend 20 hours doing the work, possibly one weekend or perhaps 2, and the result is an increase in the property value of $2000, then those 20 hours of work generated $1800 of value, or payed at $90 an hour.

I'll grant that that isn't going to help if there are structural problems, but it gives you some idea of the value you can see out of a relatively small amount of work.

Now if you work in an industry that regularly pays you more than $90 an hour before benefits and such, that may not seem like a very impressive pay rate, but I tend to doubt that most people are in that boat.

That's just an example of a tangible payoff for doing something in your 'off hours.' Other examples include the work that a shade tree mechanic may be doing for the fun of it compared to going rates of a garage, going out and taking pictures in your free time and selling them through a service like iStockPhoto.

There are also 'intangible' payoffs. Perhaps you spend your weekends doing volunteer work. Or maybe you help run an organization for a non-profit. Each can measure how much the time you put in is actually worth, because in most cases what you are doing is done by others in the commercial world for some standard rate. That said, the quality of work done is often different. As is the work environment. If you serve food at a church lunch line, the work you do is little different from the server's at a school cafeteria, but often the people you are working with are looking at what they are doing as helping people, and the people you are serving are often far happier to see the results of your work than what the people serving at a school cafeteria will ever get.

Some of us do hobby craft work on our weekends as well. That may be building or using some sort of radio equipment, needlepoint, writing stories, software, and so on.

The big one in my mind is 'independent study.' By this I mean all the research you may be doing related to either something for work, or one of those hobbies. I've seen people turn a couple of hours a day of study in their work field at home or the library into a $10k, or $40k per year increase in pay. Not necessarily for the same people as they were working for while doing the study, but that turns out not to be all that critical for them either.

In fact you can turn 8 or so hours on a Saturday into a side job that pays significantly better over time than what you may currently be earning. This weekend for me started off after a 12 hour night by stopping at my local University, where a Bar Camp was going on.

Bar Camp is a type of 'convention' that is also called an 'un-convention.' And no Mark, Bar Camps have nothing directly to do with Bars. Conventions and Seminars tend to have a few presenters who 'talk-at' the attendees. The idea of a bar camp is that everyone there is a participant at one level or another. You might be talking about what you are doing with a piece of technology, how your company handles certain types of customers, or how to turn something 'simple' into a very effective tool you may be able to use as a product, or even as a tool for you to generate more work.

You might meet someone who you've never met, get into a discussion on some topic that has nothing to do with what is scheduled, and amass a crowd of people who are all interested in the same thing. Grab an unoccupied room and hold an impromptu session on how you are using it, or get up front and ask people to stand up and describe how they use something 'conventional' in new and unconventional ways.

It also gives people a way to network on various topics. Perhaps you have a project you are working on and need something that you have no idea how to implement. At an un-convention it's likely that there will be someone you meet who will know someone who is very familiar with that piece of your project. You can either learn from them, or you may be able to exchange contact info and work with them at another time.

The idea came about as the result of observing that in many cases more information was being exchanged in the hallways of large conventions than in the convention rooms. People would 'plan' on seeing the latest word from some large manufacturer or developers in a conference program, only to discover that the conversations between people outside of the program room was generations of development beyond what was going on in the room.

Tim O'Riely (publisher of the nutshell press books and others) noticed this and created 'Foo Camp' which a number of people were impressed with and suggested that they could come up with an 'open' alternative they called 'Bar Camps.' For those who have never written software, 'foo' and 'bar' are what are called generic variable names. "We'll take the customer information, and place it in the variable 'foo' and relate it to all the products they are interested in which we'll track in the variable 'bar' and ..." 'Foo' and 'Bar' apparently do not have any relationship with the term 'FUBAR' even if they look or sound related. 'Fubar' apparently has a much longer history in a relatively disconnected area of advanced project development. For more information go look on google for 'New Hackers Dictionary' or 'Jargon file' and you should find more information all over the place.

I would love to have spent the entire day talking with various people. However I had just come off of a 12 hour shift for work, and my dogs do need attention from me. I could probably have handled the sleep deprivation, but the cleanup would have been ugly I'm sure.

I met a lot of interesting people from a lot of different areas. I think I came away with a lot of great ideas. And I had a pretty good time. Of course I have a lot of other things to do this weekend. But I thought I would share this bit early on.

23:24 - 1 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

Fighting spam posts to my web server...
Current mood: irritated
Category: Web, HTML, Tech

I run a couple of web servers, both locally, and on a remote server. On the one I run at home, I have been storing bookmarks in a text file that I access via a php page. The scripting involved is nothing exceptional, there is minor error checking (basically is the content of the URL field a URL, and is there a description) but the script does not attempt to validate if that page is reachable, or whether the content of that link leads to a malicious page or not.

Apparently my page has been found by a few bots. I've run into this sort of a problem before with Wiki's, blogs, etc. The 'easy' fix is to require a user login to be able to get to the page, or at least find some way to add a user login to be required for editing it.

The problem is that I would then have to add more files to my system to give read-only access, and things like that.

One co-worker suggested using CAPCHAs. That's the 'tech' solution. There are two problems with that. The first is that MSN, Yahoo and Google all are aware that some number of their CAPCHAs are already being broken by systems 'on the fly.' I don't know how off hand, but the two major ways are to run them through a third party as part of a separate 'access' scheme, and keeping track of something like an MD5 sum for the image that's sent out, and if it matches something in the history, send a 'known working' response. Off the shelf patern recognition can re-assemble a surprising amount of material already. For example if I were to enter my e-mail address as 'somebody onetwenty7 zero 0 1' there are systems that can convert that directly into 'somebody@127.0.0.1' and some of them will already know to throw that address away.

That's 'off the shelf' technology. Currently in development is a neural network construction that is doing substantially better, though it isn't 'in the wild' yet that I know of. The guy who developed the Palm Pilot, which demonstrated that there was a demand for 'intelligent hand held devices,' which ultimately developed into the various cell phones that sync up data to your home or work computer, is currently working on the new neural network systems.

If you are familiar with the history of expert systems, and early 'Artificial Intelligence' attempts, you may want to skip the next couple of paragraphs, but for everyone else... A expert system is given a 'knowledge base' where it takes some sort of input, compares that against conditions that are recorded in it's knowledge base, and presents a recommendation, or takes a specific action. You may have one monitoring your engine, noting how much oxygen is in the exhaust, keeping track of engine temperature, oil pressure, DC voltage, and everything else that can be monitored under the hood, and if something goes wrong, say oil pressure drops suddenly, or some other situation, including you've just gone over 80,000 miles, it will turn on the 'Check Engine' light for you, and may even shut off the engine. Or a robot on a factory floor has a sensor that tells a computer how many turns a bolt has made going into an engine block, and what the torque was at various stages as the screw was going in. If the reported measurements are within some known tolerance, it 'passes.' If the bolt only went 1/4th of the number of turns it should have before the recommended torque for tightening was reached, the system may halt the assembly and call for an engineer to come over and see what happened. Perhaps the robot needs service, perhaps something up the line isn't doing it's job right, perhaps there's a run of bolts that are too short for what they are supposed to be doing.

That's a simplified example of an expert system. AI has gone through a number of variations, of which expert systems have been one result. As recently as 5 years ago, I've heard reports that 'grep' and the associated 'regular expression' matching was essentially still the state of the art for AI. I'm not entirely certain that I was sure that was true then, and I'm pretty sure that it's not true today. Aside from the development of 'functional' programing languages such as Lisp, other directions that AI has gone in have included simple and 'complex' neural networks. 'Simple' neural networks basically are given a fairly small number of inputs, deciders, trigger thresholds, secondary deciders and outputs. 'Deciders' in this case are small programs or look at the value they are getting as an input, and if that value exceeds a specific threshold they 'fire' on their outputs. Those outputs are sent to secondary deciders which take 2 or more triggers, and depending on how they are set up will either send a 1 or a 0 on their output. In 'Simple' neural networks, someone adjusts the trigger threshold for each decider, and calls the result 'learning.' (or teaching) In the 'Complex' neural network, there are litterally hundreds or thousands of these deciders, and they are linked to each other in so many ways that attempting to manually adjust the thresholds isn't reasonably possible. So they are either all set to a 'standard' level, or in some cases they've all been set to random thresholds and a piece of software 'rewards' or 'punishes' the deciders based on the output being something like what the expected result should be.

This has resulted in som interesting discoveries over time. For example people would 'teach' the network what things like cars, trucks tanks, helicopters and so on 'looked' like, and with the sample images the system would be hitting 90% or better, but when they attempted to feed it live imagery at resolutions similar to the images it was trained on, it would fail abysmally. After reviewing the 'sample' images later on it was noted that part of the problem was that different people had been taking pictures of the various objects, and in many cases the environments surrounding the objects in question, the lighting, even the focus all were being used by the neural network as keys to determine which type of an object it should report, which meant that it had no idea what to do with a live image of these different objects, because any of the objects that were expected to be in the live image would have the same set of environmental conditions, or those conditions would change over time, and all of this would 'throw' the neural network.

For those that skipped down, this might be a good place to start reading if you're interested in this topic, otherwise I'll get back to my web server in another paragraph or two.

Those earlier examples of neural network systems were often considered abysmal failures, but the reason for the failure was more the result of the fact that we did not know nearly as much about how our brains function then as we do now. Things like knowing that the output of one neron may be affecting the direct input in another neuron, how one neuron is only connected to a few other neurons, and how neurons tend to work in clusters in our brain. For example if we are asked to say what we are seeing in a picture, we activate different parts of our visual systems and language systems than we do if we are asked to write down or check off what we see. Some of the recent developments in Neural Networks have taken those ideas and modeled them in software and hardware and the results are surprisingly good. Teach one of these networks what a house, a car, a boat, a plane, a tree, and a number of other objects look like, then start testing it by throwing images that were not in the original set at it, and it will almost always categorize the images correctly.

Unfortunately, while I think this is great for a large number of situations, for example I think that such a system analyzing backscatter radar will do a much faster job of identifying threats and hazardous objects and materials at the airport than the current human training system is very likely, I think this is going to be the death knell for CAPCHAs.

So I don't think that the amount of work involved in developing a CAPCHA based system is worth while for my web site. But over the past month or so, I've been getting about 5 to 15 'hits' on my bookmark page for sites that I don't trust even enough to check them myself. I modified my 'add' script to add rel=nofollow tags to new additions, and I can delete those myself later on if I decide that the addition is one of mine that I want to keep, but even with that I'm not interested in one of my friends 'accidentally' following one of those links. I could care less about what they are trying to sell, if that's their business model. I'm more inclined to believe that these links are to pages where some vulnerability or another has been taken advantage of, and is going to load the unwitting link clicker up with all sorts of garbage to try to take over that user's computer.

I'm afraid that the problem with CAPCHAs would also affect what I call Wise Ass form changes. So for example the form currently has a field for URL and a field Description. The 'Wise Ass' change would be to change URL to "Where's Earl Going?" and "What's he going to do when he gets there?" for Description. Of course a couple of tests and it's easy to see that the WEG field is looking for a URL, and we're back to the problem I've been having.

The Ideal fix for this problem would be to drop all packets from the various devices that are attempting to post these URLs to the before they even get into my network. Unfortunately while I'm reasonably certain that my ISP is using hardware perfectly capable of that, it's probably not going to happen that they want to know what addresses I think are a problem and start blocking them for me.

The next possibility is to start dropping these packets at one of my firewalls. Yes plural. I won't go into why there are two hardware firewalls between my server and the Internet, but there are. Actually as far as my server is concerned, there might just as well not be a firewall there, but I can add rules there to block this traffic, and I have in the past.

The problem is that I can only add so many rules to the firewall, and then it basically says 'Enough!' On top of everything else, the process of adding one of these rules is a real pain in the tookas. It's sort of like '1. log into the web interface, 2. find the page where the rule you want to add goes, 3 create the new rule, or modify an existing rule, 4. save the change (which effectively means reboot the firewall.)' Steps 1 and 2 can be skipped for adding additional rules after you've saved a rule, but it's still a pain. And with the limited number of rules that can exist on the firewall (something I consider stupid at one level, but reasonable on another, and possibly really smart on even a different level) I'm not really comfortable trying to use one of these firewalls to do that level of detail management.

So I'm down to two different solutions. One I would love to implement, but it will be more expensive, and one that is less than preferred, but is reasonably do able for me without a lot of added expense and redesign of my network.

The preferred solution would be to put in a more capable firewall. Actually the device doesn't have to be a firewall, it just has to be a router that allows me to put in better firewall rules. I would consider something like a pix 501, but even on e-bay those are rather pricey, and they are also comming up on end of life from Cisco. The same can be said for a lot of other devices, and once you get out of the cisco cable router and 501 series firewalls you start talking about a lot of money and fairly quickly you start adding fan noise that I would rather not add.

Along the same lines I could build my own firewall based on Linux, and IP Tables, and build it into a solid state drive (cf flash card to ide is very doable) and put it on a fairly low end ITX board so that ti's not generating so much heat that it needs a loud fan. If you're wondering what the starting point for something like that might look like, pop over to e-bay and search for 'carputer' and some of the $300-$500 systems are fairly close to what I'm thinking of, though with a lower end ITX based board and processor. Though with one of those higher end sytems I could also do the other thing I'm thinking of and use one of several virtual machine solutions to set up multiple isolated firewalls within one device. I'm not going to get into what all that can provide, suffice it to say that while it's a reasonable idea, it has one really big flaw.

Any Hardware based solution will only work on my personal server at home. The server I manage elsewhere is potentially susceptible to the same sort of a problem, but I don't currently have the specific pages I've encountered issues with, hosted there. I don't have access to the hardware where my 'server' is running. First of all, it's in a different state. Second of all, it doesn't actually have a console. I could take you to just about 'any' box in a large portion of the USA, and you wouldn't have the slightest idea of whether I was pointing at the box my server is running on, or something completely different. I would much rather find a solution where I can implement it the same way on both boxes.

IPtables does work on both servers. If you're familiar with the firewall that's been built into Windows since service pack 2 for XP, well actually it's been built in for longer than that, but was only enabled by default with XP-SP2, then you're at least aware of what a host based firewall is. Basically it sits between your network interface, and all the applications and services on your system and does what it can to prevent the 'bad guys' from getting into and damaging your system. Obviously it's only as good as the person operating the keyboard. If you go to a page that wants to load extensions to your browser, and the like, you end up deciding if it will load them, and if you don't know whether there is a security problem with one of those extensions, you have the potential problem of installing malicious software.

I'm not going to say that the same situation can't happen in Linux. It can. That said, for my server's I'm not generally running 'user' software anyway, and most of the software is signed, meaning that someone (usually my Linux distributors) has gone through the code and done what they can to eliminate vulnerabilities. Again I am not saying that Linux is the be-all, most secure, stablest, whatever, even if I happen to believe those things. My experience is that everyone has their own set of beliefs and feelings on such matters, and claiming that "Such and Such" is the best, bar none, simply gets in the way of solving problems and getting things done.

OK. One of the IPTables tools available for Ubuntu is UFW. It doesn't stand for Ubuntu FireWall. It is a tool that makes it easier to configure IPTables as a firewall. It stands for Uncomplicated FireWall. Having configured IP Access Lists on cisco firewalls in the past, I have to admit that for me, UFW provides a very usable way to create rules. It adds key words and uses cider notation rather than access list masks, but if I want to drop all packets from a specific IP address, or network, with a destination of my web server's port, setting it up is just about as simple as telling the tool to 'deny proto tcp from IPAddress to any port 80' Under In this case since the web server is running on the box that the rule is being applied to, that means that it will block all traffic from that IP address to the web server running on this box.

In theory I could redirect that traffic into a honey pot that would sit there and collect that variety of traffic for as long as I would like, but would never make it available anywhere else, but I'm not all that interested in running a honey pot right now. Also UFW is probably not the best tool for that, though I'm not sure I have a great idea of which alternative would be.

Now to get UFW for my debian server... (or learn how to write the IPTables rules I need there.)

As it stands, I'm thinking that my debian box is temporarily immune. But then I don't blog there as much, or have nearly as many links pointing to it.

00:16 - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment