Cracked and Defaced
04.11.08 - 10:40am
I can’t remember the last time I saw a “hacked” site, but this is quite sad that a Turkish cracker has actually taken pleasure in defacing this hotel’s site.
Canto Videos
03.28.08 - 12:52am
Some videos I’ve discovered recently…
Cute video from Wong Fu Productions (Yellow Fever guys). It’s amazing this was shot in Hong Kong in only one day. And the English subtitles are actually good.
I couldn’t help but laugh at this. (In Cantonese)
Sometimes I forget how great it is to know Cantonese.
Free Flickr Pro and Wi-Fi with AT&T Broadband DSL
03.14.08 - 08:08am
If you pay for AT&T / SBC / Yahoo (whatever the hell they’re calling it today) DSL Broadband, you have a free Pro subscription to Flickr (normally $24.95/yr). Among the benefits, you get unlimited storage and unlimited uploads which means you can archive your full high resolution photos (and let friends download those high resolution photos).
This doesn’t seem to be well documented, so here’s how to get in on it if you already have a Flickr account:
- Log into your Flickr account.
- Go to the Flickr Account Transfer page.
- Click on “Sign in with an existing Yahoo! ID”.
- Enter your AT&T login (email address e.g. joeschmoe@sbcglobal.net) and AT&T password under “Yahoo! ID” and “Password”.
After you’re done, you should see the following note in your Flickr home page:
If you don’t have a Flickr account yet, you can probably link up to your AT&T DSL free offer by entering your AT&T DSL account in the Yahoo! ID field during the sign-up process.
If you have already paid for a Flickr Pro account, rumor has it that the end date for your subscription should be delayed until after you no longer have AT&T DSL.
And for those of you who like the cafe environment and computing on the go, you can use Wi-Fi at no charge at places like Barnes & Noble, airports, and McDonald’s with your AT&T DSL login [map]. I’ve always wondered… who hangs out and computes at McDonald’s anyway?
UPDATE 05 Dec 2008: No more free Flickr Pro after January 31, 2009:
Blackberry Email Personalities
02.26.08 - 06:05pm
Before I got the Crackberry, I did some extensive testing of smartphones particularly the iPhone and Blackberry. Unfortunately, I didn’t happen to catch that you couldn’t easily set your “From” email address header. This has become a problem because for work I send emails from various email aliases and mailing list names, not just my regular username@workdomain.com.
I searched around for alternative Blackberry IMAP email apps, but couldn’t find a good/decent one. After some experimentation, I’ve discovered a workaround with the Blackberry default email app… somewhat. Unfortunately, it requires another account that has POP or IMAP capabilities since Blackberry Internet Service actually error checks to see if you have already previously set up the email account and will actually check for valid login information (so you can’t just configure your Blackberry email and trick it with the alias or mailing list as your login):
- Set up another email address via Blackberry Internet Service (AT&T) and set the “Reply to” to your email alias or mailing list of choice which will change the “From” field. Set “Auto BCC” as your username@workdomain.com so you receive a copy you can file in your Sent messages folder.
- When replying to a message, use the Forward feature which will allow you to change the “Send Using” option to one of your other email accounts set up on the device; just using the Reply option will not let you change the email account.
- Modify the Subject line and replace “Fw” with “Re” to follow email convention. (optional)
Eudora has had the Personalities feature for quite sometime, Thunderbird calls it Accounts, but Mail.app still doesn’t allow you to configure identity settings. From what I’ve heard from colleagues who have iPhones, that’s also true on the iPhone email app. The iPhone also won’t let you choose the email account for replies (though it may let you change the email account for forwards).
Now I just wish it were easier to change the settings for the second email account on the Blackberry than via the web on the device. Or Blackberry could just implement the Personality/Accounts/Identity feature which would solve the problem completely.
Moss Landing Sea Otter
02.15.08 - 02:23pm
Last month, I went on a staff overnight retreat for work. After a ridiculous number of pit stops before we were actually on our way in our party van with 12 seats, we got distracted by some sea otters hanging out in the water on the way to Phil’s Fish Market for lunch. We had to stop and take pictures. I ended up taking a video. So adorably cute!
RIAA Violates Internet Standards
01.24.08 - 06:53pm
Two weeks ago, the RIAA sent out another batch of 407 pre-litigation letters to students of 18 universities asking them to pay at least $3,000 for illegal file sharing.
The text of the pre-litigation letters has instructions on not spoiling evidence:
Now that you are aware that a lawsuit may be filed against you, there is an obligation for you to preserve evidence that relates to the claims against you. In this case, that means, at a minimum, the entire library of recordings that you have made available for distribution as well as any recordings you have downloaded, need to be maintained as evidence. Further, you should not attempt to delete the peer-to-peer programs from your system – though you must stop them from operating. For information on how to do this, you may visit www.musicunited.org.
The problem is that you go to the musicunited.org site and have to figure out where to go for the information. I dug around until I found that the information they were probably referring to was the Take It Off link which has their own instructions on how to turn off file-sharing in KaZaA. It also has:
Go to the University of Chicago’s Network Security group’s web page to see how to disable file sharing in other programs.
Unfortunately, that link on the Music United page is dead; University of Chicago’s comprehensive listing of instructions on how to disable file-sharing has moved to another page. I found it by doing a search for “disable file-sharing” on the University of Chicago site, something the RIAA shouldn’t expect everyone to do. The RIAA also advises ISPs/Universities to refer their users to the Music United site in their DMCA Complaints about copyright infringement.
Aggregating Blogs with FeedWordPress
01.21.08 - 09:18pm
With multiple websites devoted to certain topics, I was looking for something like the croissanga plug-in that would automatically link to posts from other locations in one place. Tumblr has that capability, however, doesn’t have comments nor the flexibility of a self-hosted site.
I found a great Wordpress plug-in called FeedWordPress that allows you to import other RSS feed items as posts into Wordpress. It even has the option to turn comments off so that comments can accumulate in their original location. However, I found that my theme was displaying “Comments Off” for that setting so I modified the index.php so that it would be more descriptive to visitors (43 is the category ID for my posts imported via FeedWordPress):
I also appended the blog title to the post titles (in feedwordpress.php): And imported excerpts instead of the full content with a link to read the original (in feedwordpress.php): There’s probably a more elegant way to do this especially hooking it into the plug-in for the first edit.
<?php if (!in_category('43')) {
comments_popup_link('No Comments Yet»', '1 Comment', '% Comments »');
}
else { ?>
<a target="_blank" href="<?php the_permalink() ?>#comments">Comments Located Elsewhere»
<?php } ?>
$this->post['post_title'] = $this->item['title'].’ @ ‘.$this->feed->channel['title'];
$this->post['post_content'] = strip_tags($excerpt).’<br><a target=”_blank” href=”‘.$this->item['link'].’”
>[Read original →]</a>’;
New Year, Site Changes
01.21.08 - 08:37pm
I’ve finally moved my personal blog over to its own domain name - jenniferl.net - and to deal with my multiple blogs for Technology and Travel, I’ve found an add-on called FeedWordPress which will automatically import any entries I’ve written at other sites as posts to this site. I also made some changes so that comments would collect where the original post is published; for any syndicated posts (also categorized as “Syndicated”), a link to the comment page on the original site will show up.
