Category: Geekery

  • Xbox Media Center installed

    I finally installed XBox Media Center this weekend and I’m thoroughly geeked. It plays just about anything, and I wasn’t expecting the picture quality to be so damn good. I realize I’m a little late to the game, but so be it. I followed ProductWiki’s guide to soft-modding and was able to get through it…

  • BitTorrent, Trademarks and Crypto

    BitTorrent™ is suing several spyware companies over trademark infringement. They want to keep spyware/adware companies from banking on their name, which is perfectly understandable. P2P companies need to be extra-sensitive to this, considering the abomination of adware Kazaa was. Here’s what has me paranoid, though. µTorrent and other 3rd party clients are encrypting the protocol.…

  • Slashdot Comment Spam

    On Slashdot (which I am likely dumber for reading) comment spam takes a slightly different form. Instead of earning PageRank, commenters earn karma. The end result is that instead of creating links to sites in order to screw with search engines, the spammers try to post good comments with the least amount of effort. Take…

  • Now that’s just cheap

    You know the Xbox 360 that’s currently impossible to find? The console that’s got Best Buy and Gamestop screwing their customers (even more than usual)? The one that has women using promises of sex to no doubt drug and rob credulous/horny gamers? The Xbox 360 that completely disinterests Japan? Well my local UPN station is…

  • What infuriates me about Rails

    DHH, creator of Rails, drew attention to my least favorite aspect of the framework in his wrap-up of the recent Snakes and Rubies throw-down. To me, such an elaborate administration interface with login, permissions, and groups and what have you is out of scope for inclusion in the core framework. Show of hands, how many…

  • Developing the CitizenSpeak Module

    Yes, another CitizenSpeak post. I’ll probably do one more after this about how the site is configured, and then updates as events warrant. This time I want to talk about developing the module. I’ll admit that it’s been a while since I started working on the CitizenSpeak module. Part of it was that I was…

  • Secure Email Meme

    Oh boy, a chain blog entry! Dave Walker called me out to talk about securing email; who am I to refuse? You should secure your email. Am I done? OK, so that’s not the best supported argument. If everyone secured their email there would be virtually no spam, but any system that doesn’t show benefits…

  • Quick tip: Terminal bookmarks

    You can save SSH, SFTP, Telnet and FTP servers for quick connecting in Apple’s Terminal program by choosing “Connect to server…” under the File menu, or just pressing Cmd-Shift-K. It even shows hosts found over Zeroconf. Unfortunately it doesn’t store usernames (and you should be using something like SSHKeychain instead of passwords).

  • MyKea

    MySQL wants to be Ikea of the database market. (via) The headline on its own is great, but MySQL and IKEA are actually pretty good parallels. The people with $10,000 couches and $100,000 databases will always deride the cheapness, lack of certain design flourishes, and the fact that you generally have to put it together…

  • Notes on mod_security vs. spam

    I set up mod_security, a web firewall for Apache, to deal with comment and trackback spam on my server. This isn’t a complete guide to mod_security, just the information I wish I had when I started. I’m using mod_security because my server has lots of different blogging tools installed, and there’s no way to centrally…