We’re finishing up an action-packed weekend. Yesterday, we got an impromptu visit from Kelly’s parents, who drove 11 hours to spend 3 and a half hours with Hallie. Kelly and I are still shaking our heads over their whirlwind visit. I think they really love their granddaughter or something!

We’re off now to do a little Sunday driving. I hope to have some time to write later today since there is a lot I can blather on about.

We’re finishing up an action-packed weekend. Yesterday, we got an impromptu visit from Kelly’s parents, who drove 11 hours to spend 3 and a half hours with Hallie. Kelly and I are still shaking our heads over their whirlwind visit. I think they really love their granddaughter or something!

We’re off now to do a little Sunday driving. I hope to have some time to write later today since there is a lot I can blather on about.

A friend asked me to transfer an old interview of his grandfather from a reel-to-reel audiotape to CD. I finished this task last night, creating a wonderful-sounding MP3 to email to him while I got the CDs ready.

I discovered this morning that the note I sent him with the MP3 information got filtered somehow by his “ISP”, Bellsouth.Net. Most of the message’s content made it through fine, but the link I sent him to his MP3 was completely removed! After two messages sent to him, I determined that Bellsouth must be altering the content of messages to its users.

I find this disturbing at the least and downright scandalous at the worst. I’ve never had much faith in Bellsouth as an ISP, having dealt with them before at a client site. I’ll agree that Bellsouth the phone company knows what they’re doing in hooking up Internet connections, but their Internet group has always seemed absolutely clueless when it came to being an ISP.

I should be fair and say I don’t know whether Alan is using mail-filtering software on his own PC and whether that might explain the filtered link. My “evil detector” – the gut instinct with which I place a lot of trust – points the finger at Bellsouth.

I hope I’m wrong about this, because if I’m right, it serves as a chilling indication of what the Internet can become – a filtered, censored wasteland controlled at the whim of corporate interests.

Update 25 Jul 1 PM: A test email sent through a different mailserver seemed to work. I’m not sure if its a problem with my home mailserver or what. Guess I need more testing to be sure, but at any rate, it looks less like a Bellsouth issue at this point.

I hate keys. However many keys I have on my keyring is too many. They weigh my pockets down, they wear down the fabric on my pants, they’re bulky and uncomfortable, and they are based on outdated technology thousands of years old.

Why hasn’t someone come out with commercial keyless products for things like residential door locks and car ignition systems? Fingerprints, retina scanning, electronic smart cards, whatever. There are so many new ways for identification its mind-boggling. I rushed out and signed up for Exxon’s Speedpass , thinking I could use it for purchases everywhere. Turns out there are few places I could use it.

I have seven keys on my keychain, not counting the key fob I have for my office door. This is actually the lightest load on my keychain in a long time. Two of them are big, bulky car keys that have no reason for being bulky other than to make them stand out. These I hate the most. 🙂

After looking my keychain over, I decided I can remove three keys; three keys that I use maybe twice a year but for some reason still carry around every day.

I’d love to dispense with the other four, too, but it’ll probably take another fifty years before manufacturers catch up with technology and finally make the metal key obsolete. Man, I can’t wait.

A Turner Broadcasting Systems exec complained last year that using a PVR is the same as stealing. Hollywood has subsequently waged war on them, going so far as to convince federal judges to order ReplayTV founder SonicBlue to spy on ReplyTV users in an effort to determine if users were skipping commercials.

Now I read that the new owners of the ReplayTV are removing the features that separated it from the Tivo: the abilities to remove commercials and to share programming over the Internet. What you have now is a dumbed-down Tivo wannabe.

Hollywood must evolve or die. If its business model depends on advertising, and the market no longer responds to advertising, tough beans! Guess its time to get a new business model! Strong-arming the electronics industry (a much larger industry, dollar-wise but with not nearly the lobbying clout) is not the way to do it. Convincing the courts to block PVRs is not the way to do it. Accusing your customers – the viewing public – of being crooks is not the way to do it.

I am so tired of the media mafia in this country. If I had a million dollars, I’d launch some initiatives to forever keep Hollywood’s hands off the rights of citizens to decide what media they absorb. The lengths that Hollywood is going in order to maintain their control over viewers is truly frightening.

I support the efforts to build open-source, freely-available PVRs. Not every program is the product of Hollywood. I’d like to see people everywhere producing their own TV shows and sharing them through the Internet or satellite feeds. I’d love to see a new television network, born of PVRs, sprout up across the world, driving a stake into the heart of the idea of rigid, centralized control.

It can be done. The technology is there. And such an idea is guaranteed to produce content far more interesting than what comes out of the brain[dead]-trusts in Hollywood studio boardrooms.

Hollywood should fear the PVR. The PVR, along with the Internet, is destined to relegate Hollywood to the scrap heap of entertainment history.

Swiss students have perfected a way to crack Microsoft Windows passwords in a matter of seconds, taking advantage of a design flaw in the way Microsoft creates passwords. Since Microsoft doesn’t include any random data in the password hashes it creates, the same password on two separate machines will create the same hash.

The students created a large (well, somewhat large: 1.2 Gig) lookup table of all the possible hashes. The result is that 99.9% of Windows passwords can be cracked within five seconds!

Since Unix and Mac OS X adds random data to the hash, they are 4,096 times more secure. Attacks against these boxes would also require 4,096 times more memory.

The students have a webpage which allows you to submit your own Windows password hashes for cracking. Check out the paper here.

I am strongly considering disabling password logins on my home machines and changing them all to 1024-bit SSH keys instead. Typeable passwords are too easily sniffed, logged, or cracked!

I was about to joke to someone for misspelling something on IRC today. The joke was nearly on me when I spelled “misspelled” with only one “s.”

I’m one of the few people who could manage to misspell “misspell.”

I found out this evening that my Iron Curtin protecting my empire from the marauding, comment-posessing hordes must come down. You see, there is a campaign being organized to do just that – bring comments to this humble weblog. For far too long, this weblog has ignored the pleas, the cries of those with no voice on these pages. Can there be no justice for these suffering souls? No quenching their desire to attach little strings of ASCII characters to my entries, expressing their thoughts on the matter? Surely this must end!

In my defense, and all kidding aside, I have spent a few hours looking into doing just this. Today’s mt.net is powered by PHP code over three years old: ancient by Internet standards. Forget fancy style-sheets, bookmarking, and of course, easy-to-add comments.

My choices are to hack the PHP code or start with something new. I could hack the PHP code rather easily, but it still wouldn’t change the fact that the main code hasn’t been updated in forever. The other option of new software seems to be the best route, but there is still the matter of republishing the huge amount of content you’ve come to expect from mt.net. These entries must be imported into the database format of any new blog engine I wind up choosing.

And there is a lot of entries. You see, mt.net has been around for a year and a half now. While some weblogs — and I won’t mention names — are just getting started, mt.net has been providing entertainment of dubious quality since January 2002! That’s an ocean of wasted time, and we’re darn proud of it!

So if anyone has tips on tools for importing MySQL tables into new tables with different columns, I’d love to hear from you. For now, however, you’ll still have to email. 🙂

The 2003 results of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest are in. This is a literary contest named after the author who wrote the much-plagarized opening line “It was a dark and stormy night.” Each year, the San Jose State University English department holds a fiction contest where entrants are encouraged to write their own worst opening line for a novel.

For example, here’s the winner in the “Children’s Literature” category:

The Prince looked down at the motionless form of Sleeping Beauty, wondering how her supple lips would feel against his own and contemplating whether or not an Altoid was strong enough to stand up against the kind of morning breath only a hundred year’s nap could create.

I keep threatening to enter this contest some day. Check it out. Great humor here.