MiniBlog v1

MiniBlog is my own blog software written for a class final. The idea was this, take a solid set of blogs features and stuff them into the smallest package possible. I did really well:

• Add/Edit/Delete capabilites
• Multiple User Support
• Password protected admin area
• Fully templated display system
• No reliance on a backend database.
• Requires a server with PHP (windows, (u|li)nix, whatver)
• Extremely simple set up.
• The whole download is a 4k .rar file.* (The zip was something like 5.2k)

MiniBlog is extremely easy to use and set up. Edit the users file (to set up users), upload, do a chmod command, and you’re done. That’s almost as easy as the iMac “plug it in, and play” ads.

I am looking forward to seeing if any one decides to give it a try. I already have a friend or two using it, which makes me happy. It doesn’t have the crazy power of anything like MoveableType, but MiniBlog is under 5k, and doesn�t use a database.

Download MiniBlog from the link on my own MiniBlog page.

Color Palette Generator b1

During a class of mine, Web Imaging Techniques, our teacher was showing off a demonstration of how to set up photoshop to generate color palettes through an action.

Par his demonstation, I went a step further and created an action that could quickly create a 25 count color palette. Just open any JPEG and click “go!” and in no time you have a nice palette like the one pictured. The action is avaible for download. (Let me know if it’s useful.) Notice: The action file can only be used with the new PhotoshopCS because it uses a filter called “Average” not available in earlier versions.

However, an idea tossed around was doing something like this for a website’s appearance. I thought it was a neat idea, so I have started a little side project (as I so enjoy doing) that will be able to take an image, extract colors from it, and then apply them to a website. Right now, the project is at the “extracting colors” segment. ColorPaletteGenerator is currently running in a beta state.

You can upload files to have it process. Or just choose one from the list. Also, to save you the hassel (and myself) of having to re-upload an image everytime a refresh is required, the script will save uploaded images to the server.

Last week I explained the one techinque I was using to stop some of the spam email I was getting. In summary, I recieve all emails that come to this domain, wheter it is my real address or jeffthisisanemailtoyou a:t creatimation.net. In order to block some major spammers, I have simply disabaled certain addresses. I thought this was saving me tons of spam.

I was wrong.

In fact, maybe the spammers were having a bad week – but I actually got less spam email than the week before.

Email Account	First Week Spams	Second Week Spams
jeff at cre/atimation.nt	819	745
jefzorsemail at the/code[]pro.cm	158	184
Totals	977	929

Less by about 50 emails.

What this is telling me is that spammers have got the one address I don’t want to block (my main one – jeff@) – so there really is no hope for me now.

Can anything be done?

In a last ditch effort I turned to automated filtering software. For the past 4 days I have been using SpamAssain serverside to filter my email. It’s nice because it filters the email, determines if it is spam, then sends it to me with a modified subject line. So I still get all the spam, but it should be marked easily as such.

Except that it does a horrible job.

Spam Assassin has a scoring system. Emails are marked as bad or ok based on how many points they get. More points = more spam potential. Most ISP set the “this is spam” score at 8-10. Users are advised to set the score to 5. I set it to 1. One is extremely low, marking just about everything as spam unless it is a plaintext, human written, never-mentions-viagra email.

And still a total of 38 spam emails saw their way though Spam Assassin. I was pretty disappointed.

Conclusion

I am drowning in spam, it sucks, and there isn’t much I can do about it. I know I get roughly 1000 email spams a week (my god, that’s nearly 52,000 spam emails a year) and I know that server side filtering – what is available to me at this time – isn’t sufficient. So I’m going to go back to white listing my email address.

If I didn’t get your email, it’s because you’re not on the list. Sorry.

Upside to spam?

On a lighter note – spam is pretty freakin hilarious. You would not believe some of the entertaining, rediculous, and downright aweful spams I get. But maybe you will believe it – here’s a few:

This is the “colorful” email variety. I guess these people think that if they appeal to every color on the specturm, they might just hit the “oh, i should buy this” color. Yeah, right.

 

These fall under the “rediculous” category. Both of them had virus emails attached to them, and both of them are basically trying to get you to open the attachment and thus get a virus. But I mean come on. One tells me I have “done a mistake in the document”. How would that person criticize my document when they can’t write asingle sentance correctly. The second one flat out just calls me names! Why would I want to open anything from these people?

 

This one had me laughing for a solid minute. I guess I’ll just file it under “Funniest use of HTML tables-as-graphics”.

 

I updated the site last night with a slightly different layout and a new color scheme. It’s been a while (I think maybe never) since I have used a heavy dose of color on my site. I’ve never been to particular about wanting color either. I believe (still despite this update) that black-on-white is the easiest kind of text to read – however, it’s a good thing to go outside your own box.

A few special things have changed about the site. It is now serving the site up as XHTML+XML if your browser supports it. Cool from a tech geek stand point. I fixed the comments so characters don’t show up all funny (I hope). Also, I should be adding a category listing page soon, as well as adding relevant categories onto each journal entry.

There is now a RSS (v2.0) feed for the site. This allows you to tie it into a news reader that will automatically find updates on webpage that serve a RSS feed. Lot’s of site have them, slashdot, craigslist, and more. Handy for being able to see what’s been added since it’s a quick download of summaries of all the updates.

As I was stepping off the bus, I looked at a particularily attractive girl. I had been checking her out while riding, but this time I caught her looking at me. I almost smiled at her, and I could see her almost smiling at me. It could have been a wonderful moment.

I saw a person on the bus smiling shamelessly. I thought the person was weird, but aren’t I weird for thinking it’s wrong to be smiling?

A highly unscientific signal-to-noise experiment in spam analysis.

I’ve heard stories of people getting innumberable amounts of spam mail. I’ve heard the horror stories of Hotmail accounts filling up faster than a person can refresh the page. I’ve never quite understood the validity of these statements though. I wanted to explore how bad it really was from my perspective, as I had never done before. The results were not pretty.

To truely understand how bad spam is, I decided to stop doing what most normal people do – deleting it. I saved all of my spam email for an entire week. I wanted to see just how bad it really was.

But first, a little background on the popularity of my email address.

My email, “jeff @ creatimation.net”, has been around for well over 2 years now. Back in the day, I didn’t know better (ah, youth) so I just posted it all over the place. Needless to say, this account is now spammed to death. (That’s why I have no issue posting it here.) I get every kind of email you can imagine. The best so far was one selling me a bigger penis, bigger breasts, better self-confidence, help to quit smoking, and the secrets to better sex all in a single MP3! Sweet!

However, I have used other various addresses over time for this that and the other thing. And one of the nice features of owning a domain is that you can setup a “catch-all” email system. With a catch-all, any email that is sent to the domain is forwarded to a (or several) account(s). This way I can just say, “Yes, Mr. President, my email is ‘Mr.Jeff.Sir @ creatimation.net’…” and the message will still get to me. Very handy.

But this means that all those spammers looking for “contacts@” or “info@” or “jack-asses-who-love-to-spam-me@” will still get their emails to me. What a bummer!

My other address, which I won’t post, has not been harvested yet. I’ve kept better tabs on it so far, and it’s doing all right.

Down to the results.

Email Account	Real Emails	Spam Emails	Ratio of Real Email
jeff at cre/atimation.nt	22	819	2%
jefzorsemail at the/code[]pro.cm	20	158	13%
Totals	42	977	4%

96% of the email I recieve is spam

Astounding. I never thought it was that bad really – I just deleted it when I checked my mail. But that spam really does build up – and it’s not just annoying either. It’s a real serious problem. When I recieve spam, it’s using my bandwidth. If a text message takes up, oh say, 3k, that’s not so bad. That’s about 126k for real email transmission – totally fine.

At 3k a message, spam would be 2.8Mb of transmission. That’s not such a bad figure, except that spam is filled with viruses, html, images, and a plethora of other assorted crap. So let’s change the message size estimate to, 70k (and that’s conservative).

70k * 977 = 66.7Mb of crap, uh, I mean “Unsolicited Email”

Not only is that wasting my server bandwidth, but if anyone had to sort through all of this email over a dialup connection they would simply give up email. Which brings me to my next point.

Why do I even bother to continue using email?

Seriously, with a signal-to-noise ratio of 4%, why should I even continue using it?

Quite simple, as far as I know, no better system exists yet. Email is the defacto standard of internet communication. “What’s your email” is almost as popular a phrase as “Let’s trade numbers.” The only medium that is nearly as popular is IM systems, lead at the fore by AOL Instand Messenger – or simply: AIM. However, since there is no “offline” feature in AIM (despite it being in ICQ which is now owned by AOL), it couldn’t be used in the same way – nor would attachments work as well.

Finally, the 4% of email I recieve is actually very important and useful.

Here’s what I’m doing about it

I am not sitting still on this matter either. People have lots of complicated methods for filtering spam. Address filters, word catches, fake sender detection, etc etc. All of these things work on the server’s side preventing you from ever seeing the spam at all.

Those types of solutions are all well and good – but I don’t like them. Paranoid as I am, I worry that those filters are going to catch something that was a real email. Dang it.

Instead, I download all my email – right into my trash can. That’s right, all my email goes straight into the trash, then I have a filter in my email client that automatically brings the email into my inbox, if – and only if – you are in my address book. Of course, if I get email from someone new I run the risk of lossing it, however it’s much easier to find this missed email in my trash can then in the abyss of the server side filtered email.

Oh yeah, these results are skewed…

…in favor of spam.

Yeah, I said that right. See, I explained earlier how I can have mail sent to any made up account on my server and I still get it. Well for “accounts” that get a lot of spam, I just filter all the email from that account out at the server side. I know, I said I was against server side filtering – but for the email address “junk aht creatimation.net” I can live without getting the email. Anywho, these results are skewed in the favor of spam because the numbers would be much, much higher on the spam side if it weren’t for this practice. So I’m going to give this a real try and see what happens to the numbers once I take these filters out of place. We’ll be able to get a real feel for the damage spam is doing.

Check back in a week for the horrifying conclusion to “When Spam Attacks!”

There was this woman walking down the street with a dog straped into a chest carrier. Since when does taking your dog for a walk not involve the dog actually walking? More odd, why did she have a leash?

Jessie Greene and I broke up yesterday (April 16th, 2004). We had been dating since Fedurary 27th 2002 – just about 2 years and 2 months together.

Can’t say it hadn’t been coming, because it certainly had been. We had a fantastically loving and connected relationship. We laughed together and cried together. Place this relationship 10 years in the future and I could, scary I know, see us getting married.

But that would be then. Now is different.

Now we are distant. Separated by 40 short physical miles, but annoying long emotional miles. We would see each other one, maybe two, days a week and it would always be completely unproductive for either us. Basically a day or two where the rest of our lives would be put on hold. With both of us becoming more and more responsible and involved, taking days off became not just a hassle, but impossible most of the time.

Now we are young. There used to be a time when you met a girl, dated, and married and that was that. “Till death do you part.” Instead we have options these days: we can travel, we have careers goals, life is no longer a straight and fairly even path. Our lives are going to change drastically over the next 3 years and forcing those changes into the moldings of a relationship would stunt their growth and in the end hurt us. Both of us have school to finish and a career to pursue – and they aren’t exactly going in the same direction.

Now we are inexperienced. Both of us, being young, have had limited relationship experience. For me, Jessie was only my second long term relationship – I was her first. Both of us knew that we could not go through life with only that experience once or twice. We needed more expereience dating.

In all honesty, our relationship was doomed the day I decieded to attend the Art Institute in S.F. However, if it hadn’t been me going away to college, it would have been her – so who went first really doesn’t matter.

We are in love. It sucks so much because it won’t work – and both of us knew this. We let our selves fall so far into love. Embraced, connected, shared. It’s the most fantastic experience you’ll ever know if you are so lucky. But it had to end for all the reasons I hate conceeding too.

I have been “out of it” since she left. Dazed is the correct word. I feel like it isn’t really happening. I’ve thought about it happening on several occasions, but feeling it is drastically different. Some break ups are hard. They hurt really bad: your stomach churns, you get lumps in your thoat, you cry until you can’t stand to wring your pillow out any more. This isn’t like that. I feel a pang of sorrow. A dull ache in the pit of my stomach that something is simply just off. The impact of not being with her the way we used to be only hits me in small portions for moments at a time. And I think I know why it’s not the gut wrenching, eye balling break up…

Because it’s not over.

I’m not pining for her. I’m not going to stalk, or immortalize her and never think of another girl again until I have her again. I may never be with her like I have been – and I think I can live with that.

Instead I don’t feel the intense emotions of a break up because I refuse to simply burn the bridge we built. She has become an integral part of my life over the last 2+ years. I know her family and their stuggles, her friends and their lives. I’m not willing to simply destory these important connections because we can’t be together the way we want to be. She feels the same way.

We’ll still talk once in a while. Maybe on the phone, maybe on IM – slim chance I might see her once in a while for an oddly uncomfortable lunch…but that’s a long time off.

I know that, given some time, I will begin to be comfortable being single again. Flirting, friends, and free time will return. Yet, despite grieving the relationship we shared and lost, I will treasure the realationship we will build from it’s ashes.

Thank you.

The iPod Mini has been doing extremely well since it’s launch earlier this year. So well in fact, that apple can’t keep up to demand for them.

The $250 iPod Mini sports a 4Gb hard drive (roughly holds 1,000 songs), dimensions of 3.6 by 2.0 by 0.5 inches, and weighs in at an impressive 3.6 ounces. The regular iPod, in comparison, starts at $300, has a 15GB capacity (roughly 3,700 songs), measures 4.1 by 2.4 by 0.62 inches, and weighs 5.6 ounces.

What puzzles me is why the iPod Mini has been selling so well. The iPod Mini has 1/3 the amount of storage (song space), is only slightly smaller/lighter, and costs very little less. Then it hit me:

People – are – stupid.

What other explanation could there be? Many people will make several arguements for buying the Mini, and of all the ones I have heard so far, none stand up.

Some people say that the coloring is worth it. I, and several people here, own iPods, and I can tell you the precise location of where these spend 95% of their lives. Two places:

1. A jacket pocket while walking or riding the bus.
2. The dock/firewire cable.

In your pocket, I don’t think anyone cares what color your iPod it. It could be neon-green with pink dots, and it wouldn’t matter. And when it’s in the dock, the only person who really sees it is you – and does having a pink one, as opposed to white, really make your day better?

Some people will argue that the size difference is important. I don’t know what kind of pockets there are on your pants, but if they aren’t big enough to hold an iPod, even first generation, then you may wish to consider updating your war drobe since childrens clothing is never attactive on someone with enoug money to purchase an iPod.

Others will state that the iPod Mini is simply cooler than the bland white iPod. This is complete rubbish, and I can attest to it first hand. I have a first generation, scatched up, battery dying iPod, and people still think it’s cool. This thing is a beast, but no matter who sees it, if they aren’t one of the eleet with an iPod already, they will always comment, “Oh, hey and iPod – how cool!”

Finally, those last stragglers that say “well, it’s cheaper, and I don’t need that much space.” If you are going to blow $250 (plus tax) on a music player, why not just continue scrounging through your couch for an extra $50 and get a real player. Also, the iPod is useful for things other than playing music. I regularily use the iPod to move files from school, home, and work and when I do, the extra capacity can come in extremely handy.

What it boils down to is this: I feel sorry for anyone who has been suckered into buying an iPod Mini. You have wasted your money on an inferior product because it was “cool”.

Now, despite my harsh criticisms of the iPod Mini, I do think that it has some things going for it.

• I genuinly appreciate the new dial control.
  Integrating the four buttons into the four cardinal positions makes a good deal of sense both by simplifying the controls and by centralizing them to save space.
• I also do need to give them credit for shoving that much functionality into such a small package.
• The size and weight reduction is much appreciated.
• The colors are a neat idea. Worked for iMacs, should work for other things in the furture as well.

So, while I have a large disagreement with Apple about the pricing of the iPod Mini, I think that they have taken steps in the right direction and charged to much for it – seems like that’s just the Apple way. :-D

Version2 is a redesign contest run monthly right over here.

I really like the idea of this. Sites get a good make over, and people get a great portfolio piecec. I think that works out pretty well – plus the prizes help :D

I’ve considered entering, but lack both time and design skill to compete.

However, I can still review the proposed solutions. These are my picks for this month so far:

• Jeremy Johnson
• Lucian Slatineanu
• Ben Scofield

And the most unusal (but oddly innovative to me) design goes to this fellow.

The full list of designed can be found by clicking on this pretty text.

For those not familiar, DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. A scheme created and placed upon content that controls how that content can be used. For audio this means that the music can only be played under a set of restrictions, such as only being played 20 times on one computer.

This technology was developed to help protect content for copyright holders, but all it has done to date is fail miserably. Most notable of these failures is CSS (Content Scrambling System) - an encryption scheme used on DVDs. The CSS caused fair-use issues for a number of reasons. You could no longer take your movie from one country to another because of Region Codes. In addition, some DVD players (mainly computer drives) could not decrypt these movies. Regular consumers were finding themselves having paid for DVDs that would not play.

These few people with "broken" DVDs would probably have been an acceptable loss - if the system had worked. However, shortly after the release of DVDs using CSS, a program called DeCSS was released which allowed anyone to decrypt the data on a DVD. Thus the content protection scheme was broken and high quality copies of DVDs began circulating, not only around the Internet for download, but also at street corners where cheap copies could be bought.

Any audio DRM is going to fail just as well. Only faster.

You see, DeCSS took some time to reverse engineer and takes a lot of processing power to run, and, over all, is a pain in the ass to get working. Copying a DVD is no simple task. However, copying an audio file is simple. All you need is a sound card (which you probably already have) and a mini-to-mini cable.

This is the basic setup. Take the mini, plug it into the Mic port (commonly red) and the line out (black) or headphones (blue) if you don't have line out. Now, when you play your audio file though whatever convoluted DRM scheme that has been forced on you - simply hit record in a sound application. The sound being played will then be recorded (at near perfect quality) into any format you want.

This trick has been around forever and defeats any DRM in existence. What it comes down to is this. No DRM will ever safeguard content. If you can hear or see it, it can be copied. I mean, microphone, video camera, whatever - it can be done. The only things that DRM does is hurt regular consumers by forcing them to abide by someone else's interpretation of "fair-use" - and this is why audio DRM will eventually die.