Is it just me or does it seem like weekends and holidays are a new favorite time for malicious hacking? (story: Microsoft flaw signals hack attack) I mean, is it just coincidence or is it that the really pissed off malicious hackers are weekend warriors? Whatever the case, best to batten down the hatches, close the ports, and prepare for a possible weekend of BS, courtesy of those with nothing better to do than to exploit Microsoft’s software flaws. Maybe the rest of us will get some work done. Maybe. So much wasted energy, grrrr.

I was checking various places, including bloghop looking for some other tech-related blogs to add to the blogs section (to the right) or to trackback for new entries here. The geeks must be on vacation (and I say that lovingly, because I’m a geek), because many blogs I visited were coming up 404 or hadn’t been updated in months. If you have a good tech-related / webmaster-related blog then click on comments and put it in your link area so I can check it out or trackback a relevant post. I’m looking, really. I did find a few:

Mike Wendland who does the NBC-TV High Tech Talk segment and writes a column in Detroit. Wes Felter maintains his own hack the planet . Then there is Steven Hatch’s weblog which delves into Google (linked), the web, and blogging. Chris Pirillo, the lockergnome guy. laserblog which got its name from running laser light shows at the local planetarium for over ten years. Not exactly a techie site per se, but a celebrity site: Wil Wheaton weblog which I came across; and yes, he’s the same Wil Wheaton from Star Trek Next Generation. Nice to see him keeping his own site rolling along.

Ok, admit it, you’ve done this. I’ve done this. It’s like a great stress reliever: popping that bubble wrap! So if you haven’t seen this, now you can go and pop some virtual bubblewrap real fast without the need to wait for that next package. Hopefully you don’t currently have any job stress, if you want others to see what your mood is like, you could add (for free) an imood indicator to your website. Here’s mine:

TDavid is currently feeling

(source: - Blogging News - Micronet News) Something I’ve run across more than once in my blogging evangelism is the idea that blogs contaminate Google’s search results. I found this article which takes a mathematical analysis to see if this complaint is warranted or not

The complaint from anti-bloggers is that it is almost becoming impossible to obtain good search results in Google because bloggers pages get in the way of giving you the ‘real’ pages.

I do think what will end up happening is Google will attempt to filter out blogs, perhaps by default, much as it does with news and images. There are sites out there that are very much like blogs, but aren’t using blogging software and it will be interesting to see how many of those sites are caught in the combines if Google makes this type of change.

Journalist Rafat Ali is making money blogging not to mention walking away with the European Online Journalism Award (EOJ) for 2003

This articles asks the question: What can a business blog do for you? Weblogs are not just diaries and personal exposition, as is the common perception out there, aside from those who say: what is a blog?

In a deal with Right Angle Media, the Guinness Book celebrated “Most downloaded woman on the internet” Danni Ashe is adding a wireless version of her popular site.

… the mobile site takes full advantage of the latest capabilities of recent handsets featuring colour displays to offer photo spreads of over 50 of Danni’s models and a library of streaming video clips that run on devices such as Pocket PCs and the Nokia 3650 smartphone.

Adult webmasters can promote Danni’s site through Dannicash

Wonder what all this trackback stuff is about on some blogs (those in movable type mostly)? I did. Fortunately there are nice folks like Kim that offer a good group of links here and also a nice example by Tom Coates with visuals. If you aren’t using movable type (like me) then you might consider checking out the standalone trackback.

So here is how, in detail, I added trackback to Pivot

Important: make sure to check with your host that you have the required Perl modules included. The instructions from MT say that the script author thought that the Storable module was included in the default perl 5.05 but it wasn’t in the debian package on my dedicated box so my perl install needed Storable as well as LWP in order for the trackback program to work properly. Here are the perl modules to ask your host about:

You’ll need a webserver capable of running CGI scripts (this means, for example, that this won’t work with BlogSpot-hosted blogs). You’ll also need perl, and the following Perl modules (remember, without these modules the program will not work):

File: Spec
* Storable
CGI
CGI Cookie
* LWP

* I needed to install these 

Step 1. download the trackback gzip tar file. For those who don’t know how to uncompress and untar a file, I’ll get into that shortly.
Step 2. FTP the downloaded file into your CGI-BIN.
Step 3. telnet or ssh to your server and change the directory to the location of the file you just FTP’d in step 2: tb-standalone.tar.gz. The command to change directory is cd, so if your absolute directory path was /home/sites/www/mydomain/cgi-bin you’d type:

cd /home/sites/www/mydomain/cgi-bin

Step 4. gunzip the tb-standalone file by typing:

gunzip tb-standalone.tar.gz

Step 5. untar the file. This will create a directory structure inside the cgi-bin with all the untarred files. To do this, type:

tar -xvf tb-standalone.tar

Step 6. Now that you have the directory created and the files unzipped and untarred, you can edit the tb.cgi file according to the instructions in the included README (open with any text editor) or by following the instructions here
Step 7. After editing the tb.cgi file it’s time to edit Pivot according to the instructions that say: First, you’ll need to add a link to each of your weblog entries with a link to the list of TrackBack pings for that entry.

Pivot v0.12: in the admin area edit the template file named shortentry.html, make the following changes. After comments add the trackback code listed in the README replacing [TRACKBACK ID] with %code% and yourserver with your domain.

Pivot v1.0 (Jazz beta): in the admin area edit the template file named log_entry_standard.html

Step 8. Next in the same shortentry.html template you need to add the RDF code per the README instructions: … TrackBack uses RDF embedded within your web page to auto-discover. TrackBack-enabled entries on your pages. It also uses this information when building a threaded list of a cross-weblog “discussion”. For these purposes, it is useful to embed the RDF into your page.  Make the following substitutions:

* Pivot v0.12

TrackBack ID = “http://YOURDOMAIN/*link*”
Entry Title = “%title%”
Entry Permalink = “http://YOURDOMAIN/*link*”

*Pivot v1.0 Jazz Beta

Instead of % use [[ and ]] like this [[ code ]], the name is the same inside the brackets (code, link, etc)

Note: replace * with % in link (not shown here because Pivot would convert it into the actual link)

Step 9. Next, you will need to regenerate your templates using the option: Generate Files. Once you do, go view the source of your blog to see that trackback is showing up after your comments and that the proper blog ID is being displayed when you click the TrackBack link. If you get a server 500 error, then check to make sure the permissions of tb.cgi are set to 755.
Step 10. Now it’s time to test pinging another trackback. To do this you need to go to the following url: yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/tb.cgi?__mode=send_form and fill out the form. If you get a server 500 error then it is possible that the Perl LWP module is not installed on your server, so contact your host and ask them to add that for you.

Update: those looking to start their own PHP implementation of trackback might find Jannis Hermanns efforts a good place to start. Also, I added some information on making this compatible with Pivot Beta 1.0 jazz as well as making sure that the right Perl modules are installed on the server where the trackback script will be installed.

Happy coding to you!

(story: Sony Wins Australian mod-chip case) In the original case the courts found that Eddy Stevens hadn’t acted illegally when he sold Playstation 2 mod chips. These mod chips allow the copy protection efforts and the region codes on the CDs to be bypassed. Sony uses region codes to sell certain games in certain places, like Japanese games in Japan, for example. At Sony’s appeal yesterday to the federal court in Australia the judges overturned the original decision. Lawyers believe the implication of this decision is that copyright owners can enforce DVD encoding and CD copy protection.

I always thought it was odd how folks could legally sell these mod chips, although I don’t have a lot of sympathy for videogame console makers who have been milking videogamers for years, in my opinions, by making new hardware the focus instead of the games. What’s the point in the best, fastest, most killer technically superior hardware with no fun games to play?

Yes, it’s true! Russ Caslis actually built a computer inside Star Wars Millennium Falcon. It looks pretty cool too! He has other mod projects too, mixing art and computer work. On a whim, I Googled the falcon to see what else I could turn up:

In the spring of ‘96 dschin built the Millennium Falcon out of legos. Speaking of legos, apparently this is a hobby for many Star Wars fans, so check out this list of Star Wars Lego creations.

A Millennium Falcon free screensaver and wallpaper

As Chewy would say: “Arrrrrwwwwwww!”, whatever that meant (R2-D2, for that matter too had his own lingo)

Related: Player reviews Star Wars Galaxies MMORPG

Playboy company president Jim English is quoted as saying:

“A lot of the girls are not that pretty. You can only do so much with hair and make-up,” English said in an interview today with TVPredictions.com. “HDTV is perfect for National Geographic and the National Football League where you don’t expect people to be pretty. But adult films are all about the close-up. With surgeries and implants, I don’t know if you want to see everything in HDTV.”

I agree with English on this one, actually. A lot of porn models are not all that good looking and wear way, way too much makeup. The boob jobs might appeal to some, but whenever I see perfectly rounded boobs, I usually think yech, not ooooommmmahhh.