BillSaysThis

From the chutry experiment, a meme. Generally I don’t find these things interesting but was curious to see what mine turned out.

RULES:

1. Go into your archive.
2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to it).
3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to it).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.

Here’s mine: “Of course, the Fed historically hasn’t been too interested in the stock market; many observers have pointed out that the Fed’s move on rates are generally intended to put money in the pockets of the bond markets.” [via EsotericRabbit]

Happy 56th Birthday, Bruce! I would have got you a nice present but you forgot to leave your mailing address.

[This was a letter to the Mercury News in response to an OpEd piece written by the consul general of the Mexican Consulate in San Jose regarding border concerns with our countries. It wasn’t printed in the paper but did make the online edition.]

There are two points I would make to Bruno Figeroa. First, the American Constitution guarantees the right of the People to freely assemble and to bear arms. Second, the United States is a nation of laws. So his call, oddly addressed to no one in particular, to stop the Minutemen and their ilk while ignoring the constant blatant violation of American law by his countrymen and women is badly focused and inappropriate.

While I have little use for them, the Minutemen have shown that they are in fact nothing like armed militias such as the Aryan Nation. Despite Figeroa’s contention that border spotters may “trigger violence,” many months have passed without a single reported incident. Our government has no legal basis to ask for the discontinuance of the program.

In reality, the Mexican consulate should consider the contribution of his government and citizens to the problem of illegal border crossings. If any violence does result from Minutemen presence it will only be because someone has come in the United States illegally. Despite all the references to treaties and high concept programs between our countries, the problem will only be solved when Mexico develops its own economy to provide sufficient internal employment opportunities.

A quirky little film, Grand Theft Parsons is the story of what happened when country-rock originator Gram Parsons died of a drug overdose in September, 1973. He and his pal Phil Kauffman (not the film director) had pledged that if one died before the other, the survivor would take the other’s body out to the Joshua Tree desert and set it free with fire.

Kauffman went through some shenanigans but eventually made good on his promise. The movie tells of the day, more or less, between Parson’s death and the pyre. Johnny Knoxville does an intersting turn as Kauffman, with Marley Shelton as his girlfriend, Mike Shawver as a druggie with a yellow hearse used to transport the coffin, Robert Forster as the dead star’s dad, and Christina Applegate as Parsons’ uberbitch ex-girlfriend.

Irishmen David Caffrey directs from Jeremy Drysdale’s script and neither really brings much to the party. Honestly the facts of the situation don’t leave them much room to maneuver and in hindsight one wonders if there’s really enough material to justify a 90 minute movie. Sure Parsons was a rock star but by ’73 drug overdoses had taken many greats, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Mama Cass, and he was more of a star to other musicians than the listening public.

not recommended

So I’m looking around on the web this afternoon and come across Veoh Networks. This startup has just announced the public beta of their ‘legal’ video P2P network and client software. Okay, fine, read the pages, the press releases, yadda yadda yadda (where is the blog?) but one little thing I couldn’t find anywhere on the site.

WHAT PROGRAMS ARE AVAILABLE?

Excuse the screaming. I realize in a P2P network the content is provided by the users but when launching a venture such as Veoh some material has to be seeded. Otherwise why will ordinary users sign up? Score one for the paranoid in me but I have yet to fnd a good enough reason to install any P2P software.

So I’m not the target audience. I might be if there was, say, lots of live EPL and other football available. I just think it’s silly to completely slough the programming when it’s about the second most obvious question prospects will ask.

I’m not surprised that My Name Is Earl made me laugh. After all, Earl is played Jason Lee and he’s made me laugh many times. But the show comes from the guy who gave us the craptacular Yes, Dear so that about evened things out. Trust me, this is no Yes, Dear, after one episode that is extremely clear. Politically incorrect, self-effacing, direct, the running Carson Daly joke and a couple of hotties in the mix.

Sometimes I have trouble resisting free:

• YABSTB
• Flickr
• Bill and Guy on Rails – actually this one may be worth watching, especially if Guy actually accepts my invitation.

A 2002 Hong Kong import, Infernal Affairs compares and contrasts two young men on twisting intersecting paths. Both members of the same polica academy class, Andy Lau washes out while Tony Leung makes the grade and climbs to a leadership position in the major crimes bureau. In reality, though, Lau is working longterm undercover for Leung’s boss while Leung is a mole for crime lord Sam Wong, ostensibly Lau’s boss.

After many years both reach positions of sufficient responsibility to cause major damage and must finally confront each other. Direcctors Wai Keung Lau (who is confusing sometimes also billed as Andy Lau but is not the actor starring here) and Siu Fai Mak architect this collision gracefully and I understand why Martin Scorsese, Leonardo Dicaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Martin Sheen and a stellar supporting cast are participating in the American remake.

recommended

I guess Rails is as popular as you’d expect in this area since I can’t find a single bookstore listed on the O’Reilly site that has Agile Web Development with Rails in stock. Since this title, co-authored by Rails’ creator, is the only book to come out as yet I’ll be waiting for new shipments to arrive. TS1, always the sweetie, popped over to Tower this morning to check for me on her shopping rounds with the same result.

I shouldn’t have had such a difficult time finding out how to implement the simplest action possible (IMO) with the API, pulling out a single post from a Blogger blog. The answer I finally came up with uses the newer ATOM API, which is why I couldn’t simply use the class library Beau Lebens and I published a few years ago. If Blogger wasn’t the poor stepchild at Google, we wouldn’t have to be scrounging so hard for simple code like this either–and maybe it’s my poor programming skills that didn’t allow me to see this as quickly as others might–but there you go.

Down to details. Get the BlogMarks PHP client libary (thanks Francois) and load to your server. The code is then trivial:

require_once("/path/to/file/Services/Blogger.php");

function getOnePst($version)
/* returns the text as a string ready to print
   $version is either:
   "CONTENT" - content of post only
   "ALL"     - title and content
*/
{
  // set up your authentication info
  $blogid = "Your blog ID number";
  $username = "User Name";
  $password = "Password";
  // d'oh, probably pass this in as a parameter in a real version
  $postID = "Entry to retrieve";

  // create the Blogger object
  $blogger = &new Services_Blogger($blogid, $username, $password);
  // get the post
  $ent = $blogger->getEntry($postID);
  if (PEAR::isError($ent)) {  // error handling
      // return the error code, message
      $r = $ent->getCode().':'.$ent->getMessage();
  } else {
      // you could make the return an object or something for
      // more sophisticated handling
      if($version == "CONTENT") {  // content only
          $r  = html_entity_decode($ent['content']);
      } else {          // full entry
          $ttl = html_entity_decode($ent['title']);
          $bdy = html_entity_decode($ent['content']);
          $r  = "<h2>$ttl</h2><div class="your_post_style_class">$bdy</div>";
      }
  }

   return $r;
} 

Use at your own risk, no warranty or guarantee implied or provided, no support offered though polite email requests may be answered. I’m mainly posting this so the next person has an easier time finding the answer, like I said the code itself is fairly trivial and the BlogMarks package does all the real work.

Today is the last Friday of Summer, enjoy it if you can.

Okay, I broke down and just installed everything from “the” getting started tutorial on LittleSteven here and, since I still need to watch the second half of Villareal v ManU, am stopping for the evening. Those in the know should recognize this screenshot:

I find blog posts about why the writer isn’t posting generally tedious and possibly fatuous. Which is why I like writing them myself. Sometimes I’ll think about not posting for a few days just so I can push out another extended riff on how life is like a box of chewing gum.

That isn’t the case now, I’m deep in the throes of Harry Potter 5 and celebrating today’s lovely 2-1 win by Liverpool down in sweltering Seville. And doing more experimenting with this site and other programming goggles. Microsoft had a crapload of announcements today, none of which thrilled me as much ass they did Robert but hey, he’s actually seen them and I’m just reading second hand fluff.

Also wasting time trying to correct a couple of customer service problems. Those are really annoying because I have to use time I could be, um, blogging, to straighten out other people’s mistakes or worse. People, we have only so much time on this Earth and I do not want to devote quite so much of it on second and third conversations when one should suffice.

Work is going quite well. Besides the nice mention from Dr. Weinberger, John Battelle’s casual slough generated a far bit of traffic (call me any name you want, as they say, just be sure you spell the URL http://www.rawsugar.com) and other places are throwing visits as well. Tom Carpel, a summer intern, built a World of Warcraft collection wihch is getting notice and many searchers; the popularity of violent games continues to elude me but they are popular.

What I need to find is a simple big of PHP code to parse an OPML file. I’ve been looking at Clint Ecker’s class but early analysis is not positive, as I prefer something dynamic rather than a generator. Ideas? Let me know.

As another annoyance-avoidance tool I revised the access controller for the site to block hotlinking of files (using Tom Sherman’s guidance) by other websites. If this means you see a broken image or red x in a box where you expect to see a photo, that’s why. I made exceptions for SportsFilter, Bloglines and Google but if you think there should be others please let me know.

If you’d like your own version of the Red Cross Katrina donation graphic like I’ve got on the top right of my pages, check out Brian Alvey’s post Adding the Red Cross for the simple details. I would repeat Brian’s request that you take your own copy of the graphic and not hotlink to my site–you may not be happy with the result.

Technorati tags: katrina redcross charity

Though my attempt was probably both too little and too late some time ago I removed any direct email addresses on the website and replaced them with a contact form linked from my name on every page (look in the copyright). The email address the form sends messages to, which was never used anywhere else and not directly exposed, seemed safe.

In the last few days, though, somebody or someone’s script has found the form and is filling it out repeatedly. I guess the idea is that a useful percentage of web forms will trigger an automated response that’s of interest to the programmer though just what isn’t clear to me. The script fills in the form fields with the same data, an email address of a four or five character random group of letters (such as xtpku) at this domain.

What’s truly odd is the subject line of the email. First, that it’s filled in at all since I generate the subject in my script and, as you can see, don’t give it as a field for a writer to enter. Second is the text used:

[the email address used in the form] Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=”===============1278934073==” MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: 7c77fe36 To: [the email address used in the form] bcc: [someone else’s email] From: [the email address used in the form] This is a multi-part message in MIME format. –===============1278934073== Content-Type: text/plain; charset=”us-ascii” MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit koxsakoifn –===============1278934073==–

Kind of looks like the spammer’s script figured out the name of my script, I’m not versed in these matters at all, and tried to force it to send a copy of whatever’s generated to a controlled email address (in red above). But of course I don’t believe it worked since a bcc in a subject line isn’t going to be executed by the PHP engine. Also looks to have been cut off–I bet subject lines can’t be more than 255 characters.

Amusing more than annoying and hopefully who/whatever clown’s behind it will get off the kick soon. Just enough of a pain to get me to read and try to understand Chris Shifflet’s article Foiling Cross-Site Attacks, conveniently sitting in my inbox waiting to be used. The included code was not quite enough to actually implement a solution–I’ve never needed to deal with PHP sessions before, if I had this would probably’ve done the trick–so I also got a very basic script from PHPBuilder.

Now we’ll see how well it works. If you are the cautious type who has cookies turned off, please do me a favor and try the form so I get a different test example than myself. Thanks.

Soccer Silicon Valley opened a blog and this was the title of their second post. However, I think the blog writers need some poking and so posted the following as my comment, just posting here for my memory and in case it mysteriously disappears:

Been a fan since I worked Cosmos games at Giants Stadium for the food concessionaire. Big Quakes, USA and Liverpool supporter.

Having a blog is a good idea but after two posts and no useful information about what’s going on with the team I wonder if it’ll be worth your trouble.

I don’t like all the secrecy regarding the ownership change and potential sites. Anyone who would want to lead, or be part of, a new investment group should actively be recruiting support from this fan base to show AEG and MLS they understand what is in place and that they can be part of it.

Finally, what makes the SSV leaders qualified to be involved and know what’s going on and not the rest of us? Infrequent request for letterwriting and phone campaigns aside, there have not be any opportunities for people like myself to be part of this process and I think that’s a mistake.

Bill Gates – Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect: My buddy Scoble scores a Channel 9 video session with the Big Cheese himself.

c h r o m a s i a / thumbnails: Pretty awesome photoblog, creative use of all the elements.

Tonight ESPN2 was scheduled to broadcast the USA-Guatemala Qorld Cup qualifier at 7 p.m. The Braves-Mets game ran into extra innings. So the ‘tards in Bristol decided to just skip showing the first 24 minutes of the soccer match. Though why I should expect any better in a country that calls football soccer is beyond me.

Technorati tags: soccer worldcup disneysucks