Street Level Doppler
Two friends of mine, Chris and Dan, have recently formed a group called Street Level Doppler.
Street Level Doppler is a Central Illinois-based acoustic duo that plays pop/rock covers. Their material includes songs from the 60's all the way up to today, with a particular focus on reworking 80's songs in an acoustic setting.
Stop by and check them out if you live in the area, or to book them for your event, e-mail booking@streetleveldoppler.com.
Rules
I moderate all comments and reserve the right to remove any post
that I deem inappropriate.
Since I support free speech, I do not intend to remove
any posts except for spam, which contributes nothing to a discussion.
Current web project
Recently I have been designing and developing a web site for Wesley Neurology Clinic in Memphis, TN. Unfortunately, this has not left me much time for blogging, but I hope to be finished soon.
In the meantime, I still will strive to post two or three new articles per week. If anyone wants to comment on the site, you can check it out at
http://www.wesleyneurology.com. Please post here letting me know what you think; also, keep in mind that this is a work in progress and is not everything is finalized (some blah, blah, blah type text on one page, one link on an image map does not go anywhere yet, and several images need tweaked).
I would be extremely appreciative of any MAC users who would check this site out since I do not have access to one. I have check the site already in Firefox (Windows and linux) and Internet Explorer, but not Opera, Safari (obviously, given my previous statement), Konqueror, Amaya, elinks (not a real concern), lynx (again, not a real concern of mine), or any handheld devices.
One last thing, if anyone notices a problem, please post a screen shot as well so that I can get a better idea of what is going wrong.
Thanks.
Rules
I moderate all comments and reserve the right to remove any post
that I deem inappropriate.
Since I support free speech, I do not intend to remove
any posts except for spam, which contributes nothing to a discussion.
Want to report fradulent e-mail?
In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission has setup an e-mail address for reporting fradulent e-mails. To report a message sent the message with all message headers to
spam@uce.gov.
For more information about this service, please check out
http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2004/07/newspamemail.htm.
To display the complete message headers in Evolution, go to the
View menu, choose
Message Display, and then click
Show Full Headers.
To display the full message headers in Gmail, open the message. Then click on the
More options link and then the
Show original link.
For any other mail clients or services, search in Google for
+"mail client name (for instance Outlook)" +"full headers".
Rules
I moderate all comments and reserve the right to remove any post
that I deem inappropriate.
Since I support free speech, I do not intend to remove
any posts except for spam, which contributes nothing to a discussion.
Scam e-mails
Does anyone out there have any advice on what to do when you receive scam e-mails? Personally, I like to reply by picking apart the e-mail while insulting the scammer.
If the scam seems particularly believable, I report it to various agencies since it is likely someone would fall for it. However, normally, these scams are pretty unbelievable.
For instance, I received one where the sender claimed to be from one country, while the e-mail address that he listed was from another country, and the server he actually sent the message from was in yet another country. (See my article on spam for an explanation on mail relaying.) Obviously something fishy is going on with this e-mai.
Anyone out there have any other ideas on how to have fun with scammers? Well, besides
scam baiting which I don't have enough time for.
Rules
I moderate all comments and reserve the right to remove any post
that I deem inappropriate.
Since I support free speech, I do not intend to remove
any posts except for spam, which contributes nothing to a discussion.
Tired of spam?
There are several ways to reduce the amount of spam you and others receive. Methods involve using spam filters, blacklists, honeypots, closing relays, and web forms.
First off, spam filters are a great start at reducing the amount of spam you recieve.
SpamAssassin and
Spambayes are both excellent filters that employ
Bayesian filtering. These programs rate the likelyhood of a message being spam and then can perform actions based upon differing percentages. Also, they are "learning" programs that can be trained on what constitutes spam and
ham. These two programs work with many e-mail clients; for more information, please check their respective sites.
Blacklists will block messages from known spammers, spamming domains, and, in some cases, even whole countries that the end-user does not anticipate receiving mail from. For instance, I do not know anyone in Bulgaria (no offense to Bulgaria, just needed to pick a country for an example) and could safely block all mail coming from this country.
You may help add to the accuracy of blacklists by reporting spam to services such as
SpamCop. Setting up an account is simple and free; although, you will receive faster response times from their web form if you are a paid subscriber. With SpamCop, you may make reports anonymously so that the spammer will be unable to tell who reported them.
A honeypot is a trap designed to entice spammers to collect invalid addresses and waste their time and bandwidth. Some honeypots are setup to monitor who is sending this spam and add the address or domain to a blacklist. Other honeypots generate lists of addresses at the sender's domain so that the spammer spams their own organization. For an easy to setup honeypot, check out
Project Honeypot.
An open mail relay is a mail server that allows anyone to send mail through it regardless of whether the sender or recipient has an account on the server. Spammers frequently use open relays in order to avoid having to pay for high bandwidth and also to help obfuscate where a message really came from. If you are running a mail server, please make sure that it is not relaying mail for the entire world.
Finally, many spammers use programs call harvesters, bots, or crawlers to obtain e-mail addresses from web sites. The easiest way to avoid this is to not publish e-mail addresses on websites, and instead have a form for entering this mail. The form would then send the information to a back-end that would actually send the mail. No one reading the site would have any idea what the address of the recipient is. I have written a cross-platform (UNIX-like OSes and Windows), free open-source, program to do this called
mailer. If you use this, please let me know; I am trying to track how widely it is being used and this will help me decide how often to update it. Also, if you have any problems with it, please let me know.
If you do not want to or cannot run a binary / executable file on your mail server, let me know. I have written a PHP script that has most of the functionality of mailer and can post it.
Rules
I moderate all comments and reserve the right to remove any post
that I deem inappropriate.
Since I support free speech, I do not intend to remove
any posts except for spam, which contributes nothing to a discussion.
Diablo II editor
I am currently writing a Diablo II editor for patch version 1.10 and 1.11.
Unlike many editors out there, this one is intended to keep characters "legal", or at least not over powerful. For instance, before raising a stat, another stat will have to be lowered. The same rule applies for skills.
The program is mainly for those moments when you say, "why did I ever put a skill point in that?!" I know, in my case, the first time I played an Assassin, I put several points in useless (for my playing style, at least) skills.
If anyone is interested, let me know and I will post information when I have the program finished.
Rules
I moderate all comments and reserve the right to remove any post
that I deem inappropriate.
Since I support free speech, I do not intend to remove
any posts except for spam, which contributes nothing to a discussion.
MPAA plays dirty
According to an article in
eWeek, the MPAA hired someone to
crack into a company's network in order to obtain information to proved that copyrighted works were being used improperly.
This violates due process (no warrant), and, since the MPAA is a private organization, not a governmental body, could not receive a warrant in the first place. Somebody correct me if I am wrong (ianal), but isn't this illegal?
Where does the MPAA get off thinking that they can do whatever they like? Would not the correct procedure be to inform a government body, such as the FBI, that you suspect that the corporation is spreading copyrighted material, offer them the reasons for your suspicions, and then let them handle it?
I can only hope that the MPAA is sued out of existence in the near future. Who needs government conspiracies when private organizations are trampling over our rights?
Rules
I moderate all comments and reserve the right to remove any post
that I deem inappropriate.
Since I support free speech, I do not intend to remove
any posts except for spam, which contributes nothing to a discussion.
