i@m.fm

A toy with a story [via StarNewsOnline.com] describes how Jeri Ellsworth built the C64 direct to TV Joystick. Great story. I wish the joystick was designed like competition pro extra though

I have a webserver set up with Apache that responds to several 
Aliases – basically it is some type of a parking page for unused
domains. I wanted to capture which URL the user actually entered in my
logfiles.

It took me a while to figure it out, but I did end up setting up a custom logfile format that does the trick:

LogFormat “%h %l %u %t \”%r\” %>s %b \”%{Referer}i\” \”%{User-Agent}i\” \”%{HOST}i\”" complete_log

CustomLog /var/log/apache/your.domain.com/complete.log complete_log

Basically this creates a standard combined log, with the actual request hostname appended at the end:


127.0.0.1 – - [16/Dec/2004:19:49:40
+0100] “GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1″ 404 287 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U;
Linux i686; chrome://navigator/locale/navigator.properties; rv:1.7.5)
Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0″ “your.domainalias.com”

The trial against him is starting today: Bloomberg.com: Millionaire Falk’s Lawyers Seek to Throw Out Judges

Actually I am still stuck with worthless Energis stock Energis is not being traded any more.

Lycos Europe just released a
screensaver that creates traffic to the webservers of spammers: “Make Love not Spam“. So is
this a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, or a good method to
deal with spammers? It will cost those websites money, yes so on the
first glance it sounds like a good idea.

However the spammers might very well start suing Lycos for the cost it
creates for them. After all initiating a DDoS is anything but legal in
most countries.

I will check into this a bit further, because it also seems it
partially comes down to how Lycos actually picks the sites. Let’s say
some affiliate of a major site just ends up spamming, and the Lycos
screensaver generates a lot of traffic to his site. He did not initiate
the spam nor really permit the spammer to use his affiliate link. So
the affiliate ID would be disabled, but would Lycos also remove that
site from their list?


[Update] So it turns out they are actually using the Spamcop
list to pick their targets. They are also just sending a get request,
but actually not waiting to receive a response. They also say that the
will distribute the requests in such a way that they will not bring
down the entire server, by some ‘health check’ they implemented. The Lycos website also shows a percentage by how much certain webservers are slowed down by the screensaver.

Yesterday evening we were expecting guests for dinner. We had
everything ready and set up in the kitchen when the doorbell rang. But
it was our guests out there, not quite yet. It was “Steve” from the Ontario Energy Savings Corp.

My wife had originally answered the door, while I was in the kitchen
considering to get the food going, since I thought out guests had
arrived. When I realized that there was someone else at the door, I
figured I’d join the conversation.

I started off by pointing at the “No Soliciting, please” sign on our
door, asking him if he had seen it. Yes, he had seen it, but he said
was not selling anything. He was just verifying our registration, which
would protect us from future gas rate increases. He actually asked to
see our gas bill to verify. I asked him why he was doing this on a
Sunday afternoon, to which he replied ‘when are most people home?’. Of
course he also used the ever so popular ‘your neighbours have already
been verified’.

I started smelling a rat (is that really the saying in English for ‘den
Braten riechen’?). So I asked him: So you are actually selling a fixed
rate natural gas plan, to which he replied “no, I am just verifying
your registration to protect you from future rate increases.

He did actually leave me his ‘independent agent’ name and ID, so I was
able to complain about the sales practises today. While I feel sort of
sorry for the people who fall for the promise of ‘easy money’ and
accept purely commission based positions such as his, I don’t really
feel sorry for his ignorance. I am was actually under the impression
that he didn’t really know himself how and what he was selling. The
constant use of certain ‘trained’ phrases supports this impression.

So if you live in Ontario and need to file a complaint with the Ontario Energy Board about sales practises such as this, you can give them a call at  1-877-632-2727 (toll-free)
or 416-314-2455. There’s also information on the  Code of Conduct for Gas Marketers on their site.

On the Ryze Network someone was asking about a Merchant Gateway Primer
and some additional information on AVS (address verification services).

Results:
Address verfication service (AVS) actually checks the address entered
by your client against the billing address of your
client. Mostly only works for US addresses. According to  this report by Josh Sobel
(PDF, see page 6) less than 60% of transactions will have a full match
on the addresses, while 98% of those transactions are actually
legitimate.

Introductions to the use of merchant gateways:
- Dantor Communications: An E-Commerce Primer
- LavaNet Ecommerce Primer
- First Data Direct: Merchant Account 101
- Diane Hughes: How to find the best Merchant Account for your Business.

Also Take-Payments-Online.com has some great articles online on possible pitfalls etc.

Alphabetware’s comparison of Paypal with a merchant account.

- Google search for “merchant gateway primer”.
- Google search for “merchant gateway vs. paypal” (also many interesting forum discussions in the results).

Duration: 10 minutes.

While there were two other Go Train incidents for me in the past two
weeks (with little to no announcements what was going on), again Go
Transit is promising to improve their commuter train service this
winter: TheStar.com – GO takes aim at winter ice .

Let’s hope they (finally) succeed, I am getting tired of hearing
something about ‘signal’ and ‘switch’ problems, which seem to be the
standard excuses.

gimme-five.org

1. Train or car?


I prefer the train. I can read a book, or sleep etc. I somehow associate cars with traffic jams and polluted environment


2. How do you get to work?

My wife drops me off at the local commuter train station on her way to work. I take the train and have about a 7 minute walk to work.


3. Do you have a comfortable chair at work?


I don’t like it that much.

4. Do you listen to music at work?
No. The soundcard is not set up properly.

5. What do you like best about your job?
Most of my colleagues.

A Canadian Court has recently lifted the restrictions on foreign satellite TV systems in Canada.

Making it illegal for Canadians to subscribe to television
programming via foreign satellite systems infringes on their freedom of
expression, a long-awaited judgment concluded yesterday.

And you thought I was going to comment
on the US elections? Don’t think so, it will be months until we have
the final results

Ballot Boxing
is an interesting article in the Jewish Times on electronic voting
machines and their ‘security’ in the US. Despite the security issues
electronic voting machines will still be used in the upcoming
elections.

Considering how close the call was during the last US elections and how close it will be again according to current predictions
[via The Age], I was really hoping that some other countries would
suggest that the UN needs to sends observers to the US to verify the
elections. Maybe Michael Moore‘s “Keyboard Army” and “Video Army” (he is calling for volunteers on his site) will help with the observation on election day.

Even though the author gets several issues wrong (he says for example,
that an open source code makes a program less secure), the main issue
is very apparent. The Diebold voting system (at least in the version of
the source that leaked to the net) is far from secure.