The home page in my browser is set to Google’s personalized home page, which aggregates gmail messages, headlines from various sources, weather, a word of the day from dictionary.com, etc. You can set what you want it to aggregate. Among other things I get a list of top stories from various sources and the word of the day. This interesting juxtaposition appeared today. I wonder if dictionary.com is editorializing or if the words of the day are generated randomly and this is pure chance.

From “Gates on Google: What, me Worry?” at news.com via Anil Dash:

Q: So that would be the philosophical difference between Microsoft and what Google is up to at this point?

Gates: Well, we don’t know everything they are up to, but we do know their slogan and we disagree with that.

Google’s slogan is “Don’t be evil.”

Update courtesy of Mike, who sent me the following eye-opening email:

You don’t allow comments so I can post my flame bait +5 post on your
gates/google blog =p.

Right above that quote gates said:

“In fact, they have this slogan that they are going to organize the world’s information. Our slogan is that we are going to give people tools to let them organize the world’s information.”

You could always switch it out with the memory quote, lol.

Thanks, Mike! That’s what I get for delighting in the humor of the quote without having full context.

Two weeks ago, while I was in California on business, my laptop died. I spent two hours on the phone with HP trying to figure out how to get it fixed without having to go without a laptop for the rest of my trip. They were kind of assholes about it, and I wound up having to just send the laptop in for repair. The next morning, I stopped by an electronics store and picked up a new laptop. Now I’m trying to sell the original HP to make up for some of the cost. As it turns out, there was in fact nothing wrong with the laptop itself. In spite of my pleas that, because their hardware died before I was able to get a recent backup, they not destroy my data if possible, HP wiped my hard drive apparently as their first step and sent the system back to me, apparently working. But it still didn’t work. Turns out it wasn’t the computer that was broken but was the AC adapter. So they sent me a new AC adapter, and the system works like a charm again, albeit without my data and with Windows running on it rather than Linux.

It was a good system. My only beef was that it was a little thick and heavy (I now have a Sony Vaio that feels paper thin by comparison). Sometine over the last few months, the case got cracked on the front left corner, and eventually, a fourish-inch piece of the molding snapped off. This appears to be a cosmetic thing only, and I’ve used the system without problems for months since the crack appeared.

If anybody’s interested in buying this thing, check out my auction at ebay. (I’m such a Luddite that this is the first time I’ve ever tried to sell anything there.) I’m asking $600 for a starting price and think that’s absurdly fair for a system like this. I’m hoping competition’ll eventually jack the price up to closer to $800 or $1000 (you’d be surprised how many hundreds of dollars some people will pay on ebay for real pieces of crap, by the way). If I get no bids, I’ll probably just find some group to donate it to and settle for a warm heart and a tax refund.

Ok, this is a little vulgar because it’s sperm spam, but it’s one of the funniest pieces of spam I’ve read in a while, so I couldn’t resist sharing. If you’re turned off by things like sperm, erections, etc., you might want to stop reading here. Otherwise, enjoy.

Some testimonials:

Geoffrey —- 47, Male, UK
What you claim is wrong. My sperm volume didn’t increase by 500%. It increased by ZILLION %

Ken — 38, Male, Canada
I fear it will become so thick my girl could get hurt.

Sharon — Female, UK
My husband decided to try SPUR-M, and the results are great! I just love it when it starts spurting out

Jose — 29, Male, USA
I cannot believe how good my semen has become. It is a thick blob that shoots like a rocket. My wife says she can feel the force with which my semen hits her inside, which earlier she couldn’t even feel. I don’t know about other customers but I am lovin it.

Michael — 41, Male, Hong Kong
I always dreamt of shooting like a porn star and I can do it now, my girl cannot eat as much as I can shoot.

“My wife and I had been looking for a product to help with boosting male fertility. I am happy to say that test results have improved in the time I have been using Spur-M (2 months). Thank you for your assistance, and for the supply of Spur-M”
M. Rosenberg, NYC, USA

In February, I started a new job that it’s been really hard describing to people.

>> “What do you do?” they’ll ask.
<< “I program stuff.”
>> “What do you program?”
<< “Web services.”
>> “What’s a Web service?”
<< “It’s something that allows another application to access your data.”
>> “But isn’t your company tied up in Firefox somehow?”
<< “Yes. I write Web services that we hope will help enhance the browsing experience.”
>> “How?”
<< “I can’t really say very much about it right now. I’m writing extensions to go along with the Web services.”
>> “How’s your company going to make money?”
<< “Nice weather we’re having today, huh?”

Well, we finally launched our Web site yesterday after a lot of work by a guy named Joel Apter, whom I hooked up with as a developer resource on the Spread Firefox project, and a designer named Bryan Bell who’s great at icon work in particular and who can be contracted for pretty darned reasonable rates. These guys did the bulk of the site so that I could work on my mysterious Web services and extensions with limited distractions. And I think they did a great job.

I spent some time the night we launched doing some benchmarking and tweaking to make sure our site scaled pretty well, and I’m happy to say that we weathered a slashdotting with aplomb, the site hardly affected by the heavy traffic.

For now, our site doesn’t say a whole lot about what we do. Out of the gate, our offering is sponsorship of several popular Firefox extensions. Basically, we’ve given money and other resources (server infrastructure) to these developers both to support their great work and to attach our name to their popular products. We have a lot more on the horizon, and with a little luck and a few more twelve-hour days on my part, we’ll have a beta release of what we hope will be a pretty exciting extension near the end of the month.

Google’s April Fools joke isn’t as funny as it appears they think it is, but it’s pretty cute and is full of tech-insider jokes and references to various perceptions of Google, such as that they’re getting into everything nowadays and that their invite-only Gmail deal was sort of wacky. It’s probably worth a five minute read.

I wrote an article months ago that has finally appeared at Digital Web Magazine. If you’re not a beginning-to-intermediate PHP developer, you probably won’t find it very interesting. This is the second in an occasional series (find the first here) I’m doing for Digital Web on PHP.

It sounds like a belch you’re trying to suppress, but SURBL is actually a pretty cool spam/phish-blocking tool. I think “phishing” is probably a term familiar primarily to tech weenies, so I’ll give here the description provided at antiphishing.org: “Phishing attacks use ’spoofed’ e-mails and fraudulent websites designed to fool recipients into divulging personal financial data such as credit card numbers, account usernames and passwords, social security numbers, etc.” In other words, all those emails you get from PayPal and Citibank and other financial organizations you have no affiliation whatsoever with telling you that you need to log in and provide your credit card number in order to avoid fraud are in fact from fraudulent sites. You can read more on phishing (and pretty much anything else) at WikiPedia.

Surbl.org provides a pretty cool system for testing whether or not sites are phishing sites. The system uses DNS to offload lookups onto an existing robust distributed network that’s pretty much never going to be down. This keeps surbl.org from having to maintain their own huge infrastructure to manage all the traffic they stand to get. The basic mechanism is that when you’ve found a possible phishing site (a link in a questionable email, for example), you prefix the domain to one of several possible surbl.org domains. For example, sc.surbl.org does a lookup against SpamCop’s blocklist database. Probably the most useful surbl.org domain is multi.surbl.org, which appears to aggregate results from all the lists. So for example, if I get an email with xxx.yyy.com listed as a domain, I’d do a lookup on xxx.yyy.com.multi.surbl.org. If the query returns an NXDOMAIN result, the domain’s not on any of the lists. If it returns an IP (it’ll be a 127.0.0.* IP), it’s on one of the lists and should be considered not fit for consumption. Of the following two queries I ran, the first isn’t listed as a phishing site, but the second one is:

[houston@localhost daryl.learnhouston.com]$ nslookup confirm.keydataonline.net.multi.surbl.org
Server:         69.1.30.34
Address:        69.1.30.34#53

** server can't find confirm.keydataonline.net.multi.surbl.org: NXDOMAIN

[houston@localhost daryl.learnhouston.com]$ nslookup 80.248.127.210.multi.surbl.org
Server:         69.1.30.34
Address:        69.1.30.34#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:   80.248.127.210.multi.surbl.org
Address: 127.0.0.12

If you’re testing an IP address (phishing emails often use these rather than domains but mask the IP in the status bar so that it actually looks to less savvy users as if the link is pointing to a valid site), you have to reverse it before sending the query. The actual IP address that appeared in my email for the query above was 210.127.248.80.

Of course, this isn’t very practical or user-friendly. Even as a pretty savvy user, I’m not going to go do this query before reading each suspicious email (luckily, I have a pretty good nose for phish anyway), and, surely, less savvy users can’t be expected to use a tool like nslookup to do these queries. The info is provided really for those who would write tools to tap into it and make reading email safer. An enterprising programmer might write an extension for Thunderbird, for example, that does this lookup for any links in an email and changes the appearance of the email if a positive result is returned so that it’s obvious that the email is a phishing attempt.

When I first began reading about the mechanism surbl.org provides, I thought it seemed awfully clunky and sort of jury-rigged. And in a way, it is. But it’s also ingenius in its piggybacking on top of DNS, and as scalability is one of my hot issues right now, I found this very interesting.

If you haven’t heard of del.icio.us, chances are that you’re not missing much. It’s a bookmark management tool that appeared late last year and that promotes community or collaborative bookmarking, with the bookmarks stored remotely. Further, it’s a big of a shift in the approach to bookmarking: Rather than putting a link in a folder as we’re all used to doing, you apply tags to links, and you can apply as many tags as you want to. This makes for one-to-many categorization without the redundancy of bookmarking something many times, one instance per bookmark category. It also implicitly allows for tiered organization. For example, I’ve spent most of the day googling around for information about two major open source database management systems, postgresql and mysql. I’m trying to collect a whole bunch of data about both servers so that I can make a decision about which to use for a big project I’m working on. Because I got really tired of the bookmark interface and the pain it becomes to categorize things, I started tossing my links into my del.icio.us profile. All results I tagged “database.” Postgresql-specific links I also tagged “postgresql,” and mysql-specific links I additionally tagged “mysql.” Sites relevant to both databases (such as feature-comparison sites) I applied all three tags to.

So far, this probably seems very little different from regular old bookmarking except that the interface has changed. The beauty of it all comes together, though, when you consider the handy fact that you can get at your links via RSS, which can be read in a news reader, displayed as bookmarks in Firefox, parsed in a MediaWiki plugin for display in an article, and so on. By using del.icio.us to store and tag my bookmarks, I’m actually making them very portable. Del.icio.us’s RSS API is very simple and elegant in that it allows you by simply using a correctly-formatted URL to get only the subset of links you want to see. Here are some examples:

• http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/database shows me an RSS feed of all links across the system tagged “database”
• http://del.icio.us/rss/daryl/database shows me an RSS feed of just my links tagged “database”
• http://del.icio.us/rss/daryl shows me an RSS feed of all of my links
• http://del.icio.us/daryl/database shows me an HTML page of all my links tagged “database”
• http://del.icio.us/daryl/postgresql shows me an HTML page of all my links tagged “postgresql”
• http://del.icio.us/daryl shows me an HTML page of all my links

So del.icio.us provides not only an online interface for managing and viewing your bookmarks, but also an alternate format for the links that allows you to plug them into pretty much any RSS-enabled system you want to. This is very cool.

But, as I said at the beginning, if you’re not familiar with del.icio.us, you’re probably not missing much. Chances are that you’re bookmarking things and getting along just fine, and the minor shift in mechanism and presentation seems trivial. Even I felt this way until just today. I thought del.icio.us was sort of a pain to use and didn’t want to have to login to a site to get my bookmarks. But as I started combing through sites about postgresql and mysql and bookmarking them, I found the interface for categorizing the bookmarks to be cumbersome and irritating, and I began to think that I’d probably never even bother to go digging through the bookmarks to find the links. Or I’d have to double-bookmark things to categorize them into multiple applicable folders, and it’d all become very hairy to manage and use. So I tried using del.icio.us, and when you add the popup to your link bar in Firefox, it’s really much simpler to use than the bookmark interface. And when you happen to be a developer who can tweak posts in your MediaWiki extranet to consume RSS feeds and use them to display links, del.icio.us starts to look much more attractive. I’m a convert.

Extisp.icio.us is a nifty visual representation of your del.icio.us tags that changes the font size for tag listings to show which are your most oft-used tags. It has no real practical use, but it can be fun to compare your tags to those of friends and hardcore del.icio.us users (see for example the difference between a couple of my colleagues, one of whom is a reluctant user like me and one of whom is verging on being psychotic about tagging his links). You can see my tags here. Not surpirsingly, postgresql and database are the most prominent tags, with mysql coming in third place.