Author Archive
FEEDBUTTON
Have you noticed that the standard RSS links aren’t in my sidebar anymore? Instead they’ve been replaced with the little 
icon. It’s called FeedButton and it’s a website that I run.
Anyway… Today I released some new features for feedbutton. If you click on the button (the one in the sidebar), you’ll notice 2 new links at the bottom. The first one is a preview – it allows you to preview the rss fead, and presents you with some buttons to add it to your favorite readers.
The second is the stats button. This is the cool stuff. Here’s the stats for dotCULT’s new feed. You’ll see a preview of the feed at the top (and a link to add this feed to your reader of course). But then you’ll see the stats.
The first stat shows what readers your feed has been added to (the top 5), and the total number of readers subscribed to your feed.
The 2nd column uses Amazon style logic to show you the top 6 feeds that your readers also subscribe to. It works just like the “users who bought this product also bought these” type logic. For example, the feeds currently showing for dotCULT happen to be the old dotCULT rss feed, and 2 of my friend’s websites.  This makes sense considering I’ve added my feed and my friends, and they’ve added their feeds and mine.
For you privacy advocates out there, don’t worry. It’s not tracking any identifiable information about you at all.
So go check it out, and let me know if you have any comments, questions, or feature suggestions. I’ll be glad to listen to them.
January 15th, 2007
Chalk up more bad publicity for the Wii. First the straps were faulty (nevermind the fact that people couldn’t follow instructions, or hold on to the controller. Then it was the case of Porn on the Wii. Ignoring the fact (as the article I linked mentions) that the Wii actually does a better job of shielding your kids from porn than your local computer can even dream of doing.
So what now? Well, death of course. It seems that a woman died of water intoxication in a wii contest. Actually, it was a water drinking contest put on by KDND 107.9 where the winner got a free wii. The contest was titled “Hold Your Wee for a Wii.”
A simple idea – everybody drinks water, the last to pee wins the Wii. Of course, there comes a time when one can drink too much water.
I’m not sure what’s worse… the radio station who didn’t research the effects of their contest, or all the media outlets who put Wii in the title in an attempt to either cast blame or grab more readers.
powered by performancing firefox
January 15th, 2007
This quote comes courtesy of Time Magazine, however it was too good to NOT put out there…
It’s Dick Cheney talking about “Scooter” Libby, who is on trial for lying to a grand jury.
“I believe he’s one of the more honest men I know”
If that doesn’t tell you anything about our government, I dont’ know what does.
powered by performancing firefox
January 15th, 2007
Today is Martin Luther King day. Many of you may have not noticed, but to us Detroiters it’s actually a rather big one. (although not big enough that I get today off of work.)
Anyway, if you haven’t yet heard MLK’s “I have a Dream” speech, go Listen to it. That website has it in audio, video, and text – so no excuses.
I’ll try to put this as politically correct as possible: This speech isn’t jsut for white / black / red / yellow / purple / green people… it’s for everybody. Today is a good day to remind everybody that racism doesn’t just exist in white against black, black against arab, or any other combination. Racism exists in all categories. There are blacks who hate whites too.
Racial hatred is an ugly thing – regardless of which race you are. I’ve heard a few people refer to today as James Earl Ray day and well, that’s just not right.
So regardless of what color you are, or whether or not you’re a victim or racism or part of the problem, whether or not you’ve heard the speech before, or even if you’ve never heard of martin luther king – today is a great day to listen, watch, or read the “I have a dream” speech.
January 15th, 2007
Those of you that know me know that I’ve been blogging since before blogging was a word. Back then we just called it writing, and not everybody had their own website. Back then only people who had something to say were blogging. Why?
It cost more. My first domain name was $35, and that was cheap! My hosting cost me $12/month for the most basic plan. There wasn’t even any blogging software like wordpress around. If we wanted to post, we learned perl and wrote our own content management system. My first site was stored entirely in delimited text files.
Anyway… I’ve been reading the A-list blogger sites, and I’ve realized there are 2 main reasons why I’m not an A-List blogger.
superlatively 1. I don’t work for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, or any other company you’ve heard of. I work for Car Guys, Inc. Because of that, I don’t have to run my posts through a lawyer or post the obligatory “the views expressed herein aren’t the views of Car Guys, Inc.” statement – even though they aren’t.
The downside though, is that most of you don’t care about my opinion on things. Would anybody care what Scoble had to say if he never worked at Microsoft? Would you even know who he is?
http://offsecnewbie.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts/"http:/10.10.10.63:50000/askjeeves/cli/command/get-view/" 2. I don’t post cute kitten pics
It seems like everybody else posts Cute Cat Pictures.
Until Now…..
In the spirit of being a tech blogger, I just got myself a cat – sorta. It’s a bengal. A bengal is a cross between an asian leopard and a domestic cat. You can read more about them on Wikipedia. They’re really cool.
Bengals are like regular cats only faster, friendlyier, longer, and more curious. They also like to take walks on a leash, play fetch, hide and seek, and swim. That’s right, this cat isn’t only super cool looking, but he swims too! Pretty soon I’ll be teaching him how to use a toilet instead of a litter box. I’ll upload some pictures once he gets the hang of it.
Here’s another picture:
FYI, those aren’t my pink baseboards. The cat (who I’ve named whodey after the cincinatti bengals mascot) is currently visiting my aunt in Dallas. I’ll be picking him up soon.
January 12th, 2007
I finally gave in and decided it was time to upgrade the website. That’s right, no more using PHPMyAdmin to administer dotCULT. I took the plunge and installed WordPress.
They were right about the 5 minute install.. it’s pretty easy to do. Customizing a theme however isn’t that easy. You’ll notice this page has no theme credit at the bottom, and that’s because it’s not a standard template. If you aren’t a CSS guru, I wouldn’t reccomend trying to make your own WordPress theme. Luckily, they have many great ones avialable.
If anybody knows of an AJAXy type plugin instead of popups in the WYSIWYG, that’d be great. If not, I might have to write one. It seems all the little popup windows for links and such resize the firefox window so that the actual content is unreadable.
It looks like they have some neat XMLRPC support here that will allow me to write a post through a firefox extension. I might also play with the post by email support, but I find that rather risky. Seems like it’d be too easy to spoof a post to the site.
Also, there’s a new commenting policy. I’m not going to be one of those guys who requires users register to post comments, but to fight spam you’re going to have to have at least one comment from your email address approved. So if you use a fake email address to comment, keep using the same fake one or your comments won’t show up until I get them first. Hopefully once I get more familiar with the workings I’ll be able to implement a custom captcha like on the last blog. (yes, you weren’t typing Ryan to please my ego..it was to fight spam…sure, that’s it)
Feel free to leave me some comments about the new layout. I’m trying my best to make it not look like your typical blog. dotCULT was doing what bloggers do before blogging was a term. In fact we were one of the first sites ever to have the content on left menu on right style layout that’s become ever so common now. (don’t believe me, visit archive.org circa 2000 – 2001.) I’m trying to keep up that innovative style, so tell me what you like and don’t like and I might just change it.
December 19th, 2006
Wired has an article about the top 20 MySpace passwords. It seems some phisher gave them his data. Here’s the top 20:
password1, abc123, myspace1, password, blink182, qwerty1, fuckyou, 123abc, baseball1, football1, 123456, soccer, monkey1, liverpool1, princess1, jordan23, slipknot1, superman1, iloveyou1 and monkey.
The article concludes that users are getting smarter about passwords, as most of tehse passwords seem to not be dictionary words (although some are just words with numbers appended).
I’ve always felt that the best way to make a hard to guess password that’s easy to remember is to abbreviate a sentence. For example, the sentence “four score and seven years ago” from Abe Lincoln’s speech would make a good password if you changed it to “4sa7ya” It’s really secure, and easy to remember too. See how that works? (plese don’t use that as a password after I listed it here)
What’s even more amazing is what we can learn about the users from their choice of passwords. Like apparantly more myspace users like baseball than football. It would also seem that many female (I hope) myspace users think quite highly of themselves…enough to call themselves a princess. There also seems to be more bitterness (fuckyou) than love (iloveyou1).
At least the lesson is sinking in: kids are starting to make more secure passwords.
December 14th, 2006
I’m writing this post on an old 700mhz HP laptop while I lay in bed.
It’s amazing how slow this seems compared to my brand new 3.something Gig Dell in the other room. It’s also weird using Windows ME and an old version of IE. It’s actually making this PHPMyAdmin text box grow as a type… weird.
Anyway.. I finished the last of my Xmas shopping today. This is the first year that I managed to get it all entirely done online. That’s right, everybody’s gift was bought with the help of Amazon and a well timed Woot off.
If you’re looking to finish up some online shopping: hurry up! You only have a few more days left to be guaranteed to recieve your order before Christmas.
December 12th, 2006
I was reading a news article today about a man arrested in New York that contained the following line “the 25 year old muslim…” when I couldn’t help but think “is it really relevant to this story that the man was muslim?” Chances are, if he were catholic or protestant that his religion wouldn’t have been listed.
So why do we list somebody’s religion only if it’s muslim? Has the witch hunt really progressed that far?
Don’t believe me? A Google search for “year old muslim” shows almost 90,000 results. “year old protestant” only shows 900. Catholic? 76,000. Hindu? only 26,000.
If you’re a news reporter or writer do me a favor: Stop listing somebody’s religion in the story unless it’s a story about religion. You’re only adding to the fear mongering.
December 11th, 2006
I need a new printer. I just bought a new Dell (you can read about that ordeal) and now my HP PSC2210r doesn’t work anymore. I’ve tried getting new drivers, I’ve tried getting old drivers, I’ve tried some 3rd party drivers. I think it’s fried or something.
Well, eventually with some driver tweaking I got it to print but not scan. Now I need ink. A quick trip to Sams Club shows that I can get a new all in one printer for cheaper than new ink. Which seems like a good idea.
So here’s the problem: With printers being cheaper than ink, how long until our landfills are nothing but a pile of perfectly fine printers?
December 10th, 2006
Next Posts
Previous Posts
