This is neat. I found all kinds of strange referers in my logs, mainly adult sites. Why would an adult site link to me? For linkspam.

Check out this article on referer spam. The point is to get their site listed in your log analysis report, likely with a link. For example, awstats reports on your referers, linking to each. If your log analysis report is available on the web, you accidentally throw some pagerank to the referer site.

I like it.

Interesting post from Joe Kraus, arguing that it costs 30 times less to start a company today than it did 10 years ago:

Excite.com took $3,000,000 to get from idea to launch. JotSpot took $100,000.

Here’s a nice Python tutorial. I find this very readable and easy to follow, primarily because it’s example based. Instead of covering a lot of theory and philosophy it jumps right in and shows you code right away. If you already know a scripting language or three, this will probably work very well for you.

I’m used to highlighting of things in a linux terminal automatically doing the copy, and right clicking doing a paste. With the new Fedora installs I’ve done, using the “terminal” terminal, I have to … gasp … Shift-Ctl-C to copy. Say what? How do I get the the old usable behaviour back? How did we go backwards in functionality?

FCKeditor is a nice browser based HTML editor. Check out the demo. Is anyone else interested in using this (or something like this) as the editor for a Wiki? I love nothing more than remembering all the intuitive TextFormattingRules between the various Wikis I use, but wouldn’t it be nice if we had this nice interface instead?

Is this basically what jotspot is doing? It seems to make sense.

By way of Niall Kennedy, here is Jeff Hawkins’ Stanford Talk on Entrepreneurship. I’m currently reading his book On Intelligence, so I’m bookmarking his video by blogging about it here so I can eventually watch it.

You’ve probably heard by now: Longhorn will support RSS in a big way. Mr. RSS himself, Dave Winer, is onboard. Scoble is talking about it, and has an MSDN channel 9 interview with demos. They’ve extended RSS to allow for ordered lists. It appears they’ve done this in a reasonable manner, with Winer’s approval.

Not that it’s gone unnoticed, but this is a big deal. This is not about blogs; they’re talking about all kinds of data, from Amazon wishlists to calendars, as RSS. RSS is becoming a native format for storing all sorts of user data, particularly in the windows world.

RSS is nice because it actually sticks to the “simple” in its name, unlike some of our other favourite standards. It’s being extended in easy and sloppy ways, which, if you believe Bosworth and Tim Bray, is a key enabler for success. It’s everywhere; today I found out you can use it for google sitemap.

Bosworth’s talk at SDForum last month was talking about this: a data Web with RSS (or ATOM) as the base format. It was a very interesting vision, and it looks like we’re on our way there.

RSS plus microformats is going to be the base way of exchanging data for most apps in a year or three. If you haven’t tried it out, dive right in, this is a great time. And remember, it’s Really Simple Syndication.

I noticed a good bit of traffic going to my earlier AJAX learning hurdle post. I should mention that very shortly after complaining about AJAX, I got things working and since then it’s been pretty smooth. I’ll be publishing the results in one form or another, probably as the familiar IBM DeveloperWorks article, but if you’re interested in early stuff let me know and I’ll post on the blog or send you code.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that every blog you read has the same blogroll. We all link to the same blogs.

There’s good reason for this: these are the cream of the crop in whatever category you read. Fair enough.

However, it gets old. Where are the great new blogs?

Here’s a challenge to you: link to a great blog nobody’s heard of. Find the undiscovered. Blaze a trail.

This is the Z-List blogroll folks. Drop it in right under your blogroll. Link to new stuff that might be good. Create a marketplace for the non-A-list players out there.

Pooya’s got a blog now: Hear Me Complain. Promises to be lots of food and restaurant reviews and various other ramblings.

After two weeks of diligent posting and tagging, Google gave us a little over 50 referrals while Del.icio.us gave us over 700.

From Particletree, by way of the shifted librarian.

Ok, I’m impressed. Time to try del.icio.us tagging I guess. Let me see if I can coax Jerome’s keyword plugin to do del.icio.us …

I was thinking this morning as I boarded the train how important my mp3 player is. It protects me from all the idle chatter going on around me, from the annoying cell phone yammerers, from the churning of the train machinery.

Everybody has their cocoon. Noise cancelling head phones. Cell phones so you can talk to someone far away instead of the person next to you. Computers and mobile internet access so you don’t have to look at the scenery as it flys by.

Kurt Vonnegut said it beautifully:

I tell you, we are here on earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.

I’d like to be Vonnegut, but the truth is if they sold something that could cocoon you up in total isolation, I’d probably buy it.

Hmm. I guess that’s called a car.

Iranian presidential elections were yesterday. If the winner doesn’t get more than 50% of the vote, a run-off election is held. This coming Friday will be the runoff.

The BBC has a nice graphic of who runs Iran.

Go read Bill talk about Web frameworks. Also read Dave Megginson on the same topic. I’m following with great interest for no particular reason. Bill is smart and his religion seems similar to mine. He’s researching just about everything out there. I await the conclusion with bated breath.

My take on DRM: they’ve got it backwards. They should be paying me to watch/hear/read their stuff.

Here’s what I’ve learned. The most valuable thing I possess is my time. The same can be said for the most desirable segments of the consuming population; people with money to spend are generally time limited in what they can consume.

Every day there’s more vying for my attention. The idea that they’re going to limit me in any way on how I consume their product is ludicrous. I’ll just move on to the next thing; there’s no shortage. This is all about the long tail folks. I’m a niche kinda guy, and there are more niches becoming available everyday.

This is not to say I’m not willing to pay for content; money is simply one impediment to me consuming your product. Put more hurdles in my way and I’ll move on to the next product with fewer hurdles.

This in itself is another example of the long tail. No it’s not. I just found Chris Anderson getting pissed off at Long Tail abuse very amusing, so I’m attempting to contribute to the noise. It’s out there Chris, you can’t police it.

vSkype has a video plugin for skype. Free download, no spyware. I want to try it. If you’ve got it running, skype me (or is it vskype me). My id is darugar .

I’m almost completely uninterested in the video aspect of it; I’ve never found video conferencing all that compelling. Most of the conference calls I do are for work, and I have no desire to see the lifeless, bored look of the other participants any more than I want them to see me scruffy and unshaven in my tattered T-shirt.

I’m very intereseted in the document/presentation sharing aspects, however. If you’ve done as much Webex as I have, you’d understand why. Any technology that gets more people to share documents easily is excellent.

As an aside, the only time video phone was fun was when I called my cousin in Iran. It was 3am there, and he was understandably not very presentable in his tanktop. I called my grandmother over to see him talking to us from all the way on the other side of the world, and her first reaction was: “my god, he’s so hairy! he looks like a monster!”

I laughed my head off and relayed the message to him. The freeze-frame effect of the low bandwidth connection as he ran off-screen and returned with a long sleeve shirt was priceless.

I was looking for a solution for tagging my posts without having to use categories. I posted about it earlier. In a wonderful example of the power of blogging, jerome of Jerome’s Keywords Plugin fame posted comments and got me working. Actually, it was working to begin with, I was just looking in the wrong place.

I’m impressed. Check out Jerome’s wordpress plugin if you’re interested in tagging your posts.

Got this email recently, telling me:

You have received this email because we have strong reason to believe that your eBay account had been recently compromised. In order to prevent any fraudulent activity from occurring we are required to open an investigation into this matter. To speed up this process, you are required to verify your eBay account by following the link below.

The link displays as: https://signin.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?SignIn&;favoritenav=&sid=&ruproduct=&pp=&co_partnerId=2&ru=&i1=&ruparams=&pageType=&pa2=&bshowgif=&pa1=&pUserId=&errmsg=&UsingSSL=&runame=&siteid=0

It actually goes to: http://newleb.siteburg.com/ebay/login.htm

The first screen asks for your username and password. I entered bogus information and was taken to the second page, which asks for my credit card info.

Nice. Other than the site address being clearly not ebay, this one is pretty well put together. The initial email has a lot of attributes that make it credible. It includes a person’s name, copyright, disclaimers, an address, and doesn’t include major grammatical or spelling mistakes. I could see a lot of people getting taken by this.

I hadn’t worried about phishing too much, but looks like it’s something to worry about.

Seems to me tags (ala technorati) are a significantly different thing from categories (what you see on the right hand side of this blog, as supported by wordpress, etc). Categories are a fairly static set of high level things that can be used to categorize your posts. Tags are a larger, more frequently changing set of keywords that are related to the specific content of your post. Thus, this post is in the Blogging category, but is tagged with wordpress, tags, blogging, and technorati. I’d like to have the freedom to tag my posts as needed without having to have hundreds of categories.

I’m trying TechnoTag by Keith McDuffee on this post; I tried Jerome’s Keyword Plugin on the last post with no luck. If this works, the abovementioned tags should be associated with this post. Let’s see.

UPDATE: Not happy. The solution offered by the various plugins seems to be link to technorati, as suggested by technorati. The problem is, my tags are belong to me. They’re not technorati’s tags, and I don’t want to link to them on every word just to tag a post. To be fair, I can link to any page as long as I follow the format they specify. But I don’t really want to link to any site. Links are quite disruptive.

Am I the only one that cares about this? I want to be able to assign keywords or tags to my posts without using categories and without having to alter the contents of my post in any way, including insertion of links. Maybe that’s unreasonable.

UPDATE #2: Quite happy. Jerome fixed me right up. I’ve got exactly what I was looking for via his plugin. Nicely done.

Shahin, one of the really smart, practical people I know has been singing the praises of Ruby on Rails recently. Here’s Dave Megginson, another smart, partical person, talking about why PHP (or perhaps Java) is ultimately a better choice.

Dave makes sense, and gets at the things that typically worry me about frameworks in general, namely the applicability of the scaffolding for real world problems and the difficulty of debugging thru layers of abstraction. Dave mentions:

… web applications — whether producing HTML for people or XML for machines — are really about views, not objects.

I can buy that.

On the other hand, R on R appears to do at least CRUD for me, which is great because then I don’t have to do it myself.

I’ve been doing PHP lately because, well, why not. I got it working on my windows laptop in short order following this guide. It’s really quite usable; no major complaints so far. I guess I’ll have to try out R on R myself to get a good sense. Anybody tried both PHP and RonR and want to chime in?

Btw, notice how Dave mentioned his religion upfront:

I’ve long been an MVC and Java servlet fan. I love object-oriented programming, use REST as a web architectural style, and tend to think of XML-encoded data in entity-relationship terms.

This is great, and more people should do it. Myself, I’m generally in agreement with Dave, other than I’ll take scripting over Java and servlet for Web apps any day.