Letter Never Sent

Personal / Society — 1 comment
27
Feb 06

Just a tourist passing through

Yesterday afternoon I unbent myself from the computer and pumped up the bike to take a ride around Dallas where I live. It ended up being a three hour ride around downtown, which to add the confusion, is also called “uptown” in parts. The main difference between uptown and downtown is that uptown is where the rich, white folk live. So it seems. It is apparently very important to differentiate, even though it’s all central Dallas when you get right down to it.

It was fun and exhausting to ride around and explore the area. I have no idea how many miles I went, but my ass is still sore from pushing my out of shape self around the city.

Most of the ride was uneventful, but I did have a few interesting experiences. When I crossed a creek near the Infomart, I spotted a tire-sized snapping turtle coming up for air in the green, rain-swollen creek. I knew I should have brought my camera, but from where I was it wouldn’t have made a good picture.

A short time later I went down this closed off road and passed under a rail line where a homeless black man was curled up sleeping. As I rode past, he bolted awake and leapt up at me like he thought I might be trying to rob him or mess with his shit. It scared the crap out of me, and I pushed on past the piles of wet garbage as quick as I could. As I looked back, he sat there on the edge of the concrete wall looking either very scared or very pissed off leaning forward with his hands steadying him on each side. It’s hard to tell what blaring, blood-shot eyes mean. Who cares, I’m sure you have to be one vigilant mother to sleep outside in this town. I felt ashamed for disturbing him with my clueless, whitebread jaunt through the city. Just a tourist passing through while other people sleep under bridges in the mud.

Liberties / Software / Internet / Technology — Comments Off
24
Feb 06

Time for more encrypted VOIP

From the NY Times: Taking Spying to Higher Level, Agencies Look for More Ways to Mine Data:

Mr. Arquilla, who was a consultant on Admiral Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness project, said that the $40 billion spent each year by intelligence agencies had failed to exploit the power of data mining in correlating information readily available from public sources, like monitoring Internet chat rooms used by Al Qaeda. Instead, he said, the government has been investing huge sums in surveillance of phone calls of American citizens.

“Checking every phone call ever made is an example of old think,” he said.

He was alluding to databases maintained at an AT&T data center in Kansas, which now contain electronic records of 1.92 trillion telephone calls, going back decades. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights advocacy group, has asserted in a lawsuit that the AT&T Daytona system, a giant storehouse of calling records and Internet message routing information, was the foundation of the N.S.A.’s effort to mine telephone records without a warrant.

Software / Internet — 6 comments
24
Feb 06

Gmail for your domain

I got a beta invite for the “Gmail for your domain” program. Basically, the idea is that you let Gmail and Google host your email using one of your domains. So, if you register iamthecoolestguyintheworld.com, you can let Google / Gmail handle all the email and email accounts for that domain. All you have to do is point your MX records to Gmail. They provide a control panel interface for you to create and manage email accounts as well as a total of 2GB of server space. No doubt, they will offer this service paid for with Google ads. It’s a smart service to add as well as a no brainer. Why hasn’t anyone else done this yet?

Most of the web-based email services offered by small web hosts use installations of SquirrelMail, Horde, or NeoMail. If Google can provide a reliable service, I’m sure many people will gladly switch. I imagine many might buy domains just to have personalized Gmail.

Using Gmail for your domain, you get the great Gmail interface, of course. The only downside is that your email is stored with Google rather than on your server. That’s a dubious proposition. I wish you could just license the Gmail software to install on your webserver.

gmail for your domain

Here’s a quick run down of the features:

Search accounts – This search allows you to find accounts by account name. If you create 300 email accounts and you need to find one with a specific name this is how you do it. I imagine this will be useful if Google allows you to host multiple domains in the future.
User management – Create new users, change user passwords, etc. You can even force a user to choose a new password on their next login as well as set the user as an admin with admin privileges to manage email for the domain. There are also options to create multiple account aliases for the same user. For example, I could have an email box that collected anything sent to [email protected] or [email protected]. The only other thing I noticed here was the ability to add the user to a mailing list created on the domain.
Create mailing list – This is pretty standard. Create a mailing list much like Mailman or other listserv apps, the only difference you can only add users on your domain. That will probably change in the future, which should be troubling to the various listserv companies out there like Lyris and Mailermailer.com.
Domain settings – Here you can change the sign-in box color and add a special graphic for your sign-in page, so you can brand your webmail.

The features are limited right now, and match what you can do with any virtual hosting environment. The main benefit here is the Gmail interface as well as the 2GB of essentially free space. That allows you to use your virtual hosting space solely for storing files rather than constantly growing email boxes. I look forward to what they will include in the future. If they coupled this with a domain purchasing program it will be a success. Imagine, a user buys a domain at google.com, signs up for a blog hosted by Blogger, and email hosted by Gmail, all for free. They could even start offering free domain names supported by Adsense.

Religion/philosophy — Comments Off
22
Feb 06

Jesus and bathrooms should not mix.

I’ve seen religious pamphlets left out before by unseen proselytizers, although usually it’s a copy of that Jehovah’s Witness magazine whose name I’m forgetting. In the bathroom today, underneath the ass gasket dispenser there was a pamphlet whose cover read “Your first six days in HELL”. First of all, huh? Second of all, gross.

General — Comments Off
21
Feb 06

Wikipedia: User boxes out of control?

From an interview with Wikipedia founder, Jimbo Wales:

WS: Tony Sidaway asks: “In the past six weeks the number of userboxes on English Wikipedia has risen from 3500 to 6000 and, despite your appeals for restraint, the number pertaining to political beliefs has risen from 45 to 150. Can the problem of unsuitable userboxes still be resolved by debate?”

JW: My only comment on the userbox situation is that the current situation is not acceptable.

Friends / Personal — 4 comments
21
Feb 06

Life, Love & Marriage

It seems like everyone I know is getting married. Today, on Breen’s blog I read a post written in typically terse Breen fashion: “Sarah is now my fiancÃ© [sic].” That is great news for Sarah and Breen. They are a great for each other. Having known him before and after Sarah, it is obvious that she makes him very happy. Maybe some day soon little Breens will make their debut. That would kick ass. Congratulations and good luck to you guys.

Society / Software / Internet — Comments Off
20
Feb 06

Get active in Wikipedia

While you’re using Wikipedia, you should keep an eye out for any errors you see. It’s easy to make changes and add content. I added a user template for Dallas wikipedians, but there’s still not one for Austin, I just noticed. I may have to add that unless someone gets to it before me.

General — Comments Off
20
Feb 06

Do we know whether financial speculators fund terrorism?

I read a little bit today about how the attacks on oil supplies in Nigeria caused oil prices to jump. What keeps unscrupulous speculators from manipulating markets? You could buy oil futures then hire a hit. Just funnel money through various mechanisms to Nigerian rebels and pay them to attack oil rigs and pipelines. When prices head north as they did today, cash in the futures. I imagine this goes on to some degree every day in the financial markets.

Personal — Comments Off
17
Feb 06

I can read Wikipedia for hours

I kept track of some of the articles I poured over on Wikipedia. It’s an amazing thing. WikiGnomes (People who make minor edits) Konqueror, the GPL web browser. Puerto Rico (game). Raw food diet, because I was unclear.

Personal — 1 comment
17
Feb 06

What’s the haps on the craps?

I had a pretty eventful week, for me anyway. Wednesday night my mom came up to Dallas for business and I went up to Garland after work and had a spaghetti dinner with her and my cousin at my cousin’s apartment. Since I hadn’t seen my mom since Thanksgiving she brought up a few Christmas gifts. That was a nice surprise. Maybe we should take all the Christmas presents we get and spread them out over the year?

Thursday morning I woke up after thirty minutes of playing tag with the snooze button. When I got up I found that some of the changes John had made to the listserv had prevented mail traffic to the list. This was a stressful thing early in the morning, and I had to put that fire out before heading into work.

With Jody out of town in Austin, I had to find something to do thursday night. Luckily, I had made plans with James and Melissa to go out, and we went to this pub called The Drunken Monk over by SMU, which James refers to as Southern Millionaires University. It must be noted that James is technically an SMU student since he is in the video game design program there in Plano. The pub was packed and we had a hard time getting a table, although as I said at the time, thursday is the new friday, tuesday is the new monday. It’s amazing how much of the work I do during the week is squeezed into tuesday and wednesday, which seem to be my most productive days. I can’t be the only one.

James and Melissa are a nice couple as well as great people on their own. I’m glad they’re marrying each other and asked a lot about the whole deal since I don’t know a lot of other people who are getting married. It’s a good feeling to see two people with love for one another. We talked and hung out and drank a few beers. I’m excited about being a groomsman, although I’m glad it’s still a few months away since such ceremony makes me immediately nervous due to the obvious gravity. I’m probably overthinking it.

Letter Never Sent Tell me when to go.