Working title: “Using Crafty Google Searches to Turn in Spammers”
Like most Internet users, I get a lot of spam. GMail filters 99.99999999% of it correctly, but I periodically browse through the spam to make sure. One day I read one of them, and realized it linked to something.blogspot.com, a Blogger blog. As I’ve previously posted, you can report spam blogs to Blogger with a simple form.
So I then searched my spam for “blogspot” (in:spam blogspot) and went to the handful of URLs (stripping off any variables passed) to verify they were spam, and reported each.
But it gets better! I reported maybe 4 people that way. But I get a lot of spam with the subject “What a stupid face you have here $name,” where $name is the e-mail address they send it to. The body of the message just contains the word “Watch” with a link, which always takes you to a file called watch.exe on various servers (most likely hacked by a worm to host there?)… I’m not about to download it to see what it does, though, but I assume it’s no good.
So I was curious about it, so I Googled “what a stupid face you have here,” and realized that a lot of the results were spam. And, in fact, several were on Blogger. So I refined my search to site:blogspot.com "what a stupid face you have", and started clicking through to find them. A few are people posting about the mail, but most are splogs.
LayeredTech just announced a 50% increase in server pricing for me. Consequentially, I’m working today to get my virtual machine up and running, and then I’m going to move everything over there. This is an all-around upgrade, too: we’re moving to a closer data center (PA instead of TX) on a faster machine, and inside a shiny new virtual machine where everything will be set up right and where upgrading to a new version won’t require spending 20 minutes to update Portage and then even more time to compile everything.
I’ll keep you posted; I just got networking set up on the machine, next comes pulling down updates and basic configuration, and then all the packages!
I used to have a great deal of respect for Bill Clinton. Sure, the Monica Lewinksy scandal wasn’t so great, and I was pretty peeved at how many people he pardoned on his way out. But overall, I thought he did a good job, and his continuing work on charitable causes painted a picture of a man who truly cares about helping the world.
The more he campaigns for his wife, the more I think he’s a loose cannon who may have developed mad cow. Besides all the occasions of him flipping out, this news article (with a ludicrously long URL) says it all. His Sunday speech in South Dakota accused the media of some sort of vast conspiracy against his wife, and suggested that McCain will win if Hillary isn’t nominated. (Which is odd since most polls I’ve seen suggest the opposite: we need Obama if we’re going to beat McCain.
I also used to think it was premature and tasteless to try to suggest that she had to withdraw from the campaign. I’d have loved to have seen her withdraw and give her approval to Obama, but I thought it was inappropriate for people to call her to do so. But there are increasing calls for her to do just that, and I think the time has come. Unless she finishes big in June, she’s going to seal her fate, and it’s important that she, as the linked article says, withdraws while she still has some dignity left. Between her husband’s increasingly paranoid-sounding angry speeches, and her comment about Bobby Kennedy being killed*, which still hasn’t blown over, she’s already attracting a lot of negative sentiment, and I don’t think it’s going to get any better. I can’t find the link, but a few vocal people in New York are suggesting that, if/when she loses and goes back to being a Senator, she’s going to have a lot of wounds to heal first.
As Wikipedians would say, it’s time for her to withdraw under WP:SNOW. Wait until the next round of elections, but if she doesn’t finish big, it’s time she gracefully withdraws and urges her followers to cut out the business of promising to vote for McCain if she doesn’t get the nomination. Otherwise, she’s going to fracture the Democratic party, humiliate herself, put John McCain in office, and be hated for 20 years.
While campaigning in New Hampshire, someone speaking at an event before she arrived said something to the effect of, “Some have compared Obama to JFK… But let’s not forget what happened to him.” Hillary seemed to be genuinely horrified when she was told about the remark, but still… Double references to Kennedys being killed, both times insinuating that the same might just happen to Obama…?
…I’d try to arrange a meeting of all the major candidates, in front of the media, where we all pledge to stop this crap. (Obama himself commented that he knew Hillary meant nothing negative, but that after such intense campaigning, he knew exactly what it was like to slip up and say something that sounds really bad but wasn’t what you meant.)
I made a bunch of changes all at once, and suddenly my system froze when I tried to log in, just saying “Loading your personal settings…”
For a long time, I’ve wanted Windows to show me exactly what it was doing, since “Loading your personal settings…” means nothing. Is it choking on a config file? Trying to reconnect to the network share that doesn’t exist anymore? Is my new anti-virus software conflicting with the old?
I’m still not entirely satisfied, but it turns out that Windows does support extended messages in the login dialog: in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE / Software / Microsoft / Windows / CurrentVersion / Polices / system, create a DWORD called “verbosestatus” and set it to 1. (And, per some of the online guides, make sure you don’t have a “DisableStatusMessages” key, or at least make sure it’s set to 0.)
Now, instead of getting “Loading your personal settings…” I can see exactly what file it’s loading. Although to be honest, that wasn’t at all helpful in this case, but this is a setting I’m going to leave on.
As an aside, don’t ever run two anti-virus programs at once. I’m pretty sure that’s the program. Safe Mode doesn’t let you remove software (stupid! stupid! That’s why I needed to get into Safe Mode), but I remembered the old msconfig (Start -> Run -> “msconfig”), where I was able to be judicious in disabling both anti-virus applications, along with some other services that I really don’t need running in the background anyway. And now it works like a charm.
I joined my family today in central/Northern New Hampshire. It was opening day at Clark’s Trading Post, a favorite of my brother. My brother encouraged me to go with them, and the forecast called for a decent day, so I figured I’d tag along. The area’s always been quite photogenic, and I figured it’d be a good chance to continue my exploration into HDR.
That’s the train at Clark’s. This is what I like to think of as a halfway-decent HDR shot: a close inspection will reveal some technical flaws, but it’s normally a difficult subject to shoot well. It’s largely a black train, glossy in parts, matte in others, but it also has shiny metal highlights, plus the sky. This isn’t to say that it can’t be photographed, just that the results are ordinarily less than stunning. What I like about this shot is that your first thought isn’t, “What type of surrealist artwork is this?!” As seems to be typical of my shots, the sky looks kind of wonky, but overall, I’m happy with the shot.
There’s an example of the type of stuff I’m still on the fence about. It’s just kind of jarring in a way, as the colors, while “correct” in a sense, are unnatural. Rather than correcting for the fact that the camera can’t capture the whole scene the same way the human eye might, it goes further and does something even our eyes can’t. It’s a little surreal, but the style is growing on me. (Trivia: look closely and see how many things you can spot wrong. When stitching together multiple photos in which people are moving, things are bound to not quite match up right. They’re fairly subtle in this photo.)
There’s another building, again showing the more “legitimate” aspects of HDR photography in my mind. (Besides the ghostly half-man.) This would ordinarily be a lighting disaster. The building was receiving what was almost direct sunlight, while a dark shadow existed. And the sky was somewhere in between. In this case, I think the blended exposures work perfectly. The same goes true for this shot:
I didn’t know how it’d turn out at first… It looks like a simple shot, but it wasn’t! My typical method is to set my camera up for auto-bracketing, taking three shots in a row, one properly exposed, one too dark, and one too bright, thus increasing the odds that there’s a good shot in there somewhere. Often the main one looks good, but I know that some of the details from the others will boost it when converting to HDR. In this case, though, none of the three worked. If the bottles looked good, the wooden headstones were washed out. If the wall looked good, the grass was far too bright. I had a nicely-bracketed set of three bad photos. Fortunately, Photomatix worked it magic and produced a good shot.
We eventually tired of Clark’s and went exploring the area. Lost River was nearby… I pondered what lens to take, since it wasn’t practical to carry all of them, and made the right choice to bring my wide-angle 18-50mm lens. And here I realized that shooting for HDR, much like switching to using two computer monitors, starting to carry a cell phone, or buying high-thread-count sheets, is a habit that rapidly becomes very hard to break. I’d take a “normal” shot, but realize that parts were under- or over-exposed, so I’d retake the shot as a bracketed set of three, and spent some time in the car ride back home on my laptop merging them.
This is at the Lost River section; hardly the best shot, but a quick-and-dirty example of an ‘acceptable’ use of HDR. The trees are well-lit, and so is the sky. Difficult to pull off with one exposure, but a piece of cake with three and HDR!
As we went along, I noticed various parts of running water. (I thought this was a lost river… Pretty easy to find.) I’d never actually taken the stereotypical long-exposure moving-water shot, so this served as a good opportunity. I set the camera to ISO 100 (pretty insensitive to light, very low noise, but meaning slower shutter speeds), and stopped the lens down to f/22, which gave me about a one-second shutter speed. I set the camera down on a railing and pressed the shutter. Viola!
But I was curious… How would my newfound obsession with HDR play into this? Could you “bracket” that type of shot, and merge them with any success?
I actually didn’t expect this to work, but it ended up being one of my favorite shots from the day. The shots were something like 1/3 second, 1 second, and 2 seconds, so I expected that the water / person would have moved too much. As luck would have it, they didn’t, and the result was that shot. (A nice side-effect is that I rarely remember to stop the lens down for landscapes, but I necessarily did here… At f/22, everything, in theory, is in focus. Although if you look closely, you’ll notice that some of the photo is kind of soft where things got matched up slightly off-kilter.
We then went to the Indian Head Resort, where, in a welcome break from $15 admission tickets, we paid 50 cents to climb the tower. (In hindsight, they should have paid me to climb that thing!)
Doesn’t it look big and scary? Nevermind that I used a wide-angle lens feet away from the base to distort the perspective, nor that I made it an HDR exposure to boost the ominous dark clouds that really weren’t that ominous or dark.
That’s the Indian Head. For those easily confused like me, the Indian Head, and the Old Man of the Mountain are two separate things. I initially remarked, “It kind of still looks like a face,” before realizing that it was the Old Man that came tumbling down, not the Indian Head.
This was yet another one of those shots that was pretty tricky. I pulled out a polarizing filter for this one to try to boost contrast and get the sky to not look so gloomy; you wouldn’t know from the picture, but it helped. You also wouldn’t know from the picture, but this, too, is an HDR shot.
Facing the other way, I decided to take a series of shots holding the camera vertical, intended to be stitched together into a panorama. Since I have under 500MB free on my hard drive (?!) and since I couldn’t find PanoTools or any of its ilk, I ended up trying Windows Live Photo Gallery, which I installed at Mr. T’s suggestion but never got around to using much. (I also brought the image into Photoshop, where I cropped it and tweaked it.)
I’d like to give it good reviews, as it was very easy and quite intuitive. The problem is that I’m fairly certain this isn’t actually how things looked. The pond looks right, but I’m fairly certain that there were more ‘humps’ off to the left. I’m really not sure what happened, but the end result looks good, so I’m happy.
One might assume the two were mutually exclusive. Those of us from New England, however, know better. Indeed, it’s a bright, sunny day here, but I’m watching rain fall on the roof outside my window.
Illinois Senator Barack Obama is campaigning in Florida today. He’ll be in Connecticut Sunday to deliver the commencement address at Wesleyan University, in place of Senator Ted Kennedy.
Our speaker was alright, but he was no Barack Obama. And why did Wesleyan get Ted Kennedy, when he’s our Senator?!
The International Herald Tribune reports that Myanmar’s leaders have just allowed foreign aid workers into the country. I seem to recall a story from a week or two ago about how they were accusing France of sending a warship to take over their country, when France suggested that the ship was actually coming with doctors and food or something like that.
Glad to see that Myanmarians (Burmese?) will no longer have to suffer because of their leadership.
Also: they have pretty fancy rooms in Myanmar, with huge chairs.
After hearing that McCain was talking on TV about how Obama would be a good President, or something similar, I figure I’ll continue doing things backwards, and lend a compliment to McCain.
Obama caught tremendous controversy after Rev. Wright’s comments were taken out of context and played over and over in the media. He initially stood by Rev. Wright, which was the “right” thing to do in my mind. But in an election where people are already (unjustly) questioning his patriotism, it wasn’t the popular decision. Rev. Wright went on to make more statements, when Obama finally distanced himself from his increasingly offensive remarks.
Rev. John Hagee talked about how Hitler had just fulfilled God’s will, and then endorsed McCain. McCain rejected Hagee’s endorsement, saying, “Obviously, I find these remarks and others deeply offensive and indefensible, and I repudiate them. I did not know of them before Rev. Hagee’s endorsement, and I feel I must reject his endorsement as well.”
Well-done, sir! (Hagee then withdrew his endorsement of McCain.) And at the same time, McCain made sure reporters didn’t take anything out of context, throwing in, “I have said [before that] I do not believe Sen. Obama shares Rev. Wright’s extreme views.”
I hope the rest of the campaign goes this way: more of a friendly campaign. Both candidates have condemned those in their party that go for underhanded tactics. I confess that I’m not too fond of McCain (though I don’t have anything terribly negative to say about him), but this sort of, “Not being a sneaky bastard” philosophy is one of the things that drew me to Obama. That McCain is adopting a similar policy bodes well, I think, for America, regardless of who wins.
(Full disclaimer: it’s being alleged that Rev. Hagee’s words, much like Rev. Wright’s, were taken out of context, and I believe it. But frankly, it’s a moot point: much like with Rev. Wright and Obama, it’s not so much the truth as it is the perception.)
