General

Several people at my former company are infected with some kind of Windows virus. I received several copies of emails containing an executable enclosure. Thankfully I read my email on a Mac, so it didn’t affect me.

16506 ª April 19 10:00 AM. God gets nuked. Do a Google search for God and what comes up first… PHP-Nuke of all things. As the always eloquent John Hiler points out on Microcontent News, this has got to be the ultimate, albeit unintentional, Google bomb. [MetaFilter] “;->”

I signed up for a hosting account with BounceWeb.com today for WorldBeatPlanet. They seem really nice, their server is very fast, and their prices are very reasonable. I may also switch MacMegasite over to their server, since it provides more features than PHPWebHosting and costs about half as much.

I’ve been having lots of grief with WorldBeatPlanet for the last two days. I exceeded the monthly bandwidth of the hosting service I used in less than a week since I went live with the PHPNuke-based site.

Last week, I signed up for another hosting service when I suspected there may be a problem, but they turned out to be the biggest bozos I’ve ever dealt with. We started out on the wrong foot, when I accidentally created two accounts and was billed twice. It only got worse from there. I immediately put in a trouble ticket asking for the extra charge to be removed and for the extra account to be deleted. That request (entered on 4/7) is still open, and they haven’t responded to any of my emails. They also don’t answer their phone.

They also didn’t provide any information on how to access my site and upload files without transferring my DNS servers and waiting for the change to take effect. Every other service I’ve used has always provided some other way to access the site, so I can upload everything and have it all set up before the DNS change becomes active.

I finally switched over the DNS servers yesterday and got everything set up. Today, when I logged on to the site administration screen, I found that I’m no longer allowed to administer my domain.

I’m now looking for another hosting service. If you know of anyone who provides PHP & MySQL hosting for under $10/month and will allow about 3-4Gb/month of traffic, let me know.

16415 ª April 16 6:49 PM. The Covers Project is compiling a list of covers, in hopes of creating “chains” ie: Band covered Song by Artist who covered OtherSong by OtherArtist, etc. Also see prevous thread about Musical Sausage. Unfortunately, that link now redirects to the Grand Royal on-line store, for some reason. [MetaFilter]

16363 ª April 15 8:59 AM. Debunking Six Common Israeli Myths Vital and timely reading. [MetaFilter]

Even though my family background is Jewish, I don’t support Israel’s actions and I’m appalled by their aggression. Sharon’s attack on Arafat’s headquarters was an outright act of war. He should be trying to negotiate instead of attacking. They really need to get rid of Sharon as soon as possible and get someone more moderate who actually wants peace instead of war and is willing to negotiate. Israel reaps what they sow. More than 3 times as many Palestinians have been killed, and as long as Israel continues, there will only be more attacks on Israeli citizens. I don’t blame the Palestinians for fighting back – they’re completely justified in their actions.

The US shouldn’t be supporting Israel. We always look the other way when it comes to their human rights violations and slaughter of innocent Palestinians.

Who Reads What and Why [The Car Talk Guys, via LISNews]

1. The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.
2. The New York Times is read by people who think they run the country.
3. The Washington Post is read by people who think they should run the country.
4. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don’t really understand the Washington Post. They do, however, like their smog statistics shown in pie charts.
5. The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn’t mind running the country, if they could spare the time, and if they didn’t have to leave L.A. to do it.
6. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and they did a far superior job of it, thank you very much.
7. The New York Daily News is read by people who aren’t too sure who’s running the country, and don’t really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.
8. The New York Post is read by people who don’t care who’s running the country either, as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.
9. The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren’t sure there is a country, or that anyone is running it; but whoever it is, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped minority feministic atheist dwarfs, who also happen to be illegal aliens from ANY country or galaxy as long as they are democrats.
10. The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country, but need the baseball scores.
11. The National Enquirer is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store.

[The Shifted Librarian]

16345 ª April 14 7:52 AM. Rekha Malhotra is a New Yorker of South Indian heritage who can be given credit for popularizing Bhangra and promoting the UK Punjabi dub and beat sounds in NYC. She says this about an event she hosts regularly: “Basement Bhangra is very urban. It’s Bhangra with a hip-hop sensibility. It’s raw and percussive, unadulterated. It’s got a lot of meat to it and demands that you dance. It’s not head-nodding music÷it’s body-moving music.” More. More. More. [MetaFilter]

The IOKit documentation from Apple truly sucks. It pretty much just lists the functions with no explanation of how to use them and what the various constants are.

I’m trying to use IORegistryCreateIterator to get a list of all connected devices and display some information about them.

1 Giant Leap. Last year Jamie Catto, film maker and founding member of Faithless and Artist/Producer

Duncan Bridgeman, joined forces to create the project, 1GiantLeap. They embarked upon a

global journey that included Senegal, Ghana, South Africa, Uganda, India, Thailand,

Australia, New Zealand, United Stated and United Kingdom, equipped solely with a digital

audio camera and a vision. This vision – to capture and share with others, the unique fusion

of sound, image and spoken word from some of the world’s most influential artists and

musicians such as Neneh Cherry, Michael Stipe, Dennis Hopper, Asha Bhosle, Kurt

Vonnegut and Baaba Maal. [WorldBeatPlanet]