rich
rich
@rich@richtong.org
6,908 posts
3 followers
  • My goodness, a record label that gets it…

    I’m just not sure that prosecuting your customers and telling them they are wrong are a good strategy. Never mind what the law says, its interesting to me to see that folks download songs yes, but iTunes is doing well and most folks are happy to pay $1-2 for a ring tone for goodness sakes.…

  • VOIP Really Does Work

    a little ludwig goes a long way: NATs and VOIP. I’m amazed. Ludwig found he could just use his VOIP phone from his phone without dinking with his firewall. I wonder how Vonage figured this out? I bet Gary Burd: NATs and Internet telephony is right that what they are doing is having an intermediary…

  • DNS Lookup and other handy tools on a web page

    “DNS Stuff”:http://www.dnsstuff.com/. An incredibly useful site. It is has reverse DNS, whois, tracert all on a single page. I’m always losing those little command line utilities. _BTW, checkout the new winamp3 plugin that sucks down the current song I’m listening to while doing this blog and then uses Zempf to stuff it into the blog…

  • More router logging tools

    Link Logger. This is another logger for common home network routers. Interesting to look at and see what folks are doing. I’m not sure the average home owner is going to use this, but if there were an automated service that would be great. “DShield Are You Cracked?”:http://www.dshield.org/warning_explanation.php. A great little script. It checks the…

  • Port Attacks

    Internet Storm Center. As part of understanding what is going on, the Internet Storm Center is a pretty amazing site. Tells you what folks are scanning and where the attacks are. Pretty frightening really. Tells you the top attacked ports and what applications use them. Amazing that most of these are Microsoft ports: Top Attacked…

  • How was this blog created

    _Markl asked me how I created this blog._ A good question, so heres the equivalent of the “About” box: “Movabletype.org”:http://movabletype.org. This is the blogging software. They actually have a hosted service called typepad which is supposed to be very good. Very elegant stuff written in perl, so it is not a speed demon, but very…

  • Galileo to crash into Jupiter

    NASA – Historic Galileo Mission Nears End. A spectacular thing. There will be a web cast as the Galileo enters atmosphere of Jupiter. Hat tip to Metafilter

  • Blog Tools Update

    While looking at RSS Feed Readers, I also found that the blog clients have gotten much better. Here’s my quick review and update: * :: w.bloggar ::. This was the original blog client that I used. He’s been buys working on it and it now supports a whole bunch of blog tools using a standard…

  • On time departure statistics

    BTS – Airline Information – Airline On-Time Statistics – Detailed Statistics – Results. We are thinking about going to Hawaii and I was curious about ontime departure. Man, those folks at the Bureau of Transportation really have their act together. What an incredible database. You can actually look at 5 years of data on on…

  • Your First Road Bike: A Guide

    I’ve got no less than three people asking me about bicycles to buy. Here’s quick list for Peter, Tim and Brad. First, here are the information sources to look at in order of importance: # “Road Bike Reviews”:http://roadbikereview.com. This is a site that doesn’t seem to have become polluted with biased reviews like C|Net. I…

  • Whale-Ho!

    Maui’s Best Whale Watching Cruises | Pacific Whale Foundation. Here’s a blow-by-blow of every whale trip last year by the Pacific Whale Foundation. useful if you are whale-geek or if you are trying to figure out if there are going to be many whales during spring break this year 🙂

  • Maui whale watching

    Maui Whale Watching counts. Connie just loves these creatures and is dying to show the kids. Here’s a note from 2002 on when the whales are holding court. They are around january to May.

  • RSS Readers

    According to “Ludwig”:http://www.theludwigs.com, he only reads using RSS instead of browsing web sites the old fashion way, so I’m off to find the best RSS reader. Not easy to find I should say. Lots of developments since the last time I looked. Here are the sources: * RSS Readers (RSS Info). The top google reference…

  • Santa Cruz Blur Fit and Build Kit Analyzed

    OK, if Brad thinks the Blur is great, let’s have a look and see what I need: h4. Blur Sizing I’m 5′ 10″ to 5′ 11″, so the recommendation is medium with a 120 stem. The effective top tube is 57.7 cm (I usually ride a 56.1 cm and 120 mm stem on my road…

  • Mountain Bike Review

    Been in brain lock about buying a mountain bike. My good buddy “Brad”:http://www.thesilverbergs.com finally gave me a push. Here are some of his words of wisdom below. There are quite a few Santa Cruz Blurs now on ebay as the early adopters are getting their next bikes. The powercoat lists for $1300 and the anodized…

  • Cool Utilities

    a little ludwig goes a long way: Scott Hanselman’s Utility List. Cool utilities per Ludwig. Ones I liked include: * “Xenu”:http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html. Link checker that is pretty cool and works really fast. Nice for checking my blog. * “Command Bar”:http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/CommandBar.asp. A cool utility that lets you run command line utilities in the windows explorer. * “NetPing”:http://www.sliver.com/dotnet/netping/.…

  • Codec licensing

    Been studying a little bit the codec market and how it the whole thing hangs together. There are clearly folks who are doing open source development that doesn’t involve licensing. The two that strike me right away are “Lame”:http://lame.org and “Vorbis”:http://vorbis.org. I’m wondering what the other ones are. Here are some links based on a…

  • Beware! Time Monolink Stem Bolts can break

    Time Sport USA. I’ve got a brand new Time Monolink stem. It is amazing. 125 grams made of carbon fiber. Unfortunately, while hammering up a hill, one of the titanium bolts snapped right at the head. Wow, I’m lucky I didn’t crash. In any case, the nice folks at Time Sports USA actually answered my…

  • Life without Madonna…or learn the banjo now

    John Ludwig points out the music business is collapsing and “Joseph Lasica”:http://www.jdlasica.com/blog/archives/2003_09_08.html#001472 has some sage advice on the topic. Hard for me to imagine since I’ve lived my days in the world where music was so important and everyone wanted to hear the latest. Back to the days of going to clubs I guess. Seriously,…

  • Spam Conference

    Spam Conference. The last spam conference was super interesting. At MIT again this year. Some good theoretical work. “Spam 2003 Conference”:http://spamconference.org/proceedings2003.html. These were the presentations from last year.

  • Mail Frontier

    Home – MailFrontier, Inc.. “Brad”:http://www.thesiverbergs.com says that this is a good product. Need to look at. Just did another round. A silicon valley deal with Draper Fisher Jurvetson and NEA in the A round and Menlo did a $10M B round.

  • Outclass: New VErsion

    Outclass: Mail Classification for Outlook with POPFile. A pretty big upgrade for this mail classification. Check it out. Best thing is getting rid of the training mode stuff.

  • Spam beats Bayesian Filtering

    The Fishbowl: Bayesian Filtering: The Spam Fights Back. BEsids having the absolutely best tagline for a web site (tail -f /dev/mind > blog), he does a good job explaing the latest attacks on spam filters. I’ve been using a Bayesian filter called popfile with good results, but this latest attack will mystify it. “Spammers Compendium”:http://www.jgc.org/tsc/index.htm.…

  • Furrygoats view on DVD Burning Software

    DVD Software Best of Breed. Another hat tip to Ludwig. This is Furrygoat’s view of good DVD software. He likes DVDLabs, TMP2Enc and Nero which I agree with. And, Windows Movie Maker which I don’t like. The ones I need to try in addition are: “Muvee Auto Producer”:http://muvee.com. This is an editing package for $50.…

  • A Teaching Program That Actually Works…

    UCDS and the John Neilson Fund _John Neilson passed away several years ago, but his memory lives on. Connie and I contributed to a fund for teaching and education. Here are some results from a program that is part of the teaching center it supports. It is kind of cool to see something that actually…

  • ProLink Chain Lube Use

    _Hat tip to “Roadbikerider.com”:http://roadbikerider.com newsletter on this tip about ProLink._ I can’t say enough about ProLink. It keeps a chain running clean, it lasts longer than any lube I’ve used, it seems impervious to water, and it increases chain life substantially. You can find our full review at “ProLink”:http://www.roadbikerider.com/products.htm If you buy the 32-oz. size,…

  • Road Rides late 2003 and 2004

    Well, it’s time to think about virtual next year. The summer is done, so what rides am I committing to and training for. Here is the list: * Ride for the Roses. October 26, 2003. Sunday. Ride for the Roses is a century in Austin. Sounds like a wonderful event. Saturday is the all day…

  • George Patton Quotes

    General George Patton quotation. Less poetic than Mao, but pretty colorful advice on warfare.

  • Philosophy of Warfare

    BELLUM – warfare philosophy. Super well organized site on the philosophy and doctrine of warfare through the ages

  • Peer Guardian and Filetopia

    Some quick notes on cool tools that I’ve been exploring lately around the area of IP blocking * “kazaa-lite”:http://www.kazaalitekpp.com/. This is clean version of Kazaa. Doesn’t have spyware. Also implements IP blocking through a central “list”:http://kazaalite.host.sk/dl/BannedIpRanges.txt. The list itself is an interesting read for nerds. * “PeerGuardian”:http://peerguardian.net. This is a general purpose IP blocker. Sort…