Jeremy Zawodny's blog

Buy Nothing Day

Today is Buy Nothing Day. You can help celebrate by staying at home and not shopping. Me? I'll be on a plane to Bangalore, India so there's little chance of me buying anything today.

Instead of that new DVD, how about a subscription to Adbusters for that non-lemming friend of yours?

Cool. Dan Gillmor mentioned it too. But he cheated. He's in Hong Kong now, so Friday came sooner for him than me. No worries. I'll be in India soon enough. From there I'll have a good 8 hour lead on most folks in the US too. :-)

Travel Itenerary

I suspect this will mess me up a bit...

 Leave                      Arrive                     Time
 -----                      ------                     ----
 San Fran  @  2:30pm 11/28  Frankfurt @ 10:10am 11/29  10hr 10min
 Frankfurt @ 11:30am 11/29  Bangalore @ 12:05pm 11/30  08hr 50min

 Bangalore @  2:40am 12/05  Frankfurt @  8:15am 12/05  10hr 05min
 Frankfurt @ 10:10am 12/05  San Fran  @ 12:30pm 12/05  11hr 20min

Heh. I especially like the notion of leaving Bangalore at 2:40am on Friday. Talk about an early hotel check out. Maybe I should check out the night before and just hang out at the office. But, hey, at least I'll get home the same day.

Linux Bangalore/2003 Talk Schedule Posted

The final schedule for Linux Bangalore/2003 is now online. As noted earlier, I'm delivering two talks on Wednesday, December 3rd: MySQL Optimization and Scaling Tips at 10:00am and MySQL New Features at 12:00pm.

If you're there, drop by and introduce yourself! It's not every day I get to meet weblog readers from half way around the world. Well, it happened in Japan a few weeks ago, but still... :-)

Brian Eno's Music for Airports

It's rare that I recommend music, but I've recently decided that Brian Eno's Music For Airports is some of the best background music for writing.

I've owned this particular CD for at least 4 years but have only recently begun to listen to it with any regularity. A couple weeks ago, I popped it into the CD player while hacking on a book chapter and left it on repeat. Since then I haven't even thought of taking it out of the rotation. Like much of his other ambient work, its very subtle and just fades into the background as your concentration and attention focus back on the task at hand.

If you're a fan of Brian Eno or Ambient Music in general, I highly recommend it.

Business 2.0 on Foo Camp

The Good News

According to Jeremy Wright, I'm mentioned in this Business 2.0 article on Foo Camp.

The Bad News

I'm not about to pay Business 2.0 $5 to read a single page of a single article. A subscription form keep popping up when I try to read page 2. I'd gladly pay 'em $0.50 or so. Micro-payments anyone?

Sigh.

It's PayPal not rocket surgery, guys. You'd think that part of the "2.0" in "Business 2.0" would involve understanding how business ought to work on-line, wouldn't you?

Anyway, if somehow a copy of the article magically ends up in my INBOX I can actually read it.

Update: The author has provided a PDF version from his site (local copy). Thanks John!

Comments RSS Feed Added

The other day, while setting up my linkblog and its RSS feed, I decided to also setup an RSS feed for my blog comments. The idea is simple, really. Weblogs are great because of RSS. I don't have to poll (visit each site repeatedly, looking for updates) anymore. My aggregator does that for me. However, when I get interested in a discussion on one, I'm back to square one again: polling.

By providing a feed of the 10 most recent comments on my entries, I'm making it a bit less tedious for you to keep up with any interesting discussion that might occur here. Yeah, I know it's not likely, but on the off chance it happens, you now have an easy mechansim for staying involved.

Subscribe here

Thanks to revjim's example for making this trivial to do.

If I get really ambitious, may I'll set up per-post feeds someday.

Real-Time PHP-Nuke Hacking

A couple weeks ago, I posted asking for web discussion board recommendations. In the comments Rasmus Lerdorf pointed out that most system suck because their security is a joke.

Of course, he's right. I've been on Bugtraq long enough to realize that the popular PHP-based boards and community systems seem to get compromised in some way or another (SQL injection, cross-site scripting, etc.) on a very regular basis. That's part of the reason I asked in the first place. I was hoping someone who knows more about the scene would enlighten me. And, despite that fact that I omitted security from my original list of requirements, it worked nicely.

Then, yesterday, I was looking at the MythTV project, which is an impressive Linux PVR solution (think "Open Tivo"). Literally as I was browsing the site someone compromised it. See the screenshot at the right? I took that just in case it was fixed before I had a chance to right this. Indeed, a couple hours later the site was back to normal.

Witnessing this real-time "hacking" is a sobering example of how far things have to come. If you've been brainwashed by Eric Raymond's "all bugs are shallow" logic, ask yourself why we keep seeing this sort of thing happen with popular Open Source Software such as PHP-Nuke.

Come to think of it, I think I've written about this before. Looking back over it, I still agree with myself.