Rick's World

Hmm, it looks like our friends at the United States Medical Association are back.

Today, I got yet another spam email from them. It was the exact same email, that I wrote about before. I had noticed, not long after I wrote that article that they appeared to have had their site shut down by GoDaddy due to being spam. I did the same Whois search on the domain today after receiving their email, and it looks like yesterday they moved their hosting to 1and1.com. Let's see how long they survive before 1and1 shuts them down again.

Last night, I finally finished reading the last Harry Potter novel. Great story! Very different from the others though.

I'll hold off giving my comments on it for a while though to give everyone else a chance to read it before I spoil anything. :)

While everyone (like me) is reading the last Harry Potter book, I thought I'd make some humorous sugestions for how the book should end...

1. The U.S. government declares Hogwarts to be an Al Qaeda training camp, and utterly destroys it in a massive 'shock and awe' campaign.
2. We discover that Harry is actually Voldemort and Voldemort is actually Harry. We've been cheering along the wrong hero all along!
3. Ron and Harry fall in love and marry in a beautiful wedding ceremony on the steps of a Massachusetts courthouse.
4. Harry wakes up in an insane asylum to discover that everything thats happened was just his insane mind playing tricks on him.
5. We discover that Harry was replaced with a clone many years ago. When the real Harry shows up at the end, it turns out that we've been following the adventures of Harry's clone all these years. (Note: this is an obscure comic book reference. Let's see who can guess it?)
6. Dumbledore returns to life, dressed in black, mechanical armor and declares to Harry, "I am your father!"
7. Harry, after defeating Voldemort, decides to take up acting on Broadway. He proceeds to star, in the nude, in a musical involving a boy who loves his horse way too much.
8. Harry, seduced by Black Magic, ends up turning on Dumbledore. This leads to a fight over a volcano. Harry is badly injured, but Voldermort saves his life by encasing him in black, mechanical armor.
9. Harry gets a magical sex change operation and becomes an exotic dancer.
10. Ron and Hermione fall in love and get engaged. As his wedding gift to Ron, he provides a pair of magical 'enhancements' to Hermione...

Facebook has been getting a lot of press lately. And most of it good press. Facebook is a social networking site. Exactly what that means, I'm not entirely sure, but since Facebook has been so popular lately, I decided to sign up and see what it's all about. A couple of days ago I did just that.

I have to say, my first impression of Facebook is quite good. The site has a very clean, professional feel to it, unlike the God-awful ugly Myspace. It's not too cluttered, and it seems to be pretty easy to use. One of the points of a social network is to find and connect with friends. You use it to keep up with what they are doing. One of the nice features that Facebook has is the ability to search for people based on what college and what high school you went to. I haven't found any friends on the high school search yet, but I did locate an old college roommate of mine.

This college roommate of mine (who's name shall remain anonymous, in the interests of privacy) and I shared a dorm room for the better part of a year at school. At the time we met he was also a Computer Science Major, as I was. He was also a Windows user at the time, as I was. Later, after we were no longer roommates, he switched to Macs and MIS as a major. I stuck with Windows from that point up until only recently. It looks like he may have been right about Macs way back then. He was also a very strict Christian at the time (and he no doubt still is). At the time, he was also straight (meaning heterosexual). He went on various dates with girls while we were roommates. All very standard stuff. Him and I got along fine. At the time however, I had this distinct feeling that he might be gay, and that he just hadn't realized it yet. Of course, I never mentioned it to him, but I always had that feeling. It turns out that I was right.

Yesterday, a good 15 years after graduating college, I found him on Facebook. I read his profile only to discover that he was, in fact gay (bisexual apparently). I'm impressed that he is that open about that on his profile. That's a thing that many people would find uncomfortable admitting in public. I was pleased to see this. Not because it proved my hunch at the time correct, but because apparently somewhere along the way he realized this fact himself and accepted it. I'm proud of him.

Way to go, my friend!

I've been thinking a lot about the concept of privacy in the world of blogging.

I've been running this little blog for over two years now. In that time I've written a lot of articles on various subjects. From reading the blog, you can deduce many things about me. From the title of the blog you can deduce that my first name is 'Rick'. From the domain name of the blog, you can deduce my last name is 'Ekle'. I even have my full first and last name and email address sitting right there in plain sight on the upper right hand corner of the page. Do a quick Whois search on the domain name and you can find my complete address and phone number. I have never made any secret of these things. With these bits of information an enterprising person could do some Google searches and find out a great deal more about me. My last name is fairly unusual, so you are unlikely to find another person with my name online. That being said, however, I do maintain a great deal of privacy on this blog.

I have mentioned my family in passing on my blog over the last couple of years, but I have intentionally not said anything that would allow people to easily identify them. I have never mentioned my parents by name, and I believe I've only mentioned my brother's name once. My brother doesn't like the idea of me talking about him in 'public' on the blog, and I can't blame him. That's why I've said little about him and my family. While I have to a certain degree 'exposed' myself on this blog, I will not do that to my family and friends without their permission. I tend to see this blog as my own little 'newspaper column'. I write articles about whatever is interesting to me at the time, but I rarely bring my family and friends into it.

I have seen other blogs, and know other bloggers who have revealed a great deal more personal information about themselves and their families on their blogs. That's not my style. If you want to read the latest sob story about some major medical problem me or a family member has had, go elsewhere. You won't find it here. If you want to read the occaisional interesting article about programming, computers, music, or fuzzy little cats, feel free to read on... :)

Today is my birthday! 38 years young as of today...

My blogging software keeps logs of what strings people are searching for in search engines when they end up on my site. Some of the search strings people type are very strange. I figured I'd try to answer a few of those odd messages...

NSArray* arrayOfFileNames = [[NSFileManager defaultManager] directoryContentsAtPath:pathName];

NSArray* pArray = [[NSArray alloc] init];

For a while now, I've been using a fantastic app called Quicksilver on my Mac. Its a great app if you are a fast typist because it gives you an easy way to launch any application from the keyboard without having to hunt through any menus. Just hit a key to bring up the program, type the first few letters of the app name and it runs.

Well, I just found a Windows equivalent to Quicksilver! It's called Skylight. It gives you they same keyboard based application launching that Quicksilver has. Try it out!

Recently, my web hosting provider offered me a free one year membership to a new site called Bandwagon.

Bandwagon, is an online service that offers to provide online backups of your iTunes library. They offer the service for $24 a year. At first my impression was "Hmm, $2/month to keep a backup of my 60GB iTunes library. Not bad." Of course after further reading, I found that they only store your iTunes metadata which really isn't that much space at all. You need to provide your own online storage through FTP. Ok, so not as good a deal, but I have tons of HD space on my web host and plenty of bandwidth to upload it, so I sign up for my free year and install the software.

The program installs no problem, reads my iTunes library and starts FTPing files up to my FTP site on my web host. "Great, now I'll just let it run for a few hours and my collection is backed up." The software needs some work though. The GUI uses that black, partially transparent style of window that is so popular on OS X these days. While pretty, that damn GUI insists on being the topmost application at all times! Which means I can't get rid of the thing shy of closing the window entirely! (which doesn't actually stop the program, it just hides the window). Ok, that annoying feature is gone.

After letting it run for a while, I decided to check and see how far it had gotten. Ok, after an hour I've only uploaded TWO files? What the heck? That's when I remember that while the download speed of my DSL is 6Mb/sec (about 800 kilobytes per second), the upload speed is much lower - around 800kb/sec. That means my upload speed is 10 times slower than my download speed! Now usually with a DSL connection that's fine since most of what you do is downloading. In this case though, it's a problem. For this, it's all uploading. Bandwagon then tells me that it will take 12 days for my entire 60GB iTunes library to upload! I am not going to leave my computer on for 12 days straight, just to upload this stuff! It would be easier to just burn it to a few DVDs.

It seems to me that online backup sites really aren't practical for someone running on DSL who has to backup a large amount of data. Until we start getting DSL with 6Mb/sec upload as well as download, this service is of little use.

I got an interesting spam email today. It purports to be from the 'United Stated National Medical Association'. As soon as I saw this name, I was highly skeptical. I had never heard of this 'government agency' before, so I did a quick Whois search on the domain. I discovered that not only was this so called government agency domain only registered on June 29, 2007 (a couple days ago), but it was done through a domain info masking service. In other words, it's a brand new domain and the owner is trying to hide his identity.

Had this been a genuine government agency, it would likely have been registered long before June 29th of this year, and they wouldn't be hiding their whois identity. Also, it likely would have been using a *.gov domain rather than a *.com domain. This appears to be an attempt by an online seller of prescription drugs to knock out the competition by making unsuspecting email recipients think they are a valid government agency. Then they just list all their competitors as unauthorized sellers of drugs and they get all the business selling drugs as the only 'legit' company.

I have to say, it's always interesting to see how the spammers are constantly changing their tactics to try to keep people buying their crap. You can read the entire email below. Note that I intentionally broke up the URL links so that they won't work from my blog and this site won't get any traffic from me...

The original spam email

The United States National Medical Association

Do you buy pharmaceuticals online? The US NMA was specifically established to
protect the consumer. Our experts check every online shop for bogus medicines. The
blacklist of unreliable or simply fraud shops is updated every week. We strongly
recommend to visit our site before buying any medical products online. visit us

Our site http: // www .us-nma .com

The common ways of online cheating are:
- delivery of low quality or fraud products.
- an enormous delay (up to 2-3 months) in delivery of products.
- shops obtain all the credit cards numbers and other credit information and then
simply send nothing.
- shops sell unlicensed products they know nothing or very little about.
- shops themselves don't have a license to sell the pharmaceuticals.

Please check our blacklist of unreliable and fraud shops before buying any medical
products online!!! Protect your family and yourself.

http: // www .us-nma .com/

With all due respect and care.
The US NMA.

Update: It looks like they are back. See my comments here...