FBI issues warning about anyone browsing the reference section

Found a fun link over at Kuro5hin, about the FBI issuing warnings against people with almanacs. That's right, "almanac carriers" all over the United States, beware! The FBI is after you and they would like to chat about that fine reference book in your possession.

The promise of cellular wireless data technology

Sitting around over the holidays, away from a reliable internet connection has made a good opportunity to kick around the wireless connection I have via my Sanyo 4900. As Brian Jepson at Mobile Whack points out, unreliable is the key word. The connection is just barely enough for some basic tasks—but not much more than that. No streaming music yet.

Newsmonster over this link is pretty painful but it can be done. Strangely enough, I've been having problems with Newsmonster and the latest kernel I built, 2.4.23. I get all kinds of DNS timeouts, even on a real link. I haven't had the time to chase the root of the problem down, though.

In the throws of boredom

What do you do to escape the throws of holiday boredom? I'm marooned at my parents' house for the jolly season while they themselves are out visiting other relatives. And goddamnit, I am bored out of my mind.

Samsung VGA 1000 (A620) Pictures

One thing I've been trying to do to alleviate my present condition is hunt around for pictures taken from one of the camera phones I want, the Samsung VGA 1000, also known as the A620. Googling around turns up a lot of garbage.

However, one great resource I've found is Textamerica.com. It is a site that hosts "moblogs" or mobile photo-blogs. These are sites where people post uninteresting pictures of themselves or their pets—usually not the kind of sites I dig around at. However, these moblogs go from useless to quite useful when the author designates what type of camera-phone he or she took the pictures with. Then, they become sample image galleries for phone shoppers, like myself.

So here are some moblogs with sample images from the SPH-A620. They were found using the site: operator at google, like this search string.

• Kurtz on the go
• Sean Fay's Traveling Pics
• Meaning of Life
• DactylX Moblog
• chaosan//moblog
• TheFunHouse v.4.5.1: Pictures by the Penguin
• blackunicorn dot pics
• Moblog Yoblog
• Phillip's Moblog
• organ

Next up: the Sanyo 8100

As Google turns up...

• Laura Burstein's Moblog
• Schtuff I Want
• Joe Szilagyi's Moblog
• Around Texas
• Kacie's PhoneCam Craziness
• 3DW.net MoBlog
• Pharm.D 2005 "prn Playboy"
• Silico's Stream
• Proof of Life
• Kacie's PhoneCam Craziness
• Mr. Danomyte's World
• Tom's MOB Space
• Orangekat
• Andrews Phone adventures
• MacDaddyZ World of the Cell
• ScubaJason Moblog
• What The Fu%@ is an Unkin?
• CPU_Angel's Camera Phone Log
• Cat Handcuffs Moblog
• Tom's MOB Space
• the stiphead moblog
• Dazed And Confused
• James' Pictures
• A FAT KIDS LIFE
• Welcome to my world...
• guzugi mania
• Bob Ratekin's camera phone pictures Moblog
• She's Mobile!
• Dan's Photo Blog
• Moving Sale

One thing that is immediately obvious is there are a lot more 8100 moblogs than A620 moblogs. However, I'm not sure how long each phone has been available, so it may be that the 8100 is simply newer, or perhaps it is less expensive. Anyway, dig around in these links to find all kinds of real-life example photos.

Two Week Vacation

I'm off for a two week vacation today—happy holidays. I probably won't be posting much, and if I do, it will be sporadic.

Iraq Foreign Policy Link Digging

As a part of an ongoing discussion over at LaughingMeme, I have taken it upon myself to do a bit of link digging for material related to Regan-era foreign policy towards Iraq, and the supposed sale of chemical weapons agents by the US to Iraq.

One of the best resources I came across was the National Security Archive at George Washington University. They have a good collection of documents and writeup related to shift in US policy in the early 1980's to aiding Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war. The writeup includes a WMV movie of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam, while he was visiting as a special envoy of President Reagan. Find there also a publication covering what came to be known as Iraqgate, including aid that violated our supposedly neutral stance on the Iran-Iraq war at the time. The archives at GWU are a great place to start.

Moving on, check out a time-line of events between 1980 and 1990 related to our policy towards Iraq.

Digging further, it isn't hard to find find material critical of Clinton's dual-containment policy in the region. It is fairly humorous, however, to read a pre-war article that concludes with a warning about an "awful, shocking, but seminal event." Something that could have happened had Saddam still had those weapons of mass destruction that he turned out not to have.

On the subject of non-conventional weapons in Iraq, many people allege that the US sold chemical and biological agents to Iraq. The claim is that the Department of Commerce and the ATCC provided these shipments to Iraq. The American Gulf War Veterans Association cites Senate Report 103-97 (alternate link) on this topic, which as best as I can tell, doesn't cover the topic. Is there any reliable evidence of US sale of chemical or biological agents to Iraq? I haven't found anything definitive, but the best resource I've come across is a collection of article references at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, although that is scant little. Also check out their Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Middle East page.

Well, that about wraps it up for two hours worth of link digging. Feel free to comment and contribute links or other information.

Samsung VGA1000 Compatibility Report

I just put up a compatibility report for the Samsung VGA1000. It works under Linux as modem (acm device) for wireless internet access. Just get a USB cable and you are good to go.

Fun with Apache Handlers

Pursuant to the recent CGI changes at Freeshell, I'm slowly moving the backend of this site to CGI powered by PHP, instead of PHP scripts running inside mod_php. For most people, this is the exact opposite of what they want.

However, at Freeshell, the admin recently enabled the usage of suexec, letting us run our CGI scripts under our normal user accounts. This opens up all kind of goodies, like secure file writing, not needing to mark all files readable by the nobody user, etc. However, suexec doesn't work for PHP scripts running in mod_php.

So everything here must be converted to CGI scripts—running PHP. For the most part that works nicely, except one small bit that gave me trouble. I use a technique with Apache to fake the appearance of directories inside URLs. It uses some mime magic to force the webserver to execute a script that does not have a file extension. That let's me execute the script 'search' in an URL like http://foo.bar/search/apache to search for articles related to Apache (foo.bar is not a real site, of course).

Well, mime magic doesn't work for CGI scripts. So you can use this bit of Apache magic in your .htaccess file.

And it's like, wa-lah! Instant fix for crappy URLs. Just check the $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] variable in PHP, which will return to you everything after the hostname in the URL, to determine what content to display.

For more fun, read up on Apache Handlers.

CGI/PHP changes and trackbacks disabled at LAB-Y

First off, I have disabled trackbacks here at LAB-Y. As I am on the farthest edge of the blogosphere, probably qualifying mine as the least read blog ever, nobody used the feature anyway.

My reason for deciding to turn it off is due to the recent CGI policy change at Freeshell, giving me more freedom in generating dynamic content. Eventually, I'm going to redo the way I handle trackbacks. Expect the same changes in comments as well, when I decide to get off my lazy ass and get rid of my Squawkbox service.

Linux and Sprint Cell Phone Compatibility Reports

I've put together a small set of compatibility reports for using Sprint cell phones for Internet access under Linux. If you have used a model not listed here to get data access with our favorite operating system, please drop me a line and let me know. My email address can be found at the bottom of the page, obfuscated against spammers.

Great idea: IM alerts for blog visitors.

Check out Instant Gratification, the best idea I've come across in a while. It can be set up to notify you via IM (AIM) when someone visits your blog. Seems like a useful tool, as I've caught some jokers visiting LAB-Y recently. (Link via Kuro5hin.)

Fixed a small bug in the blog calendar.

I noticed a small bug today in my calendar that it seems a few people have fallen victim to recently. The month of December was being linked to in the archives as 'decg' instead of 'dec'. Looks like I fat fingered it and that mistake propagated itself into several different files. Should be fixed. Please mail me if you find any other broken links—my email address is at the bottom of the page, obfuscated against spam.

I've also noticed that someone from Japan has been giving what look like relative paths to my trackback script. Not funny.

Log_2_rss available under the GPL

Today I released a set of PHP classes called Log_2_rss under the GPL. You can find them available for download on my software page. These classes can be used to generate RSS 1.0 reports from web server log files, specifically from Freeshell logs, which use a specialized format. While it isn't currently supported, Log_2_rss could be easily extended to support the standard Apachelog formats, or any other format. Download and enjoy.

The college disappearing person act you won't read about in the national news.

What happened to those 700 grad students? Were they abducted after enrolling? Nope. They were enrolled without their knowledge in a scam to artificially inflate the enrollment of a certain Mississippi university. A university, I might add, that has been taken over by IdiotPresident Shelby Thames, who has allowed the of faking the enrollment to meet his goal to ballooning class size in order to funnel more state money to the university. Nice scam, huh?

Not so nice, cause people found out and the story was broken in the student newspaper. The scoop made its way to the city newspaper, but, as I hear rumored from a little birdy, it won't make it to the Clarion Ledger, from Jackson. I hear that the Ledger has been pressured not to run the story.

But we didn't really need another reason to remove Shelby Thames. Send him an email to let him know how much of a nutsack licker he is. He's the man who claims faculty input is critical for his butchering of the university—critical to ignore.

Boo

Palestinian cat link via Suburban Blight.

Technical Difficulties at LAB-Y

I apologize for the technical difficulties around here, recently. I recovered just a few minutes ago from an accidental delete-without-backup scenario (don't you love that?) and I've been suffering from some of the recent CGI changes at freeshell. Hopefully they should be under control now. Please drop me a line if you notice something overtly broken.