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If you happen to deal with a website template having the copyright year (the four digits at the bottom of virtually every www page on earth) hardcoded as a number in its PHP files, replace it with the following string:

<?=date("Y")?>

and you’ll be surprising your visitors with great immediacy every year in its very first minutes!

(requires “short tags” enabled in PHP configuration)

The excellent “The Three Musketeers” by George Sidney (1948) on TCM reminded me of numerous disputes of colorizing old movies.

And I thought I got the idea, at least with the old movies depicting even older epochs - like in the case with the Musketeers.

See, the idea is that a color movie of 40’s is as much unusual as a B&W movie of a more recent period, like “Schindler’s List” (1993)

What is common in these two situations - the events portrayed are greatly divided from the times they are played by actors. So the purpose of the artificial addition (”colorization”) or removing (b&w shooting) of the color might very likely be an attempt of amplifying a dramatic impact on a viewer with the improbable connection of the Unconnectable (subsets of Time in this case)

Have you noticed how craftily mobile phone manufacturers hide the single but probably most controversial piece of information - SAR?

(SAR stands for Specific Absorption Rate - a measure of radio wave energy exposure upon a cellular phone user. It varies greatly between phone models even by the same maker)

So far only Siemens has been found to clearly state this parameter on the product pages in its website. Samsung-Europe publishes it on their website quite prominently, but not in the product manuals.

All the others producers checked (Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, Motorola) guard it pretty heavily.

For e.g. Nokia makes these data available in seemingly convenient form but keeps them on an isolated domain. Why not on the same pages with the rest of the technical data? That’s easy - to exclude them from the product selection process.

Sony-Ericsson buried this 2-significant-digit value into a 2.5 MB (!) PDF file - a dedicated monster for each single cell phone model - probably to deter the inquisitiveness of the potential customers.
FYI: it’ll take an average dial-up user (these users still comprise some 40-60% of all home users or more, depending on the market) half an hour to download this “document” of the WHOLE TWO decimal digits for only one phone model.

So why’s that?
Do they just keep customers for brainless cattle?
Do they fear that customers are going to make “wrong” purchasing decisions based on “unimportant”, but highly vexed data which SAR definitely is?

The marketer’s logic in Sony-Ericsson’s case is fairly clear: dial-up users are overly conservative folks who don’t understand the benefits of broadband which is very cool and it is very wrong not to choose new technology. These marketers aren’t willing to realize that dial-up users are just being reasonable in not going for crazy speeds (or any other new “cool” stuff for that matter) - they can’t read text at 2 Megabits per second anyway, so why pay for it?

Therefore, mobile makers probably think, it’s better to liberate these unfortunate from any distractions. Or otherwise these consumers will risk conservatively sticking to their old handsets thus spoiling sales prospects.

Due to nicely warming climate this year’s biking season has already been started (it happened on Jan 18)

As always, new season start is marked by summing up the statistical data for the previous one.

So… the season of 2006 has had the following features:

• Total Distance ridden: 2017.8 km
• First ride (season start): February 17, 2006
• Last ride (season finish): December 16, 2006
• Total riding days: 89 (22.67 km/day)
• Time on the go (wheels spinning): 140:12:54, or 5d20h12m54s
• Maximum speed (downhill on the highway): 63.0 km/h
• Average speed: 14.4 km/h
• Maximum trip distance within a day: 62.84 km
• Minimum trip distance: 1.78 km

Season’s graphs:

Odometer

Notice the perfect inverse tangent curve shape

Average & Maximum speeds

Note: the maximum of 79 km/h was a cyclometer’s fault which is running its 6th year on the original (factory loaded) battery.

And here’s my invention - an attempt to numerify (i.e. to represent numerically) the hardness of a day’s ride - currently it is calculated as Distance ridden times the day’s Average speed.

It seems to classify the “hardness”, or ride difficulty, or body burden caused, pretty well assuming terrains do not differentiate substantially

Everyone hates spam. I mean, ok, some people may actually like advertising, but spam isn’t just ads. Most spams are genuine frauds & scams. And who likes to be defrauded?

So why hasn’t it been stopped yet? Why do we see the volume of spam in our mailboxes only growing instead?

One of the markings of the past ‘06 was the drastic attempt by guys of BlueSecurity (Israel based BTW) to finally stop this vice. The idea was brilliant - to block spammers with the spammers’ methods - DDoS against the spamvertised sites (used to distribute goods - either electronic or physical), effectively stopping sales, not the innocent zombified home computers (used to promote those goods).

The plan was so huge, it hit spammers really hard, but didn’t stop spam on Earth.

Unfortunately the good guys have lost this blitzkrieg. The spammers struck back and made notable collateral damage to the whole Internet, generating quite a lot of news - on slashdot.org, Washington Post etc.

As we see, it is a multimillion-dollar business which makes tier-1 ISPs to play to their tune. This is the problem as ever more laymen are joining the Internet in coming years. The more technically unsavvy the average Internet user becomes, the more desirable target for spammers the userbase presents.

Sadly, unprofessional users are both consumers of spam and tools in hands of spammers to spread the evil.

And as long as big criminals are entering the game (see BBC report for e.g.) we are about to become witnesses of large financial interests repartition which historically leads to… wars.

Furthermore, assuming these interests are not merely large, but worldwide - just like the phenomenon of Internet economy suggests - the problem at hand (the war) provokes to be more precisely called “The World (War)”…

С пятницы 29 декабря в сети сотовой связи «Київстар Дж.Ес.Ем.» нововведение: теперь шлюз email-sms изменяет на своё усмотрение не только адрес E-mail отправителя, но и тело сообщения целиком.
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Being generally happy with Akismet spam protection plugin for WordPress 2.0, I’m still kept from total happyness by a fly in the ointment.

Before enabling Akismet I used to use a built-in setting in WordPress called “Comment Moderation” (”Hold a comment in the queue if it contains more than N links.”) Of course, “a common characteristic of comment spam is a large number of hyperlinks” is a pretty dubious spam filter and I did get hundreds of spams in short periods of time with it enabled. But surprisingly or not, now I constantly see about 90% of all spam caught by Akismet being that kind of spam with multiple links (I used “2 links” as a trigger for holding comments). That is, Akismet takes bulk of the spam caught by WordPress and misappropriates it to its own portfolio!

So I’m wondering if Akismet really benefits from breaking this standard feature. Surely they could reduce load on their servers by quite a few-fold having they left the feature alone. Moreover, WordPress webmasters are usually up on with this sort of things and are but irritated with the crazy spam counters in Akismet tab.

I realize Akismet is trying to enjoy powerful promotion in this manner, but doesn’t it go too far by depriving users of the right to judge its effectiveness adequately? Really, the spam count is absolutely irrelevant this way; it’s like telling the size of computer network by the number of copper nuclei constituting all the wires of the network.

Bayesian filtering is nothing new and Akismet may easily loose the competition to a more honest operator. Even more so in the situation where operational data ages quickly and new players catch up promptly with the veterans.

At last I got it working!
Made my first free call with Skype from a computer in Eastern Europe to US mobile, hit voice mail, called another number, this time in Canada, had a talk.

As it turns out, all you need to make free calls to US or any North American number from you computer is a fast reliable US-based proxy and appropriate egress filtering solution.

However, if you’ve read the previous paragraph carefully you can see that “free” comes at a price.

First, it is in no way trivial to get a reliable proxy, even for money, mind you.
The popular websites talking about easy Google searches akin “open public free fresh fast quality anonymous HTTPS SOCKS proxy US IP” mean only to entertain certain circles of script kiddies and ignorant paranoiacs seeking false sense of privacy.
Just think about it: who on earth (er, in US) in their right mind would set up a public proxy? No really, people who own/rent IP addresses know their responsibilities and definitely wouldn’t buy them just to give them out to strangers on the opposite side of the planet. And if such thing happens by accident (for lack of competence for e.g.) it won’t pass an hour till the victimized IP address gets blocked by an ISP up the road.
“Investigators” wishing to test their luck with intermittent proxies opened by operators’ mistake should be prepared to weed down substantial amount of data mined through Google. Or, it is possible to purchase lists of tested proxies (still I wonder if those proxies are of any usability…) but is it all worth it? Wouldn’t it be of less trouble just to purchase a Skype Credit in the end?

Note one special case though, when foreign proxy comes packaged with the working environment of the user. It is a user’s corporate VPN, or Virtual Private Network.

Now, suppose you’ve got a proxy and anticipate huge savings on calls already. Hold on, here’s the

Second requirement to be met: the Skype instance on your computer must be strictly isolated from the outside world.

Skype is known to be a bit notorious in circumventing all sorts of firewalls it encounters on its way out (and even ways in, though that’s completely different story). In that quest Skype defaults to get to the world by-passing any configured proxies as far as possible, so, deliberately or not, it will most likely reveal you local IP address and you’ll end up banned by Skype network from making free US calls.

The solution to this isn’t free if you’re on Windows. You’d have to either buy and install a third party firewall with good egress filtering capabilities (able to filter outgoing internet connections) or ask an upstream router’s administrator to set up blocking of all outgoing connections from your windows box except those to your US proxy.
The latter is a major headache, I’m telling you. And the former is a plain annoyance as well, given Windows XP built-in firewall (Internet Connection Firewall, ICF, or Windows Firewall) is pretty much sufficient for a common user. Yes, it has no protection against information leakage (i.e. has no egress filtering at all), but one can live with it more or less happily… until he or she decides to call for free with Skype, that is.

Of course, things are easier if you run Skype client on Linux. You just block all outgoing access for a user running Skype with a built-in firewall (inevitably free), which is a good practice for any human user anyway, even without Skype in mind.

Third, be aware that many proxying/tunneling techniques exhibit fairly ample traffic overhead. At least for some user groups this may present a stopping barrier by either raising the cost of use traffic-wise above Skype’s original per-minute rate or by over saturating the network link above its bandwidth heavily degrading voice quality.

In brief, this experiment’s value is rather academic, not utility. Yet in some cases it can be a life-saver, like when you already hold all the infrastructure needed for the process, but, for e.g., can’t buy Skype Credit for any reason.

Note to uninformed: The described above is based on a promo by Skype effective from early 2006 through the year’s end, enabling calls from internet-connected PC’s physically located in the United States of America or Canada to US/Canadian PSTN and mobiles without purchasing “Skype Credit”.

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