There will be a rally supporting Denmark and Freedom of Speech and Expression in NYC today (Friday) at noon. Rallies are planned for other cities as well. The Danish Consulate is at One Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, (2nd Ave @ 47th St.). Snarksmith got the ball rolling on this.

If you haven’t yet read MANIFESTO: Together facing the new totalitarianism, cosigned by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Salmon Rushdie and 10 others, please do so now. Note how many of the cosignatories have been forced to live under constant police protection. These are dark times.

Two quotes from Edmund Burke:

“The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

“Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.”

Apple is offering a $49 Pro Applications Universal Crossgrade, which is a remarkable deal, especially compared to Adobe’s “you will wait and pay for CS3” approach. Of course Apple does have an obligation to make everything work with Intel, but they could very easily have rolled this into the FCP 6 announcement at NAB (assumed, I have no prior knowledge, am not beta testing anything and don’t have a current NDA).

What Apple neglected to mention on that page is the archaic process users must go through to get that upgrade. This is the order form PDF, here are the actual steps:

1. Try to remember how to write by hand, fill out a paper form, with pen.
2. Calculate our own sales tax, (it really says “Please consult your local chamber of commerce for your applicable sales tax.”) Hope that’s correct.
3. Photocopy the four key original disks and order form (The DVDs should be backed up. They’re dual-layer DVDs, making duplication a bit more trouble.) The DVDs will be replaced, these four are gone forever.
4. Take the whole thing to UPS/Fedex (or schedule a pickup)

I don’t remember the last time a software upgrade was that much work.

The customer service people at Apple Software Exchange said the disks could be sent via UPS or Fedex to the following address:

5681 W. Cleveland Road
Back of Building 2
South Bend, IN 46628

Considering the value of these disks is $1,299 new, it would be somewhat silly to just drop them in a mailbox without any means of tracking.

Hopefully I filled out the form correctly. Despite the “back of building 2” address, talking with Apple’s software exhange office made me feel a lot more comfortable about sending in my disks. The only bad news was the ship date for the universal pro apps is still listed as “end of March.”

The FXScript Reference site is 100% scratchbuilt. I created it partly to teach myself more practical PHP and MySQL skills and shunned any existing code snippets or libraries. Yet the site and my home-built commenting system is getting pounded with spam.

How is this happening? It’s the usual crap; laser this, cheap pills that, a bunch of links that were scuttled by my post-cleaning routines, fake comments with links to casinos and porn. The spam is coming from different IP addresses each time, usually from India, Russia or Columbia. All spam comments were posted using Firefox.

The k30fps entry has been taking the brunt of the spam (72,000+ hits vs a normal average of 2500-3000 hits for other items?).

I set up a quick log to collect all $_SERVER and $_POST data for any comments posted, to see what was happening. I was hoping something would stick out like curl or some unknown referrer page. No such luck, everything looked normal, the most troubling thing was the user agent:
[HTTP_USER_AGENT] => Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10

I suspect there is a hacked Greasemonkey script out there which exploits HTML form auto-entry to insert spam comments. There’s not much I can do about blocking that.

Traffic has been low recently, except for the spammers, so I’ve unfortunately decided to turn off comments for the time being. Maybe the lack of exploitable forms will get me off the spam list. When I have more time I will try to hook into Akismet. Since turning that on for my WordPress site I have not had to manually delete a single spam comment.

If anyone has something they’d like to contribute, send me an email and I’ll either post it for you or open the site a window for posting.

**Update** Comments are on again.

The weather forecast for today shows a forty degree drop over the course of the day. That’s nuts, but Saturday’s forecast low is even crazier. 65° to 17° in 24 hours? (In Celsius, that’s 18° to -8°) The snow from Sunday’s big snowstorm has pretty much melted away just in time for more winter.

Temperature extremes like this make me think of the expansion of railroad rails in heat, and, for whatever reason, an algebra problem from my first math class in college. Oh, and the temperature of the Moon ranges about 500° F during a Lunar day, I never realized how hot it got there, though it would only affect your feet since there’s no atmosphere.

The good news: The CPUs were just upgraded to 1.83 and 2.0 GHz (from 1.67 and 1.83 GHz).

The bad news: This will likely delay existing ship dates by up to two weeks.

The interesting option: For an additional $300, the processor can be further upgraded to 2.16 GHz.

I just got off the phone with the Apple Store and was told that there would be a 2-3 week delay in shipping the 2.16GHz MacBooks. I was also told that my ship date was pushed back to Feb 28 on the existing order. So I sprung for the upgrade. Hopefully my math is right and the extra shipping on the faster CPU doesn’t stack with my existing delay. Final Cut Pro won’t work until sometime in March anyway, so it’s not a huge crisis for me to wait. Now I can take a few weeks off from checking Apple’s order status page three times a day.

The new computer I don’t even have yet is almost 20% faster than when I bought it. Not too shabby.

I finally moved my small CVS repository to Subversion this weekend. Using CVS has largely been an act of faith, Subversion promises to be slightly easier to use and understand.

I installed Subversion using the official Subversion installer package. The repository was created with the FSFS format. Easy so far.

These Migrating from CVS to Subversion instructions are largely a walkthrough of installing Fink, then using Fink to install Subversion and cvs2svn. Having used Fink in the past, I wanted to install everything without it. I’m not especially comfortable with how much Fink does for me, and have found it adds some difficulty when transitioning systems.

Much better CVS to Subversion instructions are provided by Marc Liyanage, had I seen his walkthrough sooner I would have been done hours earlier.

Most of those hours were swallowed up naively trying to get the cvs2svn script working. Thinking it would be easy to work around the default Mac OS X Python installation DBM Module problem, I followed these instructions to install the most recent Python. Each step was written out clearly and worked as described.

That just about all worked, except the cvs2svn script was still showing the DBM error. Apparently, Mac OS X doesn’t include a BerkeleyDB installation. So, following Marc Liyanage’s lead, I installed Berkeley DB and the bsddb3 package, though not nearly that efficiently. As mentioned in the sial.org tutorial link above, I also modified the first line of the cvs2svn to point to my new Python installation: #!/usr/local/bin/python

Finally, when all of that was done, my CVS repository was seamlessly imported into Subversion in under a minute. Give or take three hours.

This whole convoluted installation brings up one of the messy things about Unix that I still don’t know enough to be comfortable with. I now have two versions of Python installed. Why? BerkeleyDB is also installed, and will probably never be used again. How much disk space did I just lose? Can I just delete this stuff? Or would that cause something else to break in the future? Maybe it’s just negative conditioning from screwing with Windows myriad co-dependencies, but managing under the hood stuff in Mac/Unix scares me.

My parents ISP, Cox cable blocks port 25 so I haven’t been able to send any mail whenever I visit. For years, I’ve known about SSH tunneling, but never played around with it. Now, about 8 hours before I head back to New York, I finally sat down, read the man pages and set up my first tunnel. It worked perfectly and I can send mail again. Here was the command:

sudo ssh [user]@joemaller.com -L 25:email.joemaller.com:25

I hadn’t yet read down to the -R flag, so that left an open connection in a terminal window. Not a big deal especially since I don’t yet know how to close a connection I can’t see without killing the process (and I’m not even sure that works).

In Mail.app, I added an outgoing mail server to the main account with the address “localhost” and all the same login settings as the normal server (password authentication, port 25, etc).

While I’m comfortable with the command line, I immediately started wondering about applications that could do this simply for non-geek users. There are a lot of times I get calls from friends and co-workers asking why they can’t send mail from some remote location. Unfortunately, the two applications I found, AlmostVPN and Tynsoe projects looked like they’d terrify casual users — too many options with scary names.

I might throw this onto the bottom of my to do pile, it seems like a simple AppleScript Studio project that I might be able to bang together in a few days. The basic interface should only show the address of the remote host and login-name, extras could go in a drawer. Another nice option might be automatically switching and restoring the outgoing mail server in the current mail account.