Posted February 11th, 2010, in: Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Videos

(thanks, Stacey)

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Posted November 3rd, 2009, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| Evil Robots| Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| Marketing/Advertising In The Cloud| SEO, SEM, SMO Etc| Technology| WordPress

The site links to sites who are also under attack and when the bug is running correctly on those sites, the sites redirect the hits to the final destination,

which is http://www.zml.com/

I don’t know if zml.com knows this is happening.  I mean I suppose it’s possible that some unscrupulous SEO or Marketing guy promised them traffic and then resorted to this to get it.  I’m contacting them now to inform them of this uncool practice being committed on their behalf, and if they are not willing to cooperate on putting an end to it, I will have no choice but to give them some negative attention.

The process of extracting the bad links from the content was long and hard since the strings of code inserted were very inconsistent.

The following is a list of the sites being linked thru, which I assume are all victims of this malware.  If you own one of these sites, feel free to drop me a line and I will point you in the right direction as far as putting an end to this.

• http://blog.segd.org
• http://www.investorsunited.com
• http://www.oca-gla.org
• http://www.thunderstruck.org
• http://subway.com
• http://verdadeabsoluta.net
• http://yourrnc.com
• http://wordpressthemesbox.com
• http://mp3db.org
• http://webconsultingdc.com
• http://turtlesurvival.org
• http://turtleconservationfund.org
• http://truenorthbrass.com
• http://tarabooks.com
• http://kolenalaila.com
• http://techbostonacademy.org
• http://pie-flex.com
• http://www.philebrity.tv
• http://www.landmarkwine.com
• http://artsinbushwick.org
• http://brettmartin.org
• http://bsf.org
• http://www.popandpolitics.com
• http://womanhonorthyself.com
• http://www.brainstorm9.com
• http://webdev.entheosweb.com
• http://www.topicus-healthcare.com
• http://www.vfilings.com
• http://constantinessword.com
• http://www.dopiska.com
• http://writingcenters.org
• http://www.radisson.com
• http://notjustaprettyface.org
• http://www.arizonacriminaldefenseblog.com
• http://www.sembrarpaz.com
• http://www.apostilla.com
• http://www.geektechs.net
• http://johnquiggin.com
• http://blog.pdma.org
• http://bluesheaven.com

Message to ZML:

Hello,

I am a developer and recently one of my clients who is running WordPress for her personal website was attacked by some Malware that inserted thousands of links throughout her content. Those links resolve to your site, but via redirects thru other sites that I assume are also victims of the malware.

You look like you’ve built a pretty nice site here. And I’m writing to give you the chance to get on board with fixing this problem before I am forced to create some negative attention in the blogosphere and social media.

It doesn’t seem like you would want to be resposible for malware. But it also doesn’t seem like anyone would go through the trouble to make all these links back to you unless you were paying them. Perhaps you hired some marketing or SEO people and were not aware that they would be using these tactics? Please write back soon as I have very little patience for this kind of thing.

Thanks,

Andrew A. Peterson

Some samples of weird code that the bot inserted:

<wp:tag><wp:tag_slug>%d0%b0%d0%b2%d1%82%d0%be%d1%80%d1%81%d0%ba%d0%b8%d0%b5-%d0%bf%d1%80%d0%be%d0%b3%d1%80%d0%b0%d0%bc%d0%bc%d1%8b</wp:tag_slug><wp:tag_name><![CDATA[????????? ?????????]]></wp:tag_name></wp:tag>

<wp:tag><wp:tag_slug>%d1%81%d0%b2%d0%be%d0%b1%d0%be%d0%b4%d0%bd%d1%8b%d0%b9-%d0%bc%d0%b8%d0%ba%d1%80%d0%be%d1%84%d0%be%d0%bd</wp:tag_slug><wp:tag_name><![CDATA[????????? ????????]]></wp:tag_name></wp:tag>

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Posted October 31st, 2009, in: Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc

I don’t even remember how I found his website, which is beautiful.

I mainly wanted to draw your attention to a thing Mark “Jake” Baker wrote that was touching to me.  It’s sort of a manifesto for modern life called  ”The Human Condition.”

It’s an interesting Internet find.  It says so much!

HERE it is.  I think we will all be wiser people if we read it.

…

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Posted October 20th, 2009, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Technology| WordPress

UPDATE: After about four hours of hunting, I finally found a way to enable CodePress in WordPress! A plugin called Enable Codepress does just that! It only seems to work in FireFox, but it does work with WordPress 2.8.4

copy of a comment I left HERE, a tutorial having to do with adding line-numbers and syntax-highlighting to WordPress’ text-editor.

Wow. I am so frustrated. I have spent the last four hours trying to find a way for me to endow my clients, whom I have set up with WordPress, with the power of line numbers when editing CSS.

WordPress is nearly FTP-free, which is great for lay persons. I’ve had great results with teaching older people how to use FireBug to find and preview changes in their CSS by right-clicking on what they want to change and selecting “inspect element.” And it’s not too difficult for many of these folks to get into their Stylesheet in WP’s Theme Editor and find and change what they have tested in FireFox.

But would make the workflow a thousand times better would be a way to make the Textarea in the Theme Editor disply Line-Numbers. There are a handful of plugins that claim to do this, but none of them seem to work with WordPress 2.8.4 And in my hunt, I’ve found evidence that WP once had this feature briefly, but turned it off because it was too slow. I never noticed it and I’ve been using WP for years, and have always been up to date.

Now I find this blog post. Great. A hack to turn on the CodePress functionality in WordPress 2.8… The problem is I don’t understand how to do this!

Can’t you just make an installable Plugin? A plugin would be great because it would be nice to be able to turn the thing on and off, if it is indeed slow or buggy.

Or if some manual intervention with WP’s files is necessary, could you please-please-please explain which files you are editing in this tutorial? All of the examples show top line numbers (1, 2, 3). There’s no “this is what the whole thing should look like” …You don’t explain what file or files you are editing. This is so annoying because I’m not a programmer and this how-to assumes that we know certain things that I don’t know.

could brave these steps if I knew where to make them. I have been searching for this post for hours only to find that I’m not smart enough to understand the directions!!! Thanks for your consideration and for sharing information, even if I am ineligible for it.

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Posted September 29th, 2009, in: Art Etc| Videos

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Posted September 26th, 2009, in: Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Intellectual Property| Music Industry| New Media| Technology| Web 2.0

I just got a newsletter update explaining that they support a three-strikes policy for file-sharing.

Our meeting also voted overwhelmingly to support a three-strike sanction on those who persistently download illegal files, sanctions to consist of a warning letter, a stronger warning letter and a final sanction of the restriction of the infringer’s bandwidth to a level which would render file-sharing of media files impractical while leaving basic email and web access functional.

How backward-ass!!

As an artist, I am going to have to revoke my membership if they don’t do some serious back-peddling in the next few days.

I thought the FAC was a forward-thinking organization.  Maybe not.

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Posted September 2nd, 2009, in: Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Reviews & Thoughts About Products

I’m playing around with a mashup that includes the music of NWA, but I had initially decided to focus only on their first 3 albums, “and the posse,” “straight outta compton,” and “100 miles and runnin…”

My buddy pointed out to me that for what i’m looking for in the samples, “Niggaz4life” might be a good idea.

DAMN!

I’ve heard all these songs before, and I think when I first heard them (while I was riding a skatebord and wearing punk combat boots) I was turned off ’cause the music seemed “over-produced” and “overly-mass-marketed,” (the latter probably because there’s even reggae-influenced rapping which i wasn’t used to)…

The lyrics are of course mostly terribly juvenile.

But here’s the thing.  This is a shining example of great early rap production.  The beats are awesome and really cleanly done.

I hear a lot of the style I assoicate with the name “Dr. Dre.”

I’m rockin’ this shiznit.

The rapping is pretty good mostly.

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Posted August 18th, 2009, in: Art Etc| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Projects| Visual Art

Juicy Butt Sweats

A few years ago I noticed this new paradigm in logo placement on clothing.  I think it was the Company Juicy Couture that first put their logo right on the ass of the customer. I’m not sure if they were indeed the first, but the word “Juicy” is the first word I remember actually reading from the seat of the pants of a young lady walking in front of me on the street.

I don’t need to explain why the the word “juicy” is so provocative when placed prominently on a woman’s rear end, and perhaps this is why I remember it as the beginning of this era, whether or not the credit (or blame) is really owed to the JC clothing line for making this a trend.

Fast forward a few years and many colleges and indeed even my twelve-year-old niece’s junior high school’s athletic clothing line has the institution’s name featured in this manner.

But not on the men’s/boy’s shorts and sweats.  Only on the women’s/girl’s.

Hairy Butt Jeans

I have therefore decided to examine the cultural subtext of this phenomenon further by adding a twist to it, which I shall be wearing around town in search of truth.

Behold, the unveiling of the Hairy Butt Jean by Andrew A. Peterson.

Sorry for the camera-phone pic.  I’ll have better photos as soon as I’m ready to do a proper shoot for this amazing new addition to my artistic legacy.

Also, I know I’m not the best butt-model but I work with what I have.

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Posted July 19th, 2009, in: Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Marketing/Advertising In The Cloud| Music Industry| New Media| Reviews & Thoughts About Products| SEO, SEM, SMO Etc| Technology| The War on Free Culture| Viral Marketing| Web 2.0

OK so I have to admit that I’ve overestimated the popularity of Last.FM. At least, I am realizing how different LastFM is for a user like me that mostly has mp3s on my hard drive, and users who stream music from lastfm.

PowerPlay isn’t going to do a lot of good for me very quickly since I’ve chosen to buy impressions on radio streams for artists that are pretty obscure.  I did this because conversion rates (see web marketing 101) are higher in a narrower target, so if I try to compete for impressions/plays on Bjork’s radio stream, the chances that the users will actually like my music are considerably smaller than if I target people who like more obscure music like the constellation acts or something.  Going for Bjork is more like going for Britney Spears in that there’s a fairly diverse audience and the users are more likely to be fairly mainstream (Bjork being one of the strangest things they like).  Going after a band like Excepter or HRSTA is a better bet for me because these are people looking for fairly unconventional soundtrack-y experimental music.

In ten hours since I launched my first $20 Powerplay campaign (100 plays on radio streams of ten artists I chose), I’ve gotten ZERO plays.

On the upside, twenty bucks is going to provide my with at least 3 months of entertainment since I’ll have one more site to check in with a few times a day when I’m being neurotic.

The music industry is a mess.  The best discovery tools suck because the content owners are afraid of change, while the best music delivery systems are either incomplete (legal or illegal but private) or unreliable (illegal but public).

And legal or not, there’s no real integration between the streaming services and the OS environment.

Maybe the Chrome OS or the Smartphone market will change that.  I’m sick of storing tons of MP3s.

OH!  If these other music acts are so obscure, maybe I should buy their Keywords from Google.  Hmmm…

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Posted July 16th, 2009, in: 1| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| New Media| Technology| Ubuntu/Xubuntu/Linux| Web Browsers

I was inspired to write this after hearing the good people at Buzz Out Loud as well as others talk about Chrome OS (supposedly coming in a year or two) and the Android Mobile OS somehow being evidence of some sort of disorganization of Google’s intentions Etc.

Google has these two initiatives that keep getting mentioned: Android, a “mobile OS,” and “Chrome (an OS allegedly coming out in a year or two),” which has been announced after all of us are already aware of the Chrome browser, which is pretty awesome in my opinion.

Here’s what I think practically everyone is missing about  this.

Linux Distros are all frankensteins.  I’m most familiar with Ubuntu, but I think anyone that knows about Linux would back me up in saying that Linux is an open-ended compilation of source-code.  And if you have a given distro and need some additional software, you very likely are going to be using add-on code that users of other distros are also using.

For this reason, Android and Chrome OS are not necessarily different initiatives on Google’s part.

And to go even further, I don’t believe that Android and Web OS from Palm are competitors.  I think it’s completely reasonable to assume that a Web OS front-end for Android is likely (as long as Android and WebOS continue to be released to consumers).  They’re both just Linux with different front-ends.  And with Linux Boxes, as they used to be called, the GUI is itself just an add-on.

Back to Google Chrome and Android.

I suspect that as an afterthought, Google realized that it should choose “Chrome”as it’s brand for NetBook sales because “Android” is not as friendly a name to the average buyer of a low-end laptop.

Along with that, banking on the fact that Mobile Data Connections are only going to get better, while WiFi only becomes more ubiquitous over the next two years, the idea of a machine that, for instance, has a music player that’s basically Pandora or Last.FM starts to make a lot of sense. (remember the FT article where the teenager says streaming music preferable owning it? I don’t know that we’ll even need to download mp3’s in 2 years, just stream!)

In order to make as many apps cloud-based as possible, Google Chrome could come to us with small API-based developments that take advantage of services like Yahoo!’s Flickr or Delicious or even news and entertainment services that plug right into the struggling corporate content businesses we keep hearing about in the tech news.

Perhaps the Chrome-loaded Asus laptop will be a direct Kindle competitor (or even an additional revenue model for amazon).

Meanwhile, mobile (pocket sized) devices aren’t going to stop getting smarter.  Android is just a catchy ‘band name’ for what’s ultimately the result of Google seeing that it’s in their best interest to get the OS market out of the hands of Microsoft and Apple.

Chrome is the same thing, but with a better name, and a wider appeal as long as the NetBook trend keeps up.

And at this point, I don’t think Google is risking much on its campaign to popularize Linux.  I personally believe that Linux is finally mature enough to begin competing with Mac OS and Windows so Google is just helping it along.  They’re jumping on the bandwagon because it serves them to do so.

In case I didn’t make it clear enough, Chrome and Android are the same thing or at the very least they’re both just Linux with different default drivers and GUI coding.

You can run Linux on a toaster.

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