Archive for April, 2005

Old-style Nigerian scam: via fax

Published by Peter on April 30, 2005 in spam. 0 Comments


Amazing: I just got my first Nigerian (419) scam via FAX! In these days of practically free email sending, you have to admire someone who goes the extra mile and pays for sending faxes. A handwritten letter would have made me feel even more special, but it’s a start.

A Mister Victor Abbor (vicabbor2@yahoo.com or vicabbor@sify.com) from Lagos has picked me as a candidate for transfering a substantial amount of money ($17.6 mio), formerly belonging to Mr. Akbar Ali, who unfortunately died in the Benin plane crash on Dec 25, 2003. I have to pose as a relative for Mr. Ali (I do have a slight tan from one week in Portugal, so I should pass easily for an African) In return, he would only take a meager 65% and leave me with the remaining 35% (what, no taxes?) which amounts to … $6.16 mio, or € 4.7 mio. A day’s work for a day’s pay.

Victor refers to articles on CNN.com: Benin crash, and Pravda.ru: Bloody Christmas. Obviously, the fact he knows these articles should be enough proof that he is indeed capable of touching the money. Funnily enough, just after asking my personal details, he signs the letter as Paul Udo. I’m confused now. Is Udo Abbor’s secretary or something? While “Victor Abbor” has no Google hits yet, “Paul Udo” does have prior activity: on nigerian419fraud.freeserve.co.uk he appears to have promised 30% of 32 mio to someone else. I suddenly don’t feel that special anymore.

The fax is supposedly sent from +234-7594683 (+234 is Nigeria’s country prefix)… Nah, I don’t think I’m gonna do it. If any one is interested in doing business with Victor/Paul, just let me know. Just browse through The Spamletters first to get a feel of how to do business the Nigerian way.

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Know Your (Metric) Limits

Published by Peter on April 28, 2005 in bandwidth, hardware and science. 2 Comments


From Wired - July 2004:

The universe comes in a box. It’s a big box, and you almost never see the walls, but its boundaries are immovable - the speed of light, gravity, the way atoms interact. Even if time and space are unlimited and illimitable, physics, chemistry, and biology dictate maxima and minima in the universe. Like the strict meter and structure of a sonnet, they make the final product all the more beautiful. - Adam Rogers

5 billion Years - Maximum time Earth has left.

That’s when the sun goes red giant and expands past Earth’s orbit.

5.4 * 10-44 seconds - Shortest possible time.

Any shorter and quantum mechanics can’t tell whether events are simultaneous.

1.419 * 1026 meter (15 billion light-years) - Maximum distance we can see.

The universe is about 15 billion years old - this is light’s travel time.

1.6256 * 10-35 meter (6.4 * 10-34 inches) - Shortest possible distance.

Planck length: any shorter and quantum mechanics can’t tell between here and there.

34.92 km (21.7 miles) - Maximum height of a mountain on Earth.

Uplift reaches equilibrium with pressure at the base.

3.048 * 10-7 m (1.2 * 10-5 inches) - Minimum size of an actively growing cell.

Free-living cells need room for a full genome, proteins, and guts.

130 m (427 feet) - Maximum height for a tree on Earth.

Gravity overcomes surface tension in the plant’s circulatory system.

265 - Minimum number of protein-coding genes for life.

As seen in the smallest known single-cell organism.

200 million years - Maximum age of sub-oceanic crust.

Older than that: it cools, becomes denser, and “subducts” back into magma.

-273.15 ° Celsius (-459.67 ° Fahrenheit) - Minimum possible temperature.

Heat is a function of molecular motion, which stops at absolute zero.

338 km/h (210 MPH) - Maximum wind speed for an Earth hurricane.

A storm can acquire only so much energy from the sea.

0.24 second - Minimum delay of a signal sent via geosynchronous satellite.

It’s light speed up 35.600 km (22.300 miles), and back down.

430.000 Mbps - Maximum speed to record data to magnetic media.

Bits won’t flip reliably with a pulse under 2.3 picoseconds.

100 Tbps - Maximum information bandwidth over optical fiber.

Higher power levels mash signals together.

1051 operations per second - Maximum computational power.

Quantum rules won’t let the ideal 1-liter, 1-kilogram laptop crunch data any faster.

Contributors: Sunny Bains, Thomas Hayden, Greta Lorge, Michael Myser, and Boyce Rensberger / Sources: Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order (Knopf, 1995); Institute for Genomic Research; Lucent Technologies; MIT; NASA; National Institute of Standards and Technology; Nature; UC Berkeley; Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; Yale

via Andrew Ferguson and bytehead.org

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My favourite drummers

Published by Peter on April 26, 2005 in music. 2 Comments


Bernhard Castiglioni has created the ultimate drummer’s web site Drummerworld.com: bios and pictures of most of the world’s greatest drummers and lots of video footage. I’ve spent hours browsing through the recordings and here are some of my favourites:

  • Brian “Brain” Mantia’s gogo-beat: you don’t need dozens of toms and cymbals to lay down a funky groove
  • Toto’s Jeff Porcaro explaining how he created the “Rosanna” beat inspired by (he calls it ’stolen from’) Bernard Purdie, John Bonham and Bo Didley.
  • Bernard Purdie who’s just fabulous but man, does he know it.
  • Jeff Hamilton doing some nice stuff with the brushes
  • Gavin Harrison mixes time signatures: Rhythmic Illusions
  • Rick Latham, with a hairdo that takes us back to the Miami Vice glory days, demonstrates the cow bell
  • Jojo Mayer showing how to do a quadruple bass drum beat with 1 foot and 1 bass drum
  • and the master remains Steve Gadd: see him explain the “50 ways to leave your lover” groove or more recent in the Drummers Collective: you don’t need volume to show off skill

Some names that I miss in his overview: Stevie Wonder, Dennis Davis (who played with David Bowie, Roy Ayers and Stevie Wonder), Phil Gould (from Level 42), Carla Azar (who played with Prince and Wendy & Lisa). Very few female drummers on this site, actually, and even less video footage of them.

And then some drummers who just like to show off:

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Instant Ken and Barbie: Melanotan to the rescue

Published by Peter on April 24, 2005 in Society and science. 0 Comments

Thus a drug called melanotan (…), which was developed as an analogue of this hormone to promote a natural tan as protection against skin cancer, was found to have the side effect of dramatically increasing libido in men and women during clinical trials. Female rats increased their rate of copulation by 300% after a dose of melanotan, and 80% men suffering from impotence reported getting normal erections after taking this drug. Melanotan also inhibits appetite by suppressing the action of the hunger center of the hypothalamus. So it makes you tanned, thin and horny - which is why it is sometimes called the “Ken and Barbie drug.”
from www.hss.bond.edu.au

Now let’s see how long it takes before I get my first “Herbal Melanotan” spam mail.

Also covered in: dissectleft.blogspot.com - www.adamsmith.org - news.bbc.co.uk

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Podcast hosting: cheap or free?

Published by Peter on April 18, 2005 in bandwidth and podcast. 30 Comments


Podcasting is a fun hobby, but leaves you with several tens to hundreds of megabytes of MP3 files to host. If your podcast turns out to be popular, you might also have over 20GB of file downloads per month (’bandwidth’). This rules out any free hosting option like Geocities or even your local ISP. What are the other options?

CCPublisher:

free
Creative Commons, together with Archive.org, offer you the option to host your content for free. This is directed towards CC-licensed or open-source audio, so your own speech or your own music. Don’t use it to host illegal/copyright-troubled content.

idisk.mac.com:

$100/year (or $8.5/month)
if you’re already a subscriber to Apple’s .Mac program, this is an easy option. It is not the fastest or most reliable option.

libsyn.com:

starts at $5/month (up to $30)
built for podcasting: based on the #MB you add per month, not on the #GB downloaded per month (so the cost is predictable). Has detailed statistics (although some graphics would be nice). “Liberated Syndication is podcasting made easy”

bluehost.com:

$6.95/month (2-year subscription)
2 GB storage, 75 GB/month bandwidth. Is a general purpose hoster, so if you want to add the actual podcast blog to it, you can (you can add a WordPress blog through the Fantastico interface)

EV1Servers VPS:

$39/month
for the bigger fish: 10GB of storage, 100GB/month bandwidth. If even this is not enough, you can go up to a $99/mon fully dedicated server: 60GB storage, 1000GB bandwidth.

For up-to-date information, keep an eye on the podcasters Yahoo! group.

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Googlistics: messing with the big “G”

Published by Peter on April 5, 2005 in Google, Wordpress and spam. 0 Comments


He probably also first thought it was an April’s Fool joke:
Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress was discovered to have used his PageRank 8 site (Wordpress is a popular open-source blogging software) for hosting lots of irrelevant content, with the purpose to get high scores in Google rankings and (let a customer of his) make money on Google Adsense.

The content in articles is essentially advertising by a third party that we host for a flat fee. I’m not sure if we’re going to continue it much longer, but we’re committed to this month at least, it was basically an experiment. However around the beginning of Feburary donations were going down as expenses were ramping up, so it seemed like a good way to cover everything. The adsense on those pages is not ours and I have no idea what they get on it, we just get a flat fee. The money is used just like donations but more specifically it’s been going to the business/trademark expenses so it’s not entirely out of my pocket anymore.
(from wordpress.org)

Andy Baio (Waxy) broke the news on March 30th, at a moment when Matt was on holiday (and off-line), so he only replied on April 1st, about a thousand angry emails later. His defense is that it was a interesting idea, badly implemented, not followed up and never evaluated. Since Matt does not have the profile of a cash-hungry opportunist, and he’s explaining this to an audience of people that understand these reasons (reads like an IT project management what-not-to-do list), the storm will probably blow over.

Normally this is the kind of situation where one would say: “SEO? Leave that to the professionals!”. But the fact is that here in Belgium, some of the companies that claim to be SEO specialists, use dirty tricks all over. Hidden links, bot cloaking, keyword spamming, <noscript> tricks, the whole shebang. It’s like they read the Google SEO warning page as a guideline. “Hey look! We could put ourselves and other customers on every client’s doorway pages. Neat!”.

Joris just posted another example (Immoweb.be) on his SEO blog. And again the so-called “SEO professional” fooling around is Extenseo, just as it was for Automagazine and Actel. As one can see on their unprotected Javascript hosting site, they recently add VW/MyWay to their customers, so we can expect those homepages to be featured in the Hoe Het Niet Moet (What Not To Do) series soon!

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