mjm wired :: Website

India 2007 Pictures Online

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:12:24 -0400

I know I am about 2 months late, but I finally put all (well almost all) of my pictures from my recent India trip pictures online. It took almost 2 full weeks to upload them, sort them, arrange them and get everything up and running. It ... was ... soo ... slow. The total amount taken were about 2GB of 5 Megapixel photos (sorry I don't own an SLR). Of those I have over 650 online! Unfortunately I didn't have time to put commentary like I did for 2004, but this time they came out really nice!

Anyways, since I don't trust sites like Yahoo or Flickr, I have them on some secret webpage/location. I will be sending out login information over the next few days. So if you think I missed you, send me an email.

I Hate the Internet

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 20:56:04 -0400

I've been juggling quite a few different tasks and projects over the past few weeks. Some technical but most are just random personal things. I haven't had much time for blogging or even maintaining my website due to other priorities. But what adds insult to injury is having to keep up with the idiots on the internet.

In the past few weeks I've been slammed with spam email, spam blog comments, bot attacks, script kiddies and just plain stupid wannabe hackers. Someone used my private paid email address (which very few know) as the return address on some spam system. As a result I was getting hundreds of bounces and rejects from mail servers all across the world every flippin hour. Just a week ago some asian (I won't name the country, though you probably can guess) did some type of lame denial of service or bandwidth drain attempt and sucked up a few gigabytes of paid bandwidth in less than 24 hours before I noticed it. Then there are the idiot comment spammers. You know I might understand if they kept posting about Viagra and their useless stocks, but I have one who scripted some sort of scheduled junk comments. So I get crap like "ozdhs vksaznopm qbuap qujscawyr jegucfs dy" every couple of minutes. What purpose could that possibly serve other than just to annoy me? People need to get better hobbies.

And I feel bad for all the people emailing me asking for help and other requests. Often I can barely keep up with cleaning the above garbage, that I miss quite a few emails. People will never realize how much work it can be to run a simple website. And I regret I have not run a backup in a long time. My computer will be temporary without internet for the next few days.

So if you email PLEASE NOTE that I am unable to respond in a timely manner. I am doing my best.

Some Long Overdue Changes

Tue, 03 Oct 2006 22:24:25 -0400

I've finally made some serious changes to my website management. Although it may look the same, virtually everything underneath has been rewritten. I don't want to list the complete set of changes but the following things were of the most importance.

I've eliminated the user authentication required to post and moved to a moderated system. I've decided to show my categories lists. Previously I used them only for my own personal tracking. I've added RSS2 feeds to posts, comments and categories. I've added a cookie to only track your names for login. Moved entirely to a mod_rewrite based navigation.

There must be a few dozen bugs or quirks I have yet to fix, so for the next few days or weeks, I don't know if there will be any disasters. I'll be parsing my 404 messages for a month or so at least.

Open wide the doors to spam, random posts, and hopefully a nicer experience at this site.

Edit: (10/4) I had some comments being swallowed up due to errors with the database. Should be fixed now.

Long Live MJM!

Tue, 09 May 2006 08:22:51 -0400

The "real" Mahesh Reddy started blogging ... again. When I was chatting with him he mentioned that he happened to stumble upon a link to my site, by accident. I thought that was cool. Its funny what we find by accident on the web.

Apparently those who read my resources on my website are very appreciative. Some much more than others. Often I get some messages from overseas. I so very much want to publish my "fan" mail (or email rather) but I don't want to humiliate or make fun of people who may not speak english as their primary language.

I stumbled upon this by pure accident and apparently it is an old post, but it made me smile. Someone from Burma: Nyein Chan

Cheer MJM! Long Live MJM.

So to pay my respects: Free Burma!!!.

But one of my favorites will always be from a Chinese student last year:

I am boy come from China , I am major in computer too , So I get your website from www.google.com. I am fall in love with Linux too.

There was more, but I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea. Why can't more females contact me??? I would say free China or something to that effect, but I would hate to be blocked out by the "Great Firewall of China". Ahh well, it is good be appreciated.

Linux with Doubts

Mon, 10 Oct 2005 21:46:27 -0400

To better serve my readers (all 3.5 of you), I'm splitting off all my Linux related content to my new Linux only blog: Linux with Doubts (don't worry I'm using WordPress this time around). I'm somewhat skeptical of several aspects of this marvelous OS, and hence the title. I hope to focus my main site more on me and this new blog on the boring stuff that makes me a geek. We'll see.

I Botched My Website

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 21:41:54 -0400

Okay, my changes didn't integrate as smoothly as I thought they would. I think I screwed up the entire site. PLEASE LET ME KNOW if you find a problem. I think I got enough of them to make the site work, but there are still some issues lurking in the background.

Forced Update

Tue, 23 Aug 2005 07:36:03 -0400

Well apologies for the lame post yesterday. As I've made abundandtly clear in past entries, my site thrives on the visitors I get for my technical information. But in all fairness, I don't want to neglect those people who actually read the blog hoping for real content from me. So let's see. Since my summer vacation, I've become horribly lethargic - well, a little less motivated I would guess.

Things at the residence have been a bit laborious. I guess people should know that summer isn't for fun, it's for all those winter and spring tasks you've postponed (all will probably postpone again). Mowing, putting out fertilizer, cleaning, yadda yadda yadda. Spare time? A little TV here and there. An occasional DVD. Saw Troy the other night. It was indeed pretty boring. Too many naked bum-bum's :-P ... Saw The Others, not bad at all. Man, them ghosts. The summer science fiction television started up again a few weeks ago. I have to keep the geek spirit in check and watch the obligatory episodes.

Work? Work is work. There was a big chemical plant fire a few weeks ago and I was told at 11pm to not come into work the next morning. "Hooray for me!" So I stayed up till some aweful hour, only to have my alarm accidentally wake me up at the usual. Being the responsible yokel that I am, I called in and checked only to find out I had to come in. "Shame on me! Shame on me! Shhttuupid me!!" Other than that I made an elementary programming error and did a

Opera 8

Wed, 27 Apr 2005 20:38:08 -0400

I normally don't do plugs but I am impressed with the latest version of Opera. In my honest opinion they really improved after version 7. And in the grand scheme of things I'd be happier if there were plenty of different web browsers accessing the world wide web. It would force the a lot of people to fix things. Anyways, I've yet to try it out on windows, I'm posting this with Opera on Linux. Works better than the last time I tried it, and as far as I can tell my entire website renders correctly (apology to IE users).

So I urge people to download and try it out, I may not be 100% ready to switch anytime soon but maybe some others might dump IE for it.

Oh yeah, with 250 unique clicks of the banner I'm supposed to get a free license. So far I've got ... ummm ... 1.

Curious Tale of Stolen Content

Tue, 12 Apr 2005 17:45:12 -0400

I was doing my usual rounds on the forums. Usually I look for people to help with their computer problems while I slyly demonstrate my technical prowess over the ignorant users. I found a help topic where I was fairly knowledgeable: video drivers on linux.

A user asked for help and some people gave semi-useful comments. Someone gave the best possible answer (referring them to my site) so I felt a reply wasn't needed. However near the end, someone else had written that the user should visit his site and click on his tutorial, quote: "I can't make it much easier". Usually I compare other people's suggestions to see how they pale in comparison to mine, so I followed the link. Lo and behold his suggestions were just as good as mine - to the letter. How so? Well he simply copied everything from my site and put his signature on it. In fact he had 5 such tutorials, 4 of which were copied verbatim from my site and none of which even mentioned me by name or link. How respectful.

Restraining from any unnecessary profanity or calls for justice, I simply posted a reply in the original forum, I asked how could HE make it any easier, when in fact all the content and work was composed and researched by me. I also posted a comment on his site explaining that I do not appreciate the plagiarism. And so began the bizarre exchange.

The plagiarizer felt upset that I made public accusations and thought I was greedy for expecting credit for my work. Oh the horror, he was so burdened by all the time it took him to cut'n'paste that it was too much work to link back to me. And his simple solution: reword everything I wrote so it looks likes he wrote it. Wow, how brilliant. Don't they teach the purpose of a bibliography in this country? Anyways I stuck to my guns and made clear that those actions would be unacceptable. Of course I didn't have the infringer's email initially so I had to correspond online in public forum, while taking a barrage of vulgarities and profanities from the locals (his buddies).

I talked to my Law School buddy in Cali and asked him what the copyright law said. Basically I don't need to state "Copyright" for my work to be mine. So I finally emailed the plagiarizer and the owner of the site explaining that I want my content removed or they should add a link and my name on each page stolen and I added that I was "within my rights to seek legal action". Would I? I doubt it, I don't want to mess up some kid. Afterall his site was for video games and I assumed this was due to brash immaturity or lack of education. I told him: 2 weeks!

His reply: the work isn't mine because I don't have legally notorized proof. This is after he already admitted to copying everything publicly on his site. And the kicker: I've stressed him to lose time with his wife and child. Please excuse me for expecting all of 5 minutes that it would have taken to comply with my legitimate request in the first place! Of course I stayed steady: 2 weeks. He gave in for the most part and deleted 3 of the 4 main copied sections. ... After 2 weeks I wrote him again complaining about the 4rth page. All he had done was rename everything, equivalent to having a "Sorny VDV Player". Anyways he didn't reply and after I gave him the ethics argument, I forgot about it. A week or 2 later, I decided to see if the page was still there. It wasn't! But not because he removed it, someone either hacked his entire site, or somebody logged in and deleted everything. Honest to goodness, it wasn't me! I couldn't help but to laugh at the situation (non-sadistically of course).

I consider myself a fair person (yes, its fair for me to say that). And in the end I wouldn't have done anything that would have caused any serious difficulties to this person and I don't care to intentionally humiliate him, however I cannot help thinking that he got what he deserved. Even if it wasn't from me.

Fear of Syndication

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 18:41:16 -0500

As I've said before I get literally a hundred times more readers for my Resources than I do for my blog, which is perfectly fine. When I started this I wasn't expecting anyone to read this. Well as requested by some, I finally added an RSS feed for my blog. I don't know if I just opened a can of worms or not. I guess a blog isn't "official" unless it supports feeds. Going with the flow...

Anyways, FireFox users can add me their "Live Bookmarks" and you aggregators do your damage. I'm only supporting RSS2.0, if someone requests Atom or RSS 0.9.2, I'll add it. Otherwise enjoy.