Hal Spacejock Support Crew

Simon Haynes (yes, the same guy I’ve talked about a couple of times before :p) has got a rather nifty marketing idea over on his blog 🙂 Given that he’s already given me one of his books for free (join his contests) and I’m in the running for a copy of his other book(s), I figured I might as well join the support crew – you know what they say, if you can’t get your own book published, help somebody else market theirs :p

The good stuff

Spam is everywhere. That has become a universal constant :p Of course, most of the spam I get is useless to me since it is about home loans, or enlarging (or shrinking) body parts or strange women with manly names who are coming to my neighbourhood and want to meet me – I’ve heard of a boy named Sue but now I’ve also heard from women named Roger and Douglas who say that they would very much like to meet me :p

However, most of the time, the spam has nothing at all remotely to do with anything I’m interested in. Today was different. Today, two different e-mail in my inbox offered me two things that I am very much interested in – publication and money :p The first was from an outsourced software development firm in the Ukraine. Now I do some software consultancy work myself over the Net and I charge people anywhere from $10 to $20 per hour depending on the kind of work that I do for them. This company offers to subcontract the work for me at $9 – $15 an hour. I’m supposed to get rich doing this but I really fail to see how since I won’t have much left over after I pay them. Then again, maybe they just mean that I’ll have more time to devote to my writing and get rich using the methods outlined in the second mail …

The second mail says that my next novel could be in the New York Times best-seller list! Now never mind that I didn’t ask these people to tell me about how I could do this. They’re probably really good-hearted chaps who want to make sure that everybody gets their book on the New York Times best-seller list – there are people like that out there you know. What kind of makes me suspect that their golden heart might not be pure 24 carat gold is the fact that they are trying to sell me a set of "spellbinding CDs with a practical, step-by-step guidebook- designed to impart literally YEARS of useful information on how to navigate your career as a successful author". Heck, what more could I ask for? I’ve already got the years of experience to be an author on CD, I will be rolling in the money tomorrow!

Sometimes, (especially when I read stories like this) I think that the only people who actually get rich from writing are the scam artists or the ones who tell you how to do it instead of doing it themselves :p But then again, writing isn’t always about getting rich. Sure, the money would always be nice but it also is nice to know that you’ve created something that others find useful or enjoy and remember. So with that dream in mind, I guess it’s time to delete the spam and move on …

Wasted time …

I’ve been involved in an online controversy for the past week or so. OK, maybe involved is too strong a word – I’ve been following it keenly. I don’t like taking sides unless I know all the facts in a case and in this case, I didn’t know all the facts. Both sides claimed that they had unrevealed facts and that they couldn’t reveal all the facts just yet. So, I’ve been following things to see how it develops 🙂

Sure, I had my own conclusions (or rather theories) based on what I knew so far and what some of the players said themselves. But that isn’t necessarily proof, right? Of course, that didn’t seem to stop most people from taking sides and defending "their" side or vilifying the other side. The sad thing is, all this brouhaha broke up over a site about creativity, a site aimed at helping writers to hone their skills and their craft. Now, all that energy and all that talent is channeled towards name calling and arguments. A waste of time, or what?

A writer’s main job should be writing. And I hope, that when one writes, it will be something constructive, something useful or something entertaining. Sure, some of these posts are entertaining for a given value of entertainment – just like some people find cockfights or dogfights entertaining :p But I still feel that this energy could have been devoted to something else. We don’t know all the facts, we can’t presume to judge. So why not spend our time creatively rather than fighting others or baiting trolls? But that’s human nature for you – we just don’t know what might be logical. We do the exact opposite :p

Of course, I’m no better since I’ve been spending all my writing time reading this stuff and mentally commenting :p But I’ve decided that enough is enough. The community in question will be revived in its own time. There is not much to be gained by dwelling on what has happened. It is time to simply look to the future and start working on writing again 🙂

Scavenger hunt

There are days when I just spend all of my time hunting for something. No, not the meaning of life :p I’d set my sights on a specific set of features for an app and then I’d go hunting. There’s a lot of interesting stuff such a hunt turns up but sometimes it ends up being just a waste of time :p

Following up on yesterday’s comments about a good blogging client which supports the MetaWeblog API, I launched a search for such a client. Sure, I found lots and lots of them but the question is, were they any good? :p Most of the ones I found, I’ve added to the list of clients provided at the above wikipedia entry. Not sure if that entry will remain as it is but if you’re interested, you can take a look there 🙂

Basically, I was looking for the following features – full MetaWeblog API support (including the uploading of images – no FTP!), should fetch the complete post (most of the clients I tested fetched only the first part of the post if there was a more … tag), should have a WYSIWYG editor, should fetch all categories correctly from the server and mark each post with the correct categories. Those were the major features. In the "nice to have" section you have, the ability to fetch and save old posts from the server and the option to fetch only posts made by yourself.

Most of the clients I tried out failed the "must have" list of features. Quite a few of them did not fetch the full post for some reason – I’m guessing that they implement the MetaWeblog API but don’t look at the text returned by the more part of the entry for some reason or other. And an interesting thing was that there were a lot of clients out there which use the .NET Framework – I guess apps using the .NET Framework are going to be as common as VB apps soon! Wait, what am I saying? VB now use the .NET Framework :p

Yes, all poking fun at the .NET Framework aside, I found all the apps using the framework to be rather clunky, glitchy and slow. Sometimes things would work and sometimes things just didn’t. It gave me a rather bad taste in the mouth after a while. But moving on, I found only a few clients which actually met my standards – BlogJet, Anconia RocketPost and Chrysanth WebStory. I must mention that BlogWizard appeared to be capable of meeting the standards but I could never get it to work well or reliably. I was able to look at a post it fetched by opening it in a text editor and the post had everything but the category info but I could never open the post in BlogWizard itself :p

As far as the successful candidates go, I don’t like the editing interface in BlogJet since it seems to be a bit minimal but it does seem to do the job very competently. RocketPost is the one with the most bells and whistles and the one I would call the closest to my ideal. It had only one issue that I could find – it consistently removes an HMTL comment tag that I placed at the beginning of each entry. This comment marks where the system would later insert a Google AdSense code and so it was irritating :p WebStory had a lot of bells and whistles as well but while it fetched the category list correctly from the remote server, for some reason, it wasn’t assigning them to the posts at all when it fetched posts. Besides, it seemed to have set limits on post titles when the remote server didn’t – this was annoying.

Unfortunately, all of my final choices are commercial apps and while I like RocketPost, I am not about to pay $99 for the professional version which supports multiple blogs. (The home version costs $37). BlogJet on the other hand is $40 and does support multiple blogs. Of course, given that I still can’t find something within my price range that has everything I want, I might be better off simply coding the features I want into Blog :p Though looking at all these new blogging clients has made me re-think the user interface in Blog. Hmm …

Passing it forward

Kelly had an interesting entry over at her blog from a couple of days back and she tagged me as part of Random Acts of Kindness. The idea is that you do one (or more) random acts of kindness, blog about it and then tag someone else so that they could do the same so that the acts of kindess spread out in an ever-widening circle of goodness 🙂

So Kelly tagged me and I was faced with an interesting dilemma – what was the random act of kindness I was going to perform and for whom? See, the problem is this – I’m a hermit. When John Donne said "No man is an island", he hadn’t met me :p Laurie and I are like twin islands which are only connected to each other and have not much contact with anybody else. Sure, we just moved into my parents’ place but my parents have gone on a pilgrimage and so aren’t here either 🙂 So I finally decided to do several mini-random acts of kindness and hope that is enough :p

What’d I do? Well, first, I stopped watching the special features for "Neal ‘N’ Nikki" (that Laurie wasn’t interested in) and put "Scrubs" on so that Laurie could watch it with me 🙂 Then, I began re-arranging some of my books which were lying all over the place. See, as I mentioned before, we had moved to my parents’ place last week and our stuff is lying all over the place. My Mom loves everything to be neat and orderly and hates it when things are piled up all over the place. I’d been putting off organizing the books because there are a lot of them and there just isn’t enough room to put all of them away neatly. I decided to get started on the job even if I couldn’t finish it last night 🙂

Then today, I started my Mom’s car in the morning because she’s gone for a while and her car has a problem with not starting after a few days if it is not regularly started up and left running for a bit because the battery runs down. I also wrote to some of the people over at Absolute Write and offered to help with setting up a temporary forum (if they are of a mind to do so) till they can either get their databases recovered or decide to go ahead with a brand new forum.

So now I’m going to tag a few people and ask them to do some random act of kindness and blog about it as well. You can do it too, even if I haven’t asked you to :p So go on, do something nice for somebody and then please do come back and comment here as well 🙂

Persimmons

I have recently had several cyclical threads and entries where I posted back to other entries. I don’t particularly like doing that a lot but if unfortunately, here is another one :p This one’s about the Dan Simmons post (I talked previously about this here and here). Hopefully, I will not talk about this particular topic again but since I have contemplated much about Dan Simmons’ motives for his April message and since he promised to reveal all in his May message, I just had to comment on the May message 🙂

Basically, Dan seems to imply that the contents of the April message wasn’t his thoughts (and of course, he wasn’t that kind of person) but that the message was actually him presenting the viewpoints of various other individuals. As an explanation (or excuse) for this method, he goes to quote a few other people (again) saying that the only way to learn is to explore what goes counter to your beliefs. However, what struck me most about the whole message was the fact that Dan does not actually say what he thinks or feels or believes – he simply parrots other people (taking extracts from other works to supplement his message) and so seems to be saying, this is what others think. However, whether he’s actually asking people to make up their own minds, or is trying to make up their minds for them, remains slightly unclear.

One thing that does emerge as you read between the lines though, is that Dan Simmons has already made up his mind :p Dan Simmons, like so many others, seems to be convinced that there is an "Islamic" threat (or possibility of one). Sure, he throws around a few modifiers such as jihadists or Wahabbists from time to time but it is clear from the inferences he draws that he believes that Islam as a religion is aimed at sowing war and terror on the "infidels". He goes on to quote several verses from the Qur’an to support his point of view. What he forgets (and what most militant Muslims forget – or ignore for their own warped purposes) is that while the word is often translated as "infidel", what it actually means is "non-believer". It doesn’t sound as bad when you shout "Death to the non-believers!" though, does it? :p

I believe that the Qur’an is the word of God, given to his prophet – but that has nothing to do with this discussion. What is pertinent however, is that the chapters of the Qur’an were not revealed all at once. They were revealed at different times to deal with different situations. When a verse talks about "non-believers", it often as not is talking about *Arab* non-believers at that time as not. But of course, today, people twist it around (especially in translation since a word can have many different shades of meaning and the translator gets to pick which shade they want, even though that might differ from the original intent) and say it says "death to infidels" and that means Jews and Christians!

I am not trying to be an apologist for the terrorists who kill innocents in the name of Islam. That is wrong and there are no two sides to that. But what I do want to stress is the fact that though these people might call themselves Muslims, by the core beliefs of Islam, they are not really Muslims. So this is not an issue of Islam against the rest of the world or against the West but about human stupidity, greed, fear and prejudice against other humans. The biggest concern I have about Dan’s message is the fact that he is quick to label things. He labels the West as life-affirming and all of Islam (or most of it) as evil. This is fine and dandy if we lived in a rational world where people made up their minds by thinking about things logically. But no, we live in a world where people go about shooting people in turbans (no matter what their religion or nationality) because they might be Muslims – and mind you, this happened in the "life affirming" West :p

There are other things which are even worse which happens in the life affirming West that Dan ignores. But my point is not that the West is bad or that a country is bad or that a religion is bad – they are not. The problem is that people are not rational. They like to put labels like "us" and "them" on things because it makes it easy to know who to cheer and who to hate. When somebody who is supposed to know better (like the Islamic clerics that Dan talks about) comes along and tells them all these big name authors say that Islam is bad and that they are going to wipe us out, do you honestly believe that most of the people who read Dan’s message are going to stop to actually think if all of that makes logical sense? Or are they going to start hating something that they don’t even totally understand? Hating what we don’t know, we’ve never done that before, have we? :p

If you’re a writer, you should think about what you’re going to write. Perhaps try to present a balanced perspective. If you write a story and it sounds like vitriol, maybe you shouldn’t try to defend it by saying that before the World Wars, an anti-German story would have sounded like vitriol too. That you’re just pushing the envelope. If you’re a writer, you know that there is also something called a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course, Dan says at the beginning of his May message that if you’re expecting polemics, apologetics, politics or reinforcements of your own prejudices, that you would be disappointed because his was a writer’s website. But then again, I thought a writer’s job was to write about what he feels – not what others think. But that’s probably just me :p

Blue bites the dust …

I’ve written about Blue Security, Blue Frog and the attacks on them by spammers before. The last couple of days, access to the Blue Security site and to spam reporting has been kind of spotty. Then last night, spam reports started bouncing totally. So I took a look around the net to find out what was going on. Imagine my surprise that Blue Security had simply given up and folded in the face of continued attacks by the spammers!

Of course, on reading further, I realized that Blue Security probably had no choice. The spammer seems to have been bulldozing through everything in his/her path to get Blue Security to crumble. However, given the scale of damage caused and the number of companies and organizations that the spammer seems to have taken down, it makes me wonder as to why nothing is being done about this kind of thing.

The Internet has become the battleground of the future and the future is today. It looks as if any individual with the know how and the skill can simply hold any site on the Net hostage. Forget about little itty bitty sites like mine and yours, they can apparently hold multi-million dollar companies hostage. Nothing is safe anymore since if you are attacked, your host will probably drop you. And if you thought your host was safe, then maybe your DNS provider will drop you. Basically, if somebody doesn’t like what you say, they can take your site down and there is nothing much you can do about it. Sounds insane, doesn’t it? I guess this is just another facet of learning just how powerless we are in today’s empowered world :p

Who’s to blame?

I’ve been going through news reports about the whole Blue Frog thing that I wrote about yesterday here, here and at a few other places as well. The more I read these reports, the angrier I become.

Some of these are probably the selfsame people who talked about "collateral damage" and how "you can’t make an omelette without cracking a few eggs" when Bush declared his "war on terror" and went over to Iraq in search of WMDs. But now, let a few million "innocent" bloggers be deprived of their daily right to ramble, and out come the pitchforks and the torches. Not to get at the real culprit mind you, but to crucify the guys who actually seem to be fighting the spammers. So I guess a few thousand foreign lives have no value but by God, we have to protect the inalienable right of our innocent bloggers to blog daily, gosh darn it!

(Of course, a reverse of the same rhetoric was used by a Blue Frog defender elsewhere :p He said, and I quote, "First, the media says ‘shame on us’ for going after a sick group of people who fly planes into buildings (and who are bent on our destruction). Now, they are saying ‘shame on Blue Security’ for trying their best to fend off a cyber CRIMINIAL who thinks the Internet is his to do as he pleases." So I guess the rhetoric can be used both ways – and even to defend the viewpoint of those who think that Blue is at fault. But the rhetoric stays :p)

Now I’m by not a die-hard Blue-freak :p But Blue Security appears to be doing something about spam when almost all that these so called experts do is to sit around and talk about it. Sure, Blue seems to have been rather stupid in the way they handled the attack. But then again, if their claims are true (and the fact that they have traffic reports showing the decline in traffic to their site seems to indicate that they were working based on a hypothesis that they thought was true), they didn’t know about the DDoS and so weren’t knowingly throwing TypePad to the lions. So why are all these "experts" hell-bent on vilifying Blue Security?

Is it just the human mob mentality where you pick on the closest handy-looking victim because you really don’t care who you blame as long as you have somebody to blame? Or is it more sinister? Are these people blaming Blue because they really don’t want spam to go away because that would mean that their "expert" advice would no longer be needed – at least with regards to spam and so revenue streams will dry up? Or is it just a case of the little green eyed monster rearing its head? I don’t know … but the reporting about the incident, at least, seems a little biased.

And the battle rages on …

I wrote about Blue Security, Blue Frog and the fight against spam a couple of days ago. At that time, I mentioned how a spammer was trying to intimidate Blue Frog users and get them to stop using Blue Frog. I also mentioned that the Blue Frog servers appeared to be under attack at that time.

Well, it turns out that the two events were related. The spammer who was trying to get Blue Frog users to stop was the same one who was attacking the Blue Frog servers. He had gone as far as to get an employee at an ISP to filter all traffic to the Blue Frog site except from inside Israel, where their servers were located. If I was surprised at that – at the fact that employees at ISPs were corruptible and didn’t really take their responsibilities seriously – I shouldn’t have been. We are after all, human and utterly fallible :p

Blue Security had overcome that particular issue by moving their company blog outside Israel by pointing it to a TypePad account of theirs. The spammer had retaliated by launching a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack against the TypePad servers, denying service not just to Blue Security but all the other users of the service as well. Apparently, the spammer then proceeded to DDoS TuCows, Blue Security’s domain service provider, resulting in TuCows terminating their services for Blue Security.

Of course, this Yahoo news report (and probably others like it) seems to indicate that Blue Security might not have been totally blameless here and it looks as if people are actually blaming Blue Security for all this. I am not aware of the actual events that took place – besides, they say that there are three versions of the truth: his, hers and what really happened :p However, there are two things that I do find interesting – one, that major service providers (including registrars) will shut you down if somebody attacks you and you did not do anything. Basically, they are punishing you for somebody else’s misdeeds. Two, that people will find the most visible scapegoat for anything without actually bothering to find out who is at blame. This unfortunately, is typical of most people.

Sure, Blue Security might have been aware that they were being DDoSed and have pointed their domains at TypePad – if they did, that was reprehensible. It is also possible that they were never aware of the DDoS as they claim and that they simply pointed stuff at TypePad so that they’d have a site visible to the rest of the world. So why castigate them? Why is it that nobody talks about the spammer here and censures the guys who actually make the effort to go after spammers? I think it’s because this is not about who is right or wrong but about one thing and one thing only … money 🙂

TuCows is going to lose money if their servers are down and so they cut Blue Security loose – doesn’t matter that Blue Security was combatting spam and were a victim of the DDoS themselves. TypePad is angry because their servers went down and they look bad. Does anybody care that somebody took the stand against spammers? No. All they care about is their own businesses.

However, this situation has certainly made me go after the spammers with a vengeance 😛 I used to simply delete the spam in my Google and Yahoo inboxes. Not anymore. I report the spam with relish! If 10% of the people who were affected by this whole Blue Frog thing feel the same way as I do, the spammers have made a major mistake by launching this attack and they are going to find that it’s going to cost them …

Spammers and scammers

Have you heard of Blue Frog? It’s this anti-spam solution by Blue Security. It comes as a free tool installed on your computer as well as a FireFox extension which automatically submits spam from your Hotmail, Yahoo and GMail accounts to Blue Security for processing. (Don’t follow the links above at the moment since their servers appear to be under attack and they are trying as hard as they can to combat the issue and we don’t want to aggravate things, now do we? :p)

So why am I writing about Blue Frog (besides the fact that it is a good tool)? Well, I signed up for Blue Frog a while back, used it for a while and then uninstalled it. The reason I uninstalled it is because I’m too lazy :p I get about 20-40 spam messages a day and it’s all through my regular e-mail client, not webmail. The way Blue Frog works is that you have to forward the spam mails to Blue Security and they send a complaint to the spammer’s sponsor organization when you complain. The idea is that the more people who complain, the more complaints that the spammer gets – sort of a reverse spam :p

So being, totally lazy, I just couldn’t be bothered to forward mails to Blue Security and so I gave up on it. Gave up that is, till a few days ago. "What happened a few days ago?" you might ask. I got a message from spammer saying that they had hacked the Blue Security registry and that they had my e-mail address as a Blue Frog user and that they were going to keep spamming me till I stopped using it. Now the thing is, I wasn’t a Blue Frog user at that point. I don’t know for certain that Blue Security was hacked. Actually, it’s rather simple to find out if somebody’s e-mail address is registered with Blue Security or not. Blue Security has a feature where a spammer can run their mailing list through Blue Security to find out which addresses are protected by Blue Security so they can remove those addresses from their mailing list. All a malicious spammer needs to do is run their mailing list like that, pick the protected ones and start spamming them :p

What annoyed me was the effrontery of the spammer in thinking that all he had to do was to start spamming you more to get you to stop complaining about them. I ignored the message at that point but I got several more copies of the same message that day. The next morning, instead of the usual 20 spam messages, I got around 80. Now I am not sure if the two events are linked or if it was random chance. But since my spam count has increased since then, I decided to take action. I wasn’t doing anything to combat spam till then except to delete them when they came in but I sure as heck was going to report them if they thought they could scare me :p

That was yesterday. I looked around for a good solution and came back to an old faithful – MailWasher 🙂 I used to filter all my mail via MailWasher before opening it in my mail client but when I got PocoMail, I decided to do away with MailWasher and rely only on PocoMail’s internal junk mail filtering. It does work fairly well (I mean Poco’s junk mail filtering) but what brought me back to MailWasher was the fact that MailWasher now has built-in support for reporting spam to Blue Security :p So, I installed MailWasher again, ran all my mail through that and have been reporting spam left, right and center to Blue Security. Only problem is that their servers are under attack (I guess they must be getting effective and the spammers really hate them :p) and so, my spam reports are bouncing 🙂 Hopefully, they get the attacks sorted out and will be back to normal operations soon ….