• Hatebook – Reminds me a lot of Post Secret in that it gives you insight into random people’s biggest fears, regrets, and frustrations in life.
• rTorrent how-to – I keep needing to find that guide every now & then, so figured I’d save it here.
• twitter.com/derek – I just went through an added a bunch of friends and invited more. So follow me if you are on the site.

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• Fox News’ John Gibson is a racist hack
• Gore awarded with Nobel Peace Prize – Maybe history will look back 50 years from now and see that it was better he didn’t win in 2000 considering the good he’s done for climate awareness. Will this put the pressure on him to run in ‘08?
• Jenna Bush answers why she isn’t serving in in Iraq – “I understand that point, but there are many ways to serve our country, and I think my skills are better suited for teaching and representing the U.S. in Latin America through unicef. I respect the men and women of our country who are over there fighting. It is an unbelievably selfless thing to do. But if people really thought about it, they would know it’s not even a practical question.”
• Stephen Colbert may run for President – I was wondering when he’d announce his candidacy, now it looks like he will. Great PR move.
• Star Wars Trumpet performance – Holy crap, this is absolutely hilarious.
• Girls tricked into making out with monkeys – Wrong on so many levels, but I laughed. I’m amazed these people weren’t sued.

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• Why Blog Post Frequency Does Not Matter Anymore
• The Five P’s of Improving Your About Page
• Ron Paul: A New Hope – I’m not a conservative, but the views of Paul are so radically different from the rest of the Neo-Consrvative movement that have put the US in it’s current sad state, that I’d be overjoyed if he got the republican bid over Guiliani, Romney, or McCain.
• Portal – The Flash Version – 2D Flash version of an insanely cool 3D game that Valve just came out with.
• RIAA Hits a Sour Note With Its File-Sharing Witch Hunt – Madonna is the latest to be added to a list that includes Oasis, Nine Inch Nails, and Jamiroquai to ditch the record labels and go independent.
• PHP Adsense RSS feed generator
• Sync your MS smartphone with Google Calendar – I’ve been looking for something like this since I got my Treo 700w a year ago. This is awesome!

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In a logical step, Google has launched a mobile version of it’s ad network AdSense so users can now visit sponsored links on sites they are browsing on their phone. The original incarnation of AdSense uses JavaScript to embed ads in a page, which carries little security risks to the user and the server the page is hosted on. However, because most mobile devices don’t support JavaScript, they had to resort to using servers-side scripting languages (PHP, Perl, ASP, etc..) to embed ads prior to delivering the page to the user. Here’s an example of the PHP version of Mobile AdSense.

<?php

$GLOBALS['google']['ad_type']=’text’;
$GLOBALS['google']['channel']=”;
$GLOBALS['google']['client']=’pub-5039159613133207′;
$GLOBALS['google']['format']=’mobile_single’;
$GLOBALS['google']['https']=$_SERVER['HTTPS'];
$GLOBALS['google']['host']=$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];
$GLOBALS['google']['ip']=$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$GLOBALS['google']['markup']=’xhtml’;
$GLOBALS['google']['output']=’xhtml’;
$GLOBALS['google']['ref']=$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
$GLOBALS['google']['url']=$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
$GLOBALS['google']['useragent']=$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
require(‘http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.php’);

?>

While Google’s motto is “Do No Evil” and I don’t think they would ever do anything to harm a Mobile AdSense client’s server, using server-side scripting languages presents a massive security hole on most servers. Once I can execute that code on your serer, all bets are off. One could access the database to gain customer information, redirect users to phishing sites, or even just reformat the hard drive just for the hell of it. The best method for hacking a server running Mobile AdSense would be DNS Cache Poisoning.

While I don’t exactly have any solutions on a method to deliver dynamic ads from the AdSense network that doesn’t use JavaScript or a server-side scripting language, I find their approach completely unacceptable from a security perspective and you will find a lot of objection in the enterprise community towards this method.

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Link

I give it 24 hours before Jack Bauer breaks him out.

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The Sprint Center had it’s grand opening tonight and I was quite amazed. I’ll let the pictures do the talking. More pics on my Downtown KC blog

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• 41 Reasons Why Your Blog Probably Sucks
• Radiohead – In Rainbows – Downloaded their new album today. Ehh… like most other Radiohead stuff, I just can’t get into it.
• “This is a really amazing video of a symphony using scenes from classic video games to orchestrate their music. This is one symphony I wouldnt be bored to tears at.”
• “The Cinnamon Challenge”. Just don’t inhale…

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You get 7000+ comments about viagra and porn to go through an delete. Ugh. Hopefully I won’t have to go through that again with the new spam filter. Thanks Akismet!

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One of the reasons why I don’t find myself blogging too much is I think I’m just too lazy sometimes to go to my site, log in, go to the post page, use a crappy WSYWIG to create the blog entry, and hit post. Not a lengthy process, but one I get annoyed with. But I just came across Windows Live Writer, which is a Microsoft desktop app that hooks into your Spaces, Wordpress, Blogger, Livejournal, etc… blog and allows you to create a post in a very rich and intuitive interface. The biggest surprise is that it actually downloads the CSS sheet and mimics what your post will look like while you are editing it!

So, props to Microsoft for coming out with a pretty slick app, and especially allowing users to connect it to something other than their Spaces blog, which no one has.

Alright, gotta post this to see what it looks like.

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