Mike's Page

I have recently been scanning old negatives and slides on my junky HP PhotoSmart scanner. I've been scanning at 2400 DPI (the max of the scanner) so I won't have to do it again. Saving these files in the TIFF format yields large 22 MB files. I'd prefer to store them in a lossless format. I found that a relatively new format, JPEG2000, has a lossless mode. There's a plugin that will let Photoshop Elements read and write JP2 files. The lossless JPEG2000 version of my TIFF file is only 13MB, a 9MB savings per file. That translates to a lot more usable disk space. Sounds like a great format to use....

But I recently found out that a company is claiming a patent on JPEG2000. The patent was denied in court but the company is appealing. A successful appeal could ruin a freely available and open format, and I don't think I want to archive hundreds of photos to a format that may fall by the wayside due to potentially high licensing fees from some patent owner. Don't forget about the GIF debacle.

As a software developer, it annoys me to see companies claiming patents on what amounts to mathematical formulas, or standard business practices that just happen to be implemented with a computer. By allowing patents on trivial software tasks, the USPTO has created a minefield for small developers who don't have a legal department to deal with that stuff. We just want to create useful software!

P.S. We seem to be stuck with software patents here in the U.S. Maybe the Europeans can do something to avoid them.

Thursday we went to the Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia. I'm not much for zoos; I prefer to see the animals in the wild, but we're not quite ready to take our 20 month old son on safari just to see elephants.

The weather was great and we had a good time wandering between exhibits, and seeing which of them entertained my son the most. The size of the elephants sort of scared him. I think he liked the tigers and birds the most, but mainly he just liked to wander around. We did our best to avoid the noisy school groups who scared off the animals by yelling for their attention.

We went into an aviary where you could feed tropical birds. I expected my son to start crying when one landed on his head, but he was surprised and smiled. I, as holder of the precious bird nectar, was inundated by a dozen or more rainbow lorikeets, beautiful multicolored birds from Australia. The experience reminded me of our 1998 trip to Australia, where Crimson Rosellas and Regent Bowerbirds did the same thing at Lamington National Park. Someday I'll get those Australia pics on the web. In the meantime, here's my Lories from the zoo.

A BBQ stop at Sticky Fingers on the way home made our trip complete.

I attended The Ohio State University from 1990 to 1994. I knew nothing of the OSU/Michigan Game tradition when I arrived as a freshman, but it didn't take long to learn. I came in on the waning end of a great tradition known as "Phantom Band," which OSU tried to control and/or stamp out every year. Basically, it worked like this...late one night during Michigan week, the marching band would "borrow" their instruments and start playing the school songs around the campus dorms. The band would collect a following of lively students, singing along and throwing toilet paper in the November chill. Eventually these groups merged across campus and marched down the Oval to Mirror Lake. Mirror Lake is really a manmade pond, only a few feet deep and pretty nasty as standing water goes. My first time, I was surprised when dozens of students took to the freezing waters of the lake and thrashed around, singing the fight songs (some good anti-Michigan songs there ). I didn't swim that year, but I did the next three. The cold water was always a shock, but not so bad with the encouragement of the crowd and the music. My nights would be completed with a hot shower and a preemptive shot of Nyquil to fend off any illness, and I never got sick.

Now it seems that there's not much left of the tradition besides the jump in the lake. I found an article from the 2000 Lantern where students acknowledged it, but a school VP denied the tradition existed, and an article from this year saying that just a few students jumped in the lake, no band mentioned.

I can see how the school wouldn't want to condone the event, since occasionally stuff got broken and a few people got hurt, but I think the students should take responsibility for themselves. My friends and I never saw any property damaged or anyone get injured; all we did was have a good time walking the campus and singing songs. I wanted to write this blog entry to let people know that the Phantom Band did exist and it was a blast. Jump feet first and Go Bucks! Beat Michigan!

Update 2004-11-20: The Bucks pulled it off, 37-21! Jeers to ABC for not showing the game nationwide like they did the previous 5+ years. It wasn't on TV here in the south, and I had to settle for listening on the net.

Update 2005-11-17: This article led to my recollections being published in the Lantern!

When I overhauled my sailing community website (now at www.daysailer.org), I decided to use a free and popular web forum package called PHPBB. My home-brewed forum was getting old in the tooth anyway. PHPBB has features that not only make the forum better, but easier to maintain.

The downside is that PHPBB is everywhere, and that makes it a target for spammers and their automated bots. In this case, PHPBB has a Member List page which displays the site's members and optionally, their web address. The link spammers create bogus user accounts to take advantage of this and get their spammy website listed. I've only been running the forum at daysailer.org for a month, and I was seeing about one spam signup a day. One day I had three. I knew I had to do something or otherwise I'd show up on the site one day and there'd be a thousand of them. For some reason most of the spam links were for sites in Russia, but there are probably others out there.

Since these automated bots rely on PHPBB's user registration form looking a certain way, I decided to change the form a bit. I found this forum post to be a helpful description of how to do it. I followed those instructions, but varied things a bit for our site. The technique is to put a hidden field on the form that the bots don't know about, and fail if someone tries to register without submitting that hidden piece of data. It can't prevent someone from signing up with a junk link manually, but it seems to work with the bots. We haven't had a bogus account signup in over a week now. We'll be safe until the bots figure out how to grab and send the hidden data.

Publishing interactive content on the web seems to be one small battle after another....

Update 2006-12-18: A lot of people seem to be finding this post. Please be sure to read the other articles in my PHPBB Category as I have also tried other spam-prevention ideas.

Argh, maybe running a blog is a bad idea. It seems to be the next spam battleground.

First it came in the form of comment spam, usually from random IP addresses that always noted the referer 12.163.72.13. I'm not the only one who had that problem. I created a web server rule to block any system reporting that IP address in their referer. I also started to block the IP addresses that reported that referer.

In the meantime, my blog software has been updated to make automated comment spam difficult, by requiring the entry of graphical numbers that are hard for a computer to decipher, but easy for a human. This is known as a "captcha." So I haven't actually gotten any new comment spams, just garbage web traffic from their bots.

I'm glad I blocked the IP addresses too, because now the spammer has taken to changing the referer content (though the IPs remained the same). Now the referer has turned into ridiculously long spammish domain names like:

• www.ranking-holdem-poker-hands-4u.info
• www.buying-phentermine-pharmacy-2003.info
• www.cheap-car-rental-e-site.info
• www.cash-loan-united-advisor.info
  

They seem to be randomly generated but usually contain something about poker or phentermine. I've tried to access a few of these "sites" and none are valid. So it's pretty worthless referer spam, but it's still annoying to see this trash pile up in my logs. I'm thinking about blocking any referer with a .info address, since I've never been to a meaningful .info site anyway (those extraneous top-level-domains are so useless!).

The spammers are going to all this effort just to get a few links to their junk sites into blog comments in the hopes that Google will rank those sites higher. I'm sure the people at Google are not stupid and have caught on to this to the point where blog link spamming does no good. Too bad the spammers can't put their energies toward doing something useful for the web instead.