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thieves steal fake phones
“What the thieves did not know is that they were dummy display phones,” said Andrea Iraheta, spokeswoman for the company.
idiots.
unfortunate urls
perfectly work safe. definitely not what you think. www.gotahoe.com and www.powergenitalia.com
post via email
so i wanted to be able to post to this blog via email. why? because it's possible, and because i wanted to be able to post random things here via email through my cell phone. there are several folks out there who have each written mt-plugins or hacks or scripts to get the job done.
- raffi krikorian @ wasted bits had a small script that seemed to be just what i wanted. the only downside to his was that you couldn't choose a category for the entry. you set up an email account to send your posts too and then pipe them through his nifty script. figuring out the piping was a bit of a chore but once i got past that it was a great script. except that i could never get it to work.
- ian barton @ ian-barton.com had another take on the subject. instead of piping the email through his script. it will just check a specified email account for messages and then it will do the posting from there. his didn't allow you to choose a category either though. and again, i couldn't get it to work
- david raynes @ rayners.org has a full fledged mt-plugin called mt-email. his had all the functionality i was looking for (choosing a category), with the additional feature of being able to post a comment to a previous entry. however, his required a bit more in the bit of technical knowledge, like how to add headers to an email.
raffi and ian's scripts are used by other folks. they do work. i just couldn't get them to. the fact that i ended up getting mt-email to work was nothing short of a miracle. i tinkered, i played, i learned. also, mt-email isn't working perfectly for me as of this point. i am able to post comments to past entries via email perfectly, however when i post a new entry via email my site doesn't rebuild. so the entry doesn't show up until i manually rebuild the site, or someone posts a comment or something that causes the site to rebuild.
first let's start with the little things about mt-email i learned along the way. then i'll share with you how i did the nifty header adding thingamajig that it requires.
- mt-email should be put in your main mt directory, not the plugins directory.
- the address on line 70 (which was actually on line 69 in my version) $return_addr should be the address to which you're going to be sending the blog entries. this may seem completely obvious to some..if so, move along.
- when you email your entries you must send them from an account that corresponds to an author in mt who has permission to post to that blog. again, it may seem obvious to you that that is the case, but my author email in mt is a spam account i don't send email from, so it took a scouring of the code to realize what mt-email was checking.
- the emailed post will have whatever "Post Status" is the default for that blog. so if you want it published as soon as you post it, you have to have the default post status for mt set to post.
ok, i think that takes care of the tricky parts, except for one and i'll explain it below. now, the whole headers thing. as i said in the beginning, i wanted to post random things here via my cell phone. mt-email requires certain things to be in the headers of your email messages (blog id, password, blog name, category). you can't add those to cell phone emails. i couldn't even figure out how to add them to messages sent via outlook. plus, as david mentions on his site, this is not secure. no less secure than logging into mt is already, but still not secure. enter procmail.
i don't know exactly what procmail is but it does something with your email. one of many things you can do with it is add headers to email messages. you can get around this mt-email requirement by hacking the script a bit and setting the required info up as variables, which in retrospect i probably should have done, or you can do it as i describe below.
you'll need shell access to your account for this next step. you need to edit a file called .rc.local.init . it was in my /home/username/domain-mail/ directory. it may not exist. if it doesn't then first you'll want to make sure .procmail, in the same directory, has this line at the top.
now open, or create or whatever you gotta do, .rc.local.init and add this
:0
* $RECIP ?? ^^account_you_send_entries_to@$DOMAIN
{
:0fhw
| formail -I "X-MT-Pass: password" \
-I "X-MT-Blog-Id: blogid" \
-I "X-MT-Category: primary category|secondary category"
:0
|/path/to/script/cgi-bin/mt/mt-email.pl
}
you can substitute "X-MT-Blog-Name: xxxx" for "X-MT-Blog-Id: blogid". don't have both.
now, when email goes to account_you_send_entries_to@$DOMAIN.COM they'll get those headers added to them and then get piped through mt-email and you haven't sent your password racing through the internet in plain text.
doing it this way you'll be stuck with those categories forever. i've opted out of including the category headers. i'm planning to hack the script a bit so that i can include something like <category>movable type</category> in my email message and the script finds that, cuts it out of the entry, and then sets that up as the category. if anyone else would like to do that, or if mr. raynes would like to add that functionality i'd be a huge fan.
also, since i'm posting via a cell phone, i'd rather not type "New Entry : xxxxx" when i want to post. i don't think my cell will allow that long of a subject. so if you'd like to change the indicator of a new entry to something like "n:" just edit line 89 to what you would like. just make sure you never have a post named "n:" that you want to comment on.
and last but not least, since i wasn't able to get mt-email to rebuild when i posted via email i had to use mt-rebuild to rebuild my site every x hours or minutes or whatever. here's the mt support forum thread for mt-rebuild. it has lots of great info on how to set up a cron job to do that for ya.
i hope this helps. you're welcome to email me with questions however as i said..i tinkered and i played, i suggest you do the same.
update 6.16.03: i just got an email from david raynes, creator of mt-email. apparently he forgot the rebuild code in v 0.2 for new entries. he's gonna work on that. thanks david.
attention h.r. types
you may want to reconsider your career path.
or at least stay out of indonesia.
aussie kid quotes
leah ann, a frequent poster to this site, is spending her summer in australia working with children in schools and sharing Christ along the way. i got an email from her today that, among other things, included some funny quotes from some of the kids who she has met.
kids are funny.
wal-mart dvd rental
in case you missed it wal-mart has its own dvd rental service which is very comparable to netflix. basically you rent unlimited dvd's for $15.54 a month. netflix's lowest rung is $19 but you get to have 3 DVD's out at a time, as opposed to wal-mart's 2.
i'm a fan of free enterprise and all but i hate to see wal-mart jump in to a new market, copying someone elses business model and then sink them. maybe it won't happen.
transformers the movie
i'm so there.
of course...i guess you have to consider the source.
internet don juan
You get the idea.
Col. Kass Saleh of the U.S. Army was part of the force that fought the Taliban in Afghanistan, work fraught with peril and often lonely. But apparently not that lonely. The Army said Wednesday it is looking into allegations that he managed to line up dozens of prospective wives back in the United States and Canada whom he met through Internet dating services. Virtually all of them posted ads on a site called tallpersonals.com, which specializes in men and women who are taller than average.
In recent days, as his chronic courting has come to light, some of the betrayed women have compiled a list of 49 women who were romanced by him. The women are heartbroken and intent on revenge. They have complained to the Army that they want to see him court-martialed.
well i hate to say that's what they get but...i will. that's what you get.
voicemonkey
there's this new service from voicemonkey that allows you to call an 800 number, leave a message and then others can listen to it via the web as a link to an mp3 file. it's free as of now, so as of now i'm gonna play with it. here's my most recent message.
the animatrix
if you're a fan of "the matrix" you should definitely rent this movie. yes, it's animated. yes, it's anime or japanimation. and usually i'm not a big fan of either, especially the latter. but the matrix fan in me won out.
it includes 9 visions, or short stories, that are prequels to "the matrix" or "the matrix reloaded". two include the story of what lead up to the war between the humans and machines and then the war itself. the one that most closely fits in with "the matrix reloaded" and also "enter the matrix" (the ps2 game) is "the final flight of the osiris", in which the crew of the osiris discovers the machines beginning their dig towards zion.
the rest of the stories are pretty much a waste of time. they feature strange animation and storylines that don't really seem to fit. maybe they will fit better after "the matrix revolutions", but somehow i doubt it.
IMHO.
suicide chicken
A member of the public alerted the authorities after seeing a fanatical fowl charging around the city sporting canisters and wires. Quite rightly, the police responded in force and, after cornering the bird in an alleyway with the aid of the bomb disposal squad, safely "put down" the terrorist threat. No explosives were subsequently found.
1984
i've always wanted to read 1984. i definitely wouldn't say it's for everyone but it's worth a read if you're into the poliitical societal plight of mankind kind of thing. it reminds me alot of aldous huxley's "brave new world". it's not action packed or a particularly easy read but it's definitely one that will make you think about society and government and where our world is headed.
luckily orwell didn't get the year right, though it's definitely conceivable that much of the reality in the book could become a part of our reality in the not too distant future.
IMHO.
a/c not-so-fixed
a lack of freon was not the problem. it is now 85 in my apartment.
before someone posts the obvious "wah! wah! cry me a river" comment (i'm expecting this from jamie jo), i realize that there are those in the world that don't have the luxury of a/c and would love to have it 85 in their apartment. however there are two major things different between me and them. first, they've never had a/c and so they have adapted, it's a survival of the fittest thing. secondly, and more importantly, i'm paying for a working air conditioner.
i'm done.
movin to minnesota?
you should definitely look into getting yourself a critical habitat license plate. i'd go for the deer one.
cool camera
very small, very cool, very powerful and very expensive digital camera. only available in japan though.
junk food tax
i really hope no one in washington notices this.
The British Medical Association (BMA) is discussing a proposal to charge 17.5% VAT on high-fat foods such as biscuits, cakes and processed meals.
250th post!!
thr3e
i haven't read much fiction in a long time. probably the last fiction work i read was 3 left behind books ago. however, i needed something to read in traveling home and back so i picked up thr3e. it's a murder mystery thriller that is nonstop from the first page.
dekker interweaves a Christian theme including some pretty thought provoking philosophizing on good & evil and man's struggle against himself and doing what he doesn't want to do (romans 7:15-25).
if you want a fun book that is a quick read, slightly thought provoking, full of action and with a very surprising plot twist then this is a great one to check out.
IMHO.
mt-refsearch
i just added eliot landrum's mt-refsearch. basically search engines do a pretty crappy job of indexing blogs. people come here via google or what not and are directed to the home page instead of the archives where the information they have come in search of lives forever. mt-refsearch detects that the user has come from a search engine and then automatically searches my blog for those same terms and returns the top 5 entries matching those terms. if you wanna see it in action use this search or this one.
this is the first of many improvements and elements of redesigning i'm working on. basically cause i want to make a change. if you have any suggestions leave a comment.
manhole cover enthusiast?
interested in manhole covers for some reason? there are some pretty neat looking ones.
gollum wins
if you didn't know, gollum, from "lord of the rings the two towers", won "best virtual performance" at the mtv movie awards, beating such notables as scooby doo, yoda and kangaroo jack. his acceptance speech is definitely worth seeing. there's a bit of bleeping out but it's pretty funny.