LotR promo ads

OK, so these are a bit old, but there's some videos TBS made as a promo for when they were showing the Lord of the Rings series.

HTML email and tracking

So I get this message that's a nicely formatted HTML email, but it has a message at the top about my email client not supporting HTML. I thought about it for a second, then realized that Thunderbird says the message references external assets which it hasn't loaded. So I'm thinking either CSS or image. Sure enough, this is in the code:

<a href="http://www.educause.edu/email/ecar/ers0602_1b/track.asp?id=header"><img src="http://www.educause.edu/email/ecar/images/header.gif" width="281" height="86" border="0" alt="ECAR - EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research | If you can see this, your e-mail client does not support HTML e-mail messages. Please copy and paste the following URL into your browser's address bar to see the message: http://www.educause.edu/email/ecar/ers0602_1b.html" /></a>

So the question is whether it's just people who have no clue what they're doing, they did it to get the plain text version to come out the way it did (which means they need a better tool to send these if that's the case), or if they're trying to get people to click through just to read the email for tracking reasons. Given the source I'm somewhat leaning towards the tracking. :( The fact that every link in the thing goes through track.asp and there's a clear.gif at the bottom doesn't help go away from that opinion either. At least they don't seem to be tracking individuals with it, but it seems a little excessive either way.

Titanic: Two The Surface

Titanic: Two The Surface. Someone spent a *lot* of time pulling clips for this one.

Firefox spoof ad

The Tribe

"How they're pitching it is Lost meets Predator" - from Jewel Staite. That should be rather interesting - has anyone seen any other info on it? It sounds like what I wish Lost would be on too many weeks when they don't reveal anything interesting.

What ends up in spammer databases

These flagged in the log on one of the mail servers I manage. Normally we pretty much ignore unique invalid addresses, but the joys of UNIX history means the bangpath attempt got them flagged, drawing attention to them. Their database looks like a very interesting harvested database. Whoever allowed these into a form somewhere apparently wasn't validating email addresses well...

sendmail[30697]: k3B4dFsF030697: <!@#$%@******.***>... Invalid route address
sendmail[30870]: k3B4djbW030870: <!@#$%^&*@******.***>... Invalid route address
sendmail[30769]: k3B4dTD1030769: <!@#$%^@******.***>... Invalid route address
sendmail[30986]: k3B4e2Fi030986: <!@#$%^&@******.***>... Invalid route address

AD Error Messages

So yesterday one of our Active Directory DCs failed due to running out of memory. Some of the fun error messages that ensued:

CN=Configuration,DC=<subdomain>,DC=<domain>,DC=<tld> 
    <SiteName>\<DCName> via RPC
        DC object GUID: <GUID>
        Last attempt @ (never) was successful

Source: <SiteName>\<DCName>
******* 305 CONSECUTIVE FAILURES since (never)

The effects of KCC and dynamic replication partners...

Open Data Formats

I find it interesting that news of Minnesota's new proposed "open data format" requirements came up because I was just talking to a coworker about the Massachusetts requirements today. While short term it may be a bit of a pain for everyone, long term it will definitely be needed as things are otherwise going the direction of being locked up in proprietary formats with DRM and the vendor throwing DMCA complaints in the direction of anyone who even thinks about not paying for access to their own data.

I do find it interesting how far it's going though. Documents are usually addressed when discussions come up, but the interesting part is other media. That whole free to use in perpetuity is cool, but it rules out MPEG-2, MP3 and AAC as storage formats. While the licenses have come down since the pre-2002 dvd-player-software-not-bundled-with-drive days, it's still not free. The concept is nice on a philosophical level, but it's well past what the federal government has required for things like DTV (MPEG-2 and DD) which could have implications for how well it's accepted. Uncompressed formats such as WAV or YCbCr bitstreams aren't really reasonable for storage (or even transmission of HD content). One big catch is while Vorbis and FLAC are pretty far advanced and probably reasonable for audio, things like Xvid have iffy backgrounds and Theora doesn't seem to have a lot of support behind it yet. While the proprietary as the companies are solid and will be around and willing to support it is nice on one hand (IIRC the official reason why the FCC picked MPEG-2 for DTV, which disregards lobbying that likely took place), if it's free anyone can create an implementation of it. In case you didn't notice by the links to the open formats, a lot of the work in this regard for free stuff is being pushed through the Xiph.Org Foundation (the Ogg people). It seems there's enough support out there from the community in general and groups like Xiph.Org willing to back it up that it'd be possible. It'll be interesting to see how far it really goes, and what happens in the world of data formats if it stays mostly intact and other governmental organizations take similar approaches.

Information on H. F. No. 3971 from the MN House site for those interested.

April Fools and Banks

So this lady thought it'd be a good idea to give the bank teller a note that said "I'm here to take money." as an April Fools joke. I'm actually amazed at how far she got before being stopped...

DST date changes

Last year our all-wise government went and changed the begin and end dates of daylight saving time and all the techies were complaining about the impact this is going to make on systems that either aren't upgradeable or are no longer maintained by the manufacturer. Seems now more people are realizing the issue (hopefully it's again for ISC even if it's a first for many readers). Of course nobody's gonna do anything about it now. I'm predicting that late-September/early-October most of the tech world will start freaking out about it, and it'll be all over the news every day the last week of October. Out of those who can get updates I wonder how many actually will do so.

With unix it'll probably just be a matter of copying the right /usr/share/zoneinfo files to old systems. Last I looked at the zone stuff in the registry it was interesting to say the least, and I think someone changing it in the GUI would wipe out any patches too.

I just hope people workaround by changing their timezones rather than the clock itself. Most inter system communication is based off GMT, most unix systems convert for display, Windows converts for communication. The fun that causes with Outlook and Exchange while changing timezones... As a side note, this is why Windows does the stupid confirmation of DST changes, as it's possible for it to get out of sync if it's gets confused as to whether it's changed the clock or not. Anyways, it could get interesting for a while...