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Free Books for Everyone…

Perusing through Groklaw today I noticed an interesting article. Google has finally started putting some of the books online that they started scanning. You are able to download full versions of books whose copywrites have run out. You can check out the Google blog for more information.


… preserving knowledge and art …

Keep in mind that Project Gutenberg has been doing this type of activity for some time now. They are more of a community based effort, so I encourage you to support them in what they are doing.

Projects like Project Gutenberg and Google Books are extremely important in preserving knowledge and art from past generations. Unfortunately, with copywrite laws and patent laws these days, who knows if ideas and books and art will be able to be freely shared in the future by our children. We need to preserve what we can.

EDIT:

It appears that Google is doing scans of the books, at least from what little I played around with it. Gutenberg is actually making the books available as text files.

Time to upgrade…

It looks like there are some security flaws with WordPress. It is time to upgrade to the newest version.

The upgrade is pretty simple. Just overwrite your existing wordpress directory with the new files. (You should probably take a backup first, however.) Then, access your dashboard. It will finish the upgrade for you at that point.

World Cup thoughts after US elimination

With the return of a good number of players from the 2002 World Cup squad, expecatations were sky high for the 2006 US Men’s National Team in Germany. Unfortunately, due to some issues of their own making and some issues of FIFA’s making, those expectations were not realized.

I do not want this post to be a rant about the low quality of refereeing we have seen this Cup. Nor do I want it to be about our initial seeding. It will mostly be about my observations regarding the perfomance of team USA.


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Security without firewalls: Sensible or silly?

For years, infosec experts have called the firewall a critical ingredient to security, whether it’s in a large enterprise or on a home PC. But the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) has defied that logic with what some would consider surprising success.

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Personally, I think that this is a wrong approach.

A firewall is just another device in the security design of the network. He is essentially using firewalls on all his hosts, if I am understanding the article correctly. A centrally managed firewall is going to help regardless if you have firewalls running on the hosts. Imagine if you have someone attacking your network with a DDOS. Theoretically, this is going to be stopped at the border by your firewall. If you did not have a device to block this traffic, now your LAN is going to be flooded with traffic. In addition, each host is now going to waste processing cycles to determine whether the influx of traffic is valid or not.
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Announcing a Feedburner WordPress Widget

UPDATE(02/19/2007):
The plugin has now been updated to version 2.2. This change incorporates some changes sent from Ying-Chieh Liao. There are two changes to the plugin.

The first change is that the user only needs to input their feedburner id, not the whole URL. So, if you update, you may have to re-enter this information. So, instead of putting in “http://feeds.feedburner.com/jeremysbraindump”, you only have to put in “jeremysbraindump”.

The second change add a little tiny text link for the feed. You could use this instead of one of the chicklets for example.

As always, if you have any feedback, let me know.
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UPDATE (08/16/2006):
The plugin has now been updated to version 2.1. This change incorporates Diona’s changes of adding a li and closing /li to each line. This should be purely cosmetic and not change any funtionality. Please let me know if it does.
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UPDATE (05/17/2006):
The plugin has now been updated to version 2.0. 2.0 gives you the ability to select which chicklets you want to display from Feedburners list. This is configurable through the normal widget configuration under Presentation. It has been tested with multiple themes. Everything seems to work, as far as I can tell. However, I do not have accounts with all of the syndication sites, so I do not know for sure, if they work. One site that seems to have trouble is Newsgator. However, the code looks just like Feedburner’s code. So, I think this is either their problem or C|Net’s problem.


… the ability to select which chicklets …

I also changed the default title to be: Subscribe through Feedburner. This is also used as text when you hover over a chicklet.
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UPDATE(05/15/2006):
The plugin has now been updated to version 1.1. 1.1 follow’s Andy’s comment and intercepts the normal feed location in the header of the page. It redirects these feeds to Feedburner. However, it does not do anything with your original feeds, they are still there. But, if a syndication program automatically scans your blog page, it will detect the Feedburner feed and use that.

Because of this, I would recommend setting up Feedburner before you activate my plugin. That way, when Feedburner scans your blog for the feed, it actually finds something. Otherwise, you have to know the location of your feed, such as http://blog.blog.com/feed?=rss.

Anticpated features of 2.0 still include using chicklets from all blog services that Feedburner hooks into.
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This is the initial version of my Feedburner widget for WordPress. This allows you put Feedburner subscription links into your WordPress sidebar and arrange it with the rest of your widgets.

The initial 1.0 version just allows for the large icon to be displayed. Also, the title “Subscribe with Feedburner” is hardcoded.

To install, just download the plugin from here. Uncompress it and place it in your wordpress/wp-content/plugins/widgets directory. Then go to your admin page of your blog and activate it under Plugins. After that, goto your Presentation->Sidebar Widgets page. Drag it over to the sidebar where you want it displayed. (Continued)