Talk about a blast from the past…

An exploit for mailback.pl, a Perl CGI script I wrote back in 1995, was discovered over the weekend. Bob at Eskimo North called me about it last Sunday.

Took us a while to figure it all out as Eskimo is running a slightly modified version.

The fixed public version can be found at:

ftp://ftp.skytouch.com/soft/unix/cgi-scripts/mailback.pl.txt

Erik's Pulse has been published.

This has to be one of the coolest gadget I bought in years. The IOGEAR GBMHKIT is a Wireless Stereo Headphone/Headset with Bluetooth capabilities.

It comes with a wireless transmitter/adapter that connects directly to any standard 3.5mm, RCA or phono audio jacks. It allows you to listen to audio/music from up to 66 feet away. The sound quality is outstanding.

Additionally you can pair it to your phone and use it like any other Bluetooth headset.

And, that's the kicker, it does both at once. Let me explain…

I'm currently using it to listen to music all day long. Whenever my phone rings, the music is automatically muted. I just need to press the button on the earpiece to take the call. The music will unmute as soon as the call ends, which is actually a little jolting at first.

Now, it's hardly perfect either…

First, the various included extension/converter cords are total cheap pieces of crap. Thankfully, most local audio/video store will carry good replacements.

Second, the Bluetooth capabilities are very limited. There is no way to initiate a call from the headset, for example.

Third, you can't use the transmitter while it's charging. Well, you can, if you don't mind the hissing sound that comes thru the headphones.

Apart from these very minor annoyances, I just love it.

Why is the Super Bowl considered a World Championship? Which other country in the world is eligible to compete? I really hope the Seahawks win it, however I'll stick to my earlier prediction. All I know is that they'be better not preempt Grey's Anatomy, if they do win. A tip of the hat to Bob for another brilliant marketing move. It looks like GoDaddy finally had their latest commerical approved. Only took 14 attempts. I guess the NFL got smart and offered to air it standalone during the 2nd quarter. Don't blink or you'll miss it.

If you're like me and get bored after 3 minutes of most ball games, don't forget about the Puppy Bowl. Guaranteed K-9 fun for all ages.

[@227]

Well, they did not win. 21-10. Better luck in another 30 years or so.

Thanks to Russ I discovered a problem in my feeds that caused Bloglines (and probably a few others) to keep on marking every entry as new. The comments counter is automatically incremented each time a new comment is added. Bloglines, in addition of the looking at the entry dates, also scan the actual text. Per Russ suggestion the feeds now include a dynamically generated image to indicate the number of comments associated with an entry. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Okay, so what's the deal with Free downloads? When was the last time you paid to download anything? Does it mean it's free to download but you'll have to pay later? Duh… You got me fooled. There's no such thing as a free lunch. Does putting the free in there make it more appealing? I guess it sounds better than trial or crippled. I don't know. Maybe I got too much free time on my hands or maybe I should just start a free meme.

I was trying to setup ViewVC to display both my public cvs and subversion repositories. It meant I had compile the swig-py bindings. Subversion 1.3.0 requires SWIG 1.3.24 or later. Or so they say…

I'm using 1.3.27, yet ./configure kept on barfing. Apparently the script does some voodoo magic to parse the current version number. It's failing miserably.

Here is what I did to get it to compile:

cp -p configure configure.orig
sed -e 's/"103025"/"103027"/g' configure.orig > configure

which basically makes a backup copy of the configure script, then replaces the hard-coded version number.

From then on, the regular compilations steps worked:

./configure --with-apr=/usr/local/apache --with-apr-util=/usr/local/apache
make
make install
make swig-py
make install-swig-py
echo /usr/local/lib/svn-python > /usr/lib/python2.2/site-packages/subversion.pth

Looks simple, but it took a while to figure it all out.