düBer's Blog

Monday, July 7, 2003 06:59 p.m.

Spam revisited

Here are the number of unsolicited emails I received in a two-week period, from 1 to 14 June 2003.

	Week One	Week Two	Average
	Sun - 101	Sun - 106	Sun - 103
	Mon - 96	Mon - 105	Mon - 100
	Tue - 101	Tue - 109	Tue - 105
	Wed - 109	Wed - 135	Wed - 122
	Thu - 84	Thu - 124	Thu - 104
	Fri - 94	Fri - 117	Fri - 105
	Sat - 85	Sat - 131	Sat - 108

Total	670	827	748
Average	95	118	106

So, did my spam increase over the three-month period? You betcha. From an average of 76 per day to 106 per day. From 529 a week to 748 a week.

Heaviest spam day: Then - Monday. Now - Wednesday.

Current spam-to-wanted emails ratio: 50%.

Yep. Half of my email is spam. And about 25% of it is unsuitable for children. Be careful, folks.

Monday, May 26, 2003 06:34 p.m.

"I Don't Like SPAM!"

A couple of months ago, I kept track of how many unsolicited e-mails I received each day over the course of two weeks. Here are the results:

	Week One	Week Two	Average
	Sun - 54	Sun - 68	Sun - 61
	Mon - 92	Mon - 106	Mon - 99
	Tue - 106	Tue - 55	Tue - 80
	Wed - 72	Wed - 87	Wed - 79
	Thu - 59	Thu - 87	Thu - 73
	Fri - 71	Fri - 69	Fri - 70
	Sat - 101	Sat - 31	Sat - 66

Total	555	503	529
Average	79	72	76

Why did I do this? Two reasons. First, curiosity. I wanted to know the daily average amount of junk e-mails I received.

Second, I'm keeping track for another two weeks, which is three months after the first study. I want to see if my spam levels have increased.

I'll post the results here in a couple of weeks.

And the title, of course, is from the infamous Monty Python diner sketch. Except they were of course, speaking of the product SPAM (note all caps) and not e-mail spam.

Monday, April 28, 2003 07:39 p.m.

Spyware: Phoning Home

A quick definition of spyware: software that installs itself on your computer, collects information about you and your surfing habits, and sends the info back to the company that created the program.

These programs can be installed when you install other programs, such as the file-sharing program Grokster. It can be installed without your knowledge while the parent program is installing. It can also install itself when you visit a web page.

So what can you do about it? There are many programs available that detect and wipe out adware and spyware on your computer. Some of them are free, and two of them are very good at what they do.

Just one word of warning, though - if you wipe out the adware or spyware, the parent program might not work anymore. For example, Grokster may cease to work if you uninstall the spyware.

Now for the programs and a brief review:

Ad-Aware is a great program for removing both adware and spyware. Out of over 261,000 objects (an object can be a registry key, registry value, folder, or file), it found 103 objects that were adware or spyware. And it wiped them all out.

After that, I ran Spybot. It found 50 more objects, which it was able to remove from my system.

If you don't have these programs, I highly recommend you download and run them. They're both free, and like antivirus programs, have data files that are updated, and you can download the latest definitions from their sites directly through the programs.

Monday, February 24, 2003 08:47 p.m.

Who's that knocking on my door: Part 2 - "Dude! Visitors!"

Here's a more current list of countries where my web site visitors have come from - it's sorted, even...

Luxembourg? All I need now is Vatican City...

Argentina
Australia
Austria
Belgium
Bolivia
Brazil
Bulgaria
Canada
Cook Islands
Costa Rica
Croatia
Czech Republic
Denmark
Dominica
Estonia
Finland
France
Germany
Greece
Hungary
India
Indonesia
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Japan
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Malaysia
Malta
Mauritius
Mexico
Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
Peru
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Russian Federation
Saudi Arabia
Singapore
Slovak Republic
South Africa
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
Taiwan
Thailand
Trinidad and Tobago
Turkey
Ukraine
United Arab Emirates
United Kingdom
United States
Uruguay
USA Government
USA Military
Venezuela

And of course, the subtitle for this entry comes from an infamous South Park episode.

Wednesday, February 19, 2003 07:24 p.m.

AdCritic Update

Okay, I've found a site which took AdCritic's place. Plenty of your favorite commercials to download for free.

That site is (ready?): Clipland.

Just did a search on "Budweiser" and found 2 matches, so I guess they have a ways to go yet.

Tuesday, November 12, 2002 08:48 p.m.

GoogleFight

Recently found a site called GoogleFight, which allows you to pit two words or phrases against each other, to find out which one is more popular on Google, a popular search engine.

My first bout was "Jesus" vs. "Beatles" - and the Big Guy won by a landslide! So sorry John, you guys AREN'T more popular than He is...

A good time-waster that I'm sure I'll find plenty of uses for...

Tuesday, November 5, 2002 08:19 p.m.

What's in YOUR Mailbox?

Wow, I'm learning things about myself that I never knew, through email.

For instance, today's emails informed me that I need the following:

to work from home
to become a gourmet chef with free software
to sell my RV - (Didn't know I had one!)
Human growth hormone
Viagara
to refinance my loans
more comfortable underwear
$5,000 pre-approved
an unsecured Gold Mastercard
Free Euro through the mail
a new cell phone carrier (Even though I don't have a cell phone)
a million-dollar credit line that I don't have to pay back
Cheaper long-distance rates
to have larger body parts (both male and female)
a new home loan (even though I rent)
to protect myself against viruses and worms (I assume they're referring to COMPUTER viruses and worms...)
many, many adult website memberships
to earn $1000 commission on every sale (of what?)
to get a university diploma

So you're not the only one out there that receives this crazy stuff!

Send your whackiest spam to duber@duberweb.com...

Monday, September 2, 2002 07:22 p.m.

Who's that knocking on my door?

Now that my site is indexed with the major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and Altavista, I've found that visitors to düBerWeb have been coming from all over the world.

An analysis of my Web logs have shown the following domains, in order of frequency:

Commercial (.com), Network (.net), Educational (.edu), Non-Profit (.org), U.S. Government (.gov), and U.S. Military (.mil).

People from the following countries have visited:

Australia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Canada, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Netherlands, Estonia, Japan, Italy, Mexico, Slovenia, Denmark, Dominican Republic, France, Brazil, Greece, United Kingdom, United States, Taiwan, India, Peru, Spain, and South Africa.

Truly amazing - the internet is a great communications tool.

Thursday, July 25, 2002 03:57 p.m.

Heartwarmers4u

I have to share a great web site I recently found - and no, they're not paying me to plug them...

It's called Heartwarmers4u.

Tired of hearing about all the sick and/or evil people on the evening news committing atrocities against children?

This site just may restore your faith in humanity, as you read stories of random acts of kindness that people do for each other.

They also have a daily newsletter that you can subscribe to, and receive inspirational tales every day in your inbox.

One of the quotes I have on My website is from "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure."

The quote is: "Be excellent to each other!"

Spread the kindness, would you? Thanks!

Thursday, July 25, 2002 03:51 p.m.

Spontaneuous Human Combustion

Recently spoke with a friend about spontaneous human combustion (SHC). I've seen the BBC QED special on cable, and it was truly amazing.

One man woke up and saw smoke rising from his arm, which was verified by his wife. A fireman also saw a flame rising out of a man's stomach "like a blowtorch."

Most of the incidents occur within a closed-up room or house with little to no ventilation. The burned fat of peoples' bodies leaves a buildup on the windows.

My advice: open a window! Keep your central air/heater functioning!

The best site I've seen on the web is about the BBC special, at Alternative Science.

Read it, and you be the judge - is it an urban legend or is it real?

Saturday, May 18, 2002 08:00 p.m.

Ask and ye shall receive

As a result of the poll on my homepage, I've added two new sections - The Best Freeware Sites, and Internet Privacy and Security.

I want to thank everyone who voted in the poll and encourage everyone to keep on voting!

Thursday, May 16, 2002 08:09 p.m.

More on AdCritic.com

Don't even try to view the new Ad Critic web site in Netscape - Internet Explorer is the only way. I always thought it was a poor design decision to force users to use one browser over another - but apparently others don't think so!

At any rate, you can still email them and demand the return of downloadable commercials! They could even work it out so that they get paid by a sponsor for each download - hey, free advertising works...

Tuesday, April 30, 2002 08:26 p.m.

Google Vanity Searches

Well, I've been hearing a lot about people searching for entries about themselves on the internet by using Google search.

I decided to give it a try and entered "Glenn P. Dubois" in the search line. Lo and behold, a page appeared with my honorable mention from The Twilight Zone Magazine's short story contest from 1985.

That was about it for the hits. I tried Hotbot, but was only amused to see "Great prices on ""Glenn Dubois"" at eBay!"

The internet is a strange place indeed...

Thursday, April 11, 2002 07:52 p.m.

www.adcritic.com

Well, things are looking up for adcritic.com. They've been bought out and the new site is up and running, although you still can't download commercials yet.

If you want to demand that they post commercials again, email them at adcritic.com. I sent mine in - I really liked being able to download the Budweiser "Wassup?" commercials and others.

I would think that companies would enjoy the free advertising, and many of them still don't offer video downloads on their own websites.

So send in those emails!

Tuesday, April 9, 2002 09:21 p.m.

The New Morpheus Revisited

DISCLAIMER: Unless you own the copyright or have permission from the original copyright owner, using file-sharing programs to download copyrighted works may violate copyright laws and you may be subject to payment of damages and other remedies. If you are unsure about your rights you should contact your legal advisor or visit The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)'s Copyright Laws page concerning digital music.

The New Morpheus, a.k.a. Morpheus-sp, doesn't do nearly what the old Morpheus did. Which is what Kazaa still does. Time to put it to rest and delete it from the hard drive.

Especially when after running it for 10 minutes, it reboots my machine. That may be particular to my computer, but it's totally unacceptable and worthless to me.

R.I.P., Morpheus. There are better file-sharing programs out there that tie into the Gnutella network.

Wednesday, April 3, 2002 07:48 p.m.

New website and Trademarks

Well, I finally acquired my own internet domain - duberweb.com. It was up and active as of 02 April 2002.

Also had my first run-in with the US trademark office.

I registered the trademark "duberweb.com," duberweb, and my logo for an embarrassing amount of money.

And I have to comment on the host, Earthlink. They waived the domain registration fee and the startup fee, and are hosting the site for only $20 a month.

Although there was some holdup with site registration, I have to say that the young lady in customer service was very curteous and helpful. She resent an email that I'd lost, allowing me to log into my site, and re-submitted the domain registration.

The next day, the site was up. I'm still having trouble creating email aliases, though. I've emailed them and I'm sure they'll set me straight soon.

</shameless plug>

Thursday, March 20, 2003 06:59 p.m.

New and (Un-)Improved Morpheus

Well, MusicCity has released their latest version of Morpheus.

Morpheus is a file-sharing program similar to Napster, but allows sharing of audio, video, text, and software.

Seems that the engine behind it, Gnutella, changed its source code and the older version, similar to Kazaa, was incompatible.

The new version takes away a lot of features. Gone are the sort by filename, size, status, speed, etc. It also doesn't allow searching by category anymore.

There are many more tabs and you can view more than one tab at once by selecting check boxes. However, the queue is constantly updating and files change postion based on some unknown sort.

This means that right-clicking on a file to select options like "Re-Search" is almost impossible when you have more than one box checked. Overall, Morpheus is still an effective program; but with fewer features and not as user-friendly. Kazaa still seems to be the file-sharing peer-to-peer program of choice. Coming soon on my site is a full review of as many file-sharing programs I can find, install, and test. So far there are over a dozen.

Saturday, March 2, 2002 09:29 p.m.

All the News That's Fit to Post

A list of newsletters worth subscribing to:

Jacob Nielson's AlertBox - tips for web designers

CNET Download.com - latest software downloads
- CNET has one of the most extensive sites about computers and the internet. Their site download.com rivals ZDNet and their hotfiles.com.

Filebasket - more new software downloads
- another good site to find software demos, shareware, and freeware

FreewareWeb Online - lists and links for freeware
- The best place to find free software.

Gamespot - Latest video and computer game demos and reviews
- One of the few immense computer/video gaming sites left.

Lockergnome - Links to software and interesting sites
- Chris Pirillo is the host of TechTV's "Call for Help," and his insights and links are invaluable.

Steve Gibson's updates - learn about grc.com's new offerings
- Gibson Research Corp. is a site that will tell you all you ever wanted to know about security and privacy on the internet.

TechTV - Computer tips, links, and upcoming shows
- Read about shows you've missed and explore them online.

ZDNet Software Express - they find the good stuff for you
- One of the oldest, most massive and authoritative sites on computers and the internet. Ziff-Davis publishes the majority of PC magazines on the newsstands.

These are the newsletters I read most often, but there are others, so stay tuned...

Wednesday, February 27, 2002 09:18 p.m.

Where oh where has my software gone?

Received an interesting newsletter from GameSpot about abandonware.

Abandonware is commercial software from the past that is no longer available or supported by the publishers. Seems that some sites have archived the programs and/or linked to available downloads.

The best site out there by far is The Underdogs. Not to be confused with the cartoon character Underdog, whose theme song is paraphrased in this entry's title.

This site's main content is computer games of all categories. Most are full version commercial games available for download or linked to sites where they can be purchased.

But with so many free ones, why buy any? Even instruction manuals are available. And since most of the games are old, they can be run on ancient pre-Pentium™ machines.

So if you want to fill out your gaming collection at no cost, this is the site for you.

Happy downloading!

Tuesday, February 26, 2002 04:39 p.m.

Tales of the Bizarre

I subscribe to so many email newsletters, I'm never quite sure of the source of some of the links I visit and bookmark. Most are probably from Ziff-Davis Net Tech TV's Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome. Here are a few strange tales:

Useless Information has a story about "Headless Mike," the chicken who lived for a couple of years after having his head chopped off. Go there, do that, get the t-shirt...

Earthfiles, billing their site as "The Real X-Files," has an intriguing story about the Ghosts of United Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001.

Seems that the Rent-A-Cops (their company's real name - I kid you not) guarding the crash site have seen and heard some unnatural things. A local television reporter covering the story also had an interesting tale to tell.

They also have a story on crop circles that changed while researchers were present. The researchers remain very secretive about their new theory about magnetic resonance frequencies, however they do hint at an upcoming breakthrough...

"'Curiouser and curiouser!' cried Alice..."

Oh, BTW - where did I get that quote? From Project Gutenberg, a massive project whose aim is "to make information, books and other materials available to the general public in forms a vast majority of the computers, programs and people can easily read, use, quote, and search."

So there. I used a quote. Still, Alice in plaintext just isn't the same as a hardbound copy with original illustrations...

Monday, February 25, 2002 09:57 a.m.

I Want My MP3

I've been exploring the world of MP3s since even before Napster was first released and became front page news.

For the uninitiated, MP3 is short for another acronym, mpeg-3, which breaks out to Moving Picture Experts Group level 3. It's a lossy compression standard that cuts off any frequencies of an audio file (roughly) below 20Hz and above 20KHz, the normal range of human hearing.

Now that it's been squelched, users have had to look elsewhere for song trading. The pre-Napster way was to find an ftp site by using search engines or programs like PlanetMP3Find. Once you found a site, you had to use an ftp program like CuteFTP to log in.

Once logged in, you usually had to download a "leech.txt" file that explained how to upload files without having to download. Most had you visit a sponsor web page, which more often than not was an adult site welcome screen.

If you could get past that, music was free for the taking.

I'm sure these ftp sites are still out there, but an easier way is with other peer-to-peer programs. I've tried Bearshare, but seldom found what I was looking for, and people tended to log off before downloads were finished.

AudioGalaxy Satellite is a fairly good program, but doesn't tell you the bitrate of a file before you download. It's worth a shot if you can't find a song anywhere else.

Morpheus is by far the easiest and fully-featured file-sharing program. It isn't limited to MP3s, although there are gigs and gigs of them out there at any given time.

Despite the ethical and legal debates, I've found several benefits from these file-sharing programs:

My CD purchases have increased since I started (ever try to listen to a 128kbps song on your stereo?);
It's introduced me to music I wouldn't have otherwise heard;
I've been able to find other songs from artists I like, and what CD they're on (see item 1).

So of course, I only have MP3s of songs I own, although sometimes the owning part came after the download...

Quality is definitely an issue. If you're listening to songs on your computer, then 128k sounds okay. But if you want to rip songs from your CDs to burn a custom mix, you'll be happier with the frequency range and harmonics that 256k provides. The file will take up twice as much room (about 20% of a .wav file of the same song), but after you burn it to CD you can delete it anyway.

The title for today's entry is a nod to Bob Rivers, whose parody of Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing" has that title. Other hits include "I Can't Ski Babe" - ouch!

In the words of Jane Curtin, "Good night and have a pleasant tomorrow!"

Monday, February 25, 2002 12:15 a.m.

Pop-Up Killer

Well, I've been reading a lot lately about pirated software, and decided to see for myself whether it's as available and proliferant as the knee-jerkers say it is.

I decided to look for an old PC game - Moto Racer 2, so I typed it into a search engine in quotes along with the word "warez" afterwards.

Warez is the nickname for pirated software, and "gamez" the one for games. Others include "Appz" for applications.

Discoveries: Many of these highly illegal sites are sponsored by adult sites. So parents be warned - there are very explicit animated banner ads that will pop up in separate windows.

This type of web surfing requires advertisement killer software, such as Pop-Up Killer. Otherwise so many pop-ups will open up that it may crash your browser or even lock up your entire system.

So what was the end result?

Most of the sites had outdated or invalid links. These pages are quickly shut down by the host ISPs, probably as a result of complaints or legal threats. If you do find links that are still active, they will probably disappear in time.

Although I wasn't able to find the game I was looking for, I found that others were still available. Some sites require you to "vote" for them - a ploy that will gain them some points with sponsors that keep them up and running.

Some of these vote links will spawn other pop-ups when you close them, so Pop-Up Killer is definitely a must. Once you identify a url or site, the program will close the window automatically.

Conclusion: Found Moto Racer 2 at amazon.com for $14.99, and decided it was much easier just to buy the game. You can spend hours looking for gamez without any result, especially with older games. I decided it was much easier to stay on the right side of the law. And unless you're calloused in regard to what the internet underground exposes you to, be prepared for explicit shocks...

Altavista
Google
ZDNet Downloads