Encrypting Shell Scripts - The Community's Center for Security

Here's a hack that shows a way to encrypt scripts: Encrypting Shell Scripts - The Community's Center for Security

This pairs nicely with gzexe, which compresses scripts (and other executables)
[thanks Kevin].

Googling TV shows

Jeff McWhirter just pointed me at Google Video, which indexes closed-captioning
for TV shows. Cute.

I was showing Lyn Bloglines, when I heard Jeff talking about Bloglines at the
table behind me. I turned around and said, "We're talking about the same thing."

Cookin' With Google

Here's a tasty little hack.

Cookin' With Google helps you use up what's in your fridge.

You give it ingredients you have at hand, and the kind of meal you want to make -- Atkins, crock-pot, diabetic, vegetarian, whatever .... It constructs a Google query and returns you a list of recipes to look through.

Quoth the author, "Send some feedback if you've got some recipe type ideas."

Bloom filters

Learned about Bloom filters from Chris and Jonathan last night.

It's a probabilistic way of determining set membership: very fast, but with some frequency of error.

Given a Bloom filter, there's no way to enumerate the members of the set from the filter, but you can use the filter to test, quickly, whether something's in the set. There are no false negatives. The rate of false positives is configurable. If the universe is large, and the number of set members is small, this can be very useful.

(If the universe is small, then, obviously, you can enumerate the members of the set by just testing everyone. If the universe is large, and the number of set members is huge, then testing is inefficient and the size of the filter is huge.)

Trackback autodetection

Added trackback autodetection. If you do that sort of thing, then this is the
sort of thing that you do.

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

Do you think these guys have an esneSdA program?

I particularly like the "Google mirror."

Text Ads

I didn't like the graphical ads I was seeing, so I went to Google AdSense and looked at how to change the template to say "text ads only."

Tinkering with blogrolls

Just to see what would happen, I organized my blogroll into folders, over at Bloglines. Yes sirree, Bob, the folders show up as subheads on my blog. I had to mark the "Private" folder itself as "Private," to keep from having an empty subhead. Other than that, it work just fine

Ads On!

Got the Google AdSearch and AdSense stuff turned on and stuck in the template.

Google Ads

I just applied for the Google adsense program. This means that in a couple of days,
assuming they approve, I'll see what that's like.

Lots of prep but no content for this site so far. Do I have a plan? An ulterior motive?
Nope. I just want to be ready for when I do. "Chance," said Pasteur, "favors the prepared mind."

Of course, he said it in French:

Dans les champs de l'observation, l´hazard ne favorise que les esprits préparés

Blogrolling

Okay, I've now figured out how to add the blogroll from my bloglines account to the blog.
This is actually starting to look presentable.

Technorati stuff

I registered at Technorati and added that to my list of blogs at Bloglines. All this, again, from the practical advice on blogging to be found at Evangelical Outpost.

I notice bizarre visits in Sitemeter. Ah well. Just goes to show that if you let people search your site, they will.

Making it public

I've made the blog listed, and added an email address to my profile.
I removed a couple of posts that now seem irrelevant to this particular blog.
Also, the date's not quite right.
The little quick-edit icon seems to have disappeared, as does my previous post, about sitemeter.com.
Let's see if this shows up.

sitemeter.com

On the advice of Evangelical Outpost (which I went to because of Hugh Hewitt's Blog), I struggled and put up a site meter from Sitemeter. It mis-parsed my "+sitemeter" address form, and gave me a bogus error message when it tried to insert a site meter in my blog, but it's there.

I also stuck in a new email address, but it only shows up in the profile, not on the main page. The time now seems right, approxmiately.