September 2003.2

I’m not really doing much at the moment — just hanging out at the house. I had an awesome carnitas burrito today from Lucinda’s. I’ll miss that place when I have to go back down to LA next week. There’s not a whole lot going on so I don’t have much to say. Maybe I’ll go do something in San Francisco with Takeshi and Josh, if they’re free. I haven’t been to see my high school teachers in a while. It might be a good idea to pay them a visit.

Oh yes, I almost forgot. The family home page has gotten a little makeover and it now sports a weblog…that my mom updates. Seriously.

I found that using mod_rewrite to send an error 403 Forbidden code to web sites that attempt to link to my images isn’t that effective. The image will appear is a blank box in Internet Explorer which the casual surfer can right click on, copy the image location, paste it into their address bar and see the final image.

My new method for preventing hotlinking that I’ve installed on Webspiffy is much more effective because instead of serving up no image at all, it serves up a replacement image that draws attention to itself. This is good because the webmaster of an infringing site will remove the hotlinked image just to get rid of my replacement image. Of course, you can be as creative as you want with a replacement image, such as using a gigantic porn picture, but I like to keep it low key. I just serve up an image that says, This image is stolen!. Simple and effective.

My anti-hotlinking code now looks like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !stolen\.gif$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?yourdomain\.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ http://yourdomain\.com/images/stolen\.gif [R,L]

The replacement image should be saved to /images/stolen.gif relative to the web root. Feel free to use any image you want for the replacement image! If you use this code, please post a comment with an example. I love to see what people come up with. Enjoy!

Take a look at the new Power Mac G5 performance page and scroll down to the bottom. There’s a little section entitled “Science and technology genius.” This section is extremely relevant to modern science. I’ve used BLAST here at UCLA on occasion and the new G5 supposedly can do BLAST sequence match searches faster than any other machine. The same goes for HMMer. This is very good to know if you are in the Bioinformatics industry.

• These tests haven’t been confirmed by any major agencies, such as PC Labs. Therefore, it is unknown how credible the results are, but I’m sure they’re pretty accurate. Regardless, the G5 is a fast little machine and undoubtedly will help the emerging Proteomics industry.

I’m appauled by this new tactic by VeriSign to sign up new customers. Now when you try to access an unregistered domain name, you don’t get an error message. Rather, you get redirected to VeriSign’s domain registration page. Doug Bowman pointed this out today and is also very pissed off about SiteFinder. I totally agree with him that this is a ploy to take total control of future domain name registrations.

Casual surfers that wish to register a domain may not know that there are other alternatives, like my current favorite, Hostway. The funny thing is that VeriSign’s competitors often charge less than a fourth of the price that VeriSign does for the very same service.

Thankfully, ISPs are reacting to this move by VeriSign and are blocking the request redirects to the SiteFinder page by banning SiteFinder’s IP address. Within a few days, there should be no more SiteFinder and the web should go back to normal. However, this kind of behavior should not be tolerated from VeriSign.

I’m done with LS3 after having taken my final today at 10:00. I’m glad it’s over with. I’m head back to San Francisco this weekend — don’t know when exactly, but probably Sunday depending on whether or not I can find something to do tomorrow here in L.A. Not much else to say at the moment. Good night.

My final is tomorrow. Wish me luck.

Today is also the two year anniversary of September 11. Say a prayer for the families of the victims and take a moment of silence out of respect for the dead. Let’s hope nothing like this happens again in America.

It’s also my cousin’s birthday today. Happy birthday, Nick!

I met with Dr. Ken Bradley about doing SRP or a 199 project. He’s currently studying anthrax toxin receptors and trying to figure out a way to develop a drug that will block anthrax uptake. It’s very, very cool research. He took me through the lab today and showed me where they grow human tissue cultures.

I’m really looking forward to working with him this fall. It will be very exciting indeed. Tentatively I’m going to study the promoter region of the genome that codes for the anthrax toxin receptor and how it is transcribed — specifically, what activates transcription.

E-Icons lets you modify a number of the Windows shell icons. I’ve been trying to replace the default Windows folder icon for a while and I finally managed to do it with this program. I’m not big into theming Windows because it is resource intensive and tends to slow my computer down a little. Yes, WindowBlinds is a resource hog, even though they have improved it in recent years. StyleXP is a “hack” program that lets you run unauthorized themes in the Windows Themes panel. I’ve never been a big fan of that program because a lot of the themes are buggy.

No, I’ve always been happy with just changing my icons around. E-Icons lets me do that quickly and easily — I can even save my themes in the program. This is a must have for Windows users. I recommend downloading World of Aqua: CandyBar and using that for default Windows icons. There are some other great packs at The Iconfactory although it caters to Mac users. Many of the sets come with Windows XP icons.

Today marks the final week of Summer session for me. My test for LS3 is this Friday and afterwards I’m driving home. Until then, I have to study my butt off an attempt to get an A in the class, which has an extremely skewed curve. However, I’ve gotten A’s on all the tests (quizzes and midterms), and the final doesn’t sound like it will be terrible. However, I must prepare.

Good night for now — I’m off to hit the books.

I’m now officially hooked on news aggregators. I figured out how to get comics to display in FeedDemon. Yes, this has been around for a couple of months, but it’s new to me and I’m sure to many others out there. Tapestry is a site that specializes in comic RSS feeds. I don’t currently have a newspaper subscription at the apartment except for The Wall Street Journal, which doesn’t have comics in it. I’ve been in withdrawal. My roommate Adam asked me today if it is possible to syndicate comic strips in a newsreader. I told him about half an hour ago that I wasn’t sure, but I did a little Google hunting and sure enough, Tapestry came to my aid.

Another thing I’m loving right now is Chris Pirillo’s Amazon Feeds (link is in OPML format and requires a newsreader to open). You can bargain hunt on Amazon with your newsreader now. I subscribed to the DVD and Music feeds along with the top selling electronics.

God bless you RSS. This is going to catch on like wildfire. Just wait for AOL users to jump on the bandwagon, just like they are doing now with blogging.

Tapestry also has an OPML file which can be used to add all of the available comics in one easy click.