All posts by Matt

Fray Day 7

Essays, Events

I'll be at Fray Day 7I’m going to participating in Fray Day 7 here in Houston tonight at 8 PM. I’m a “featured speaker” tonight and I’m going to be telling a story I call “The Little Red Button That Changed My Life.” Several friends have already expressed an interest in coming and I’m looking forward to seeing everyone. It should be a lot of fun for everyone involved. I know Robert Nagle has worked very hard in putting all this together, my Dad told me he heard the event mentioned on the radio Friday morning.

To be honest though I’m scared to death.

Where? The Nexus Cafe (Walden Internet Village) is located on 2828 Rogerdale, 2nd floor (between Richmond and Westheimer).

Two Great Shows

Jazz, Music

Radiohead was really exciting. The Chronicle has a review, but like most stories there it’s painful to read and I doubt that link will last as long as this entry is on my front page. Our seats were on the lawn and we were a bit to the left and back. We had a good clear view of the stage but couldn’t see too many details, though certainly everything came through. I would have liked te been closer to see how some of the effects were done, but maybe next time. They went through old and new songs, starting with some of the latest ones from Hail to the Thief and moving forward. There were a few flubs, such as Yorke skipping a section on 2 + 2 = 5 one or two other minor things that I doubt too many people noticed. My only complaint would be that with several songs they would end with a solo usually from the guitarist on the right (I can’t think of his name at the moment) but you could tell it was the end of the song and the energy was dying around him as he was trying to build up his solo. It would of been nice if they took a cue from jazz and went from a solo back into the melody or some sort of chorus to end the tune and keep the energy up.

The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra at Jone’s Hall last night was one of those musical experiences that will stay indelibly burned in my memory for a long time. I had been looking for tickets and the day before my uncle called asking if I’d like to go with him, row B right in the center. Close enough to hear the musician’s sounds and not just the amplification, I was blown away. Every soloist and every piece was top-notch. The highlight of the evening, besides of course Houston native and HSPVA grad Andre Hayward’s music, was Eric Lewis’ piano. I have never heard of this man before, nor can I find anything on the web. Throughout the concert whenever Wynton introduced him he prefaced his name with what sounded like “Top Professor” which I’m sure means something, but I’m not sure what. Lewis’ solo on A Love Supreme’s Resolution was so intense and captivating that I was completely taken away by it in a way that music effects you only a few times in your life. The personnel of the group was different in several regards from the program, but that’s to be expected with the dynamics of a touring group and the fact that the programs are printed months before. If you have a chance to check out the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, do so. Highly recommended.

Ongoing

Jazz, Music, Personal

I usually write entries in my head before I put my fingers to the keyboard. The problem with this is that the longer I go between entries, the more that I try to cram into my mental post and inevitably the more that’s lost.

When you last left your Author he was gearing up for the second night of the Kemah Jazz Festival. It was fantastic, as expected, and he had good fun with the company. Tim Hagans made a guest appearance on Woody Witt’s set and it was the highlight of the night. Ended up leaving a little bit early due to tiredness, and slept well.

Saturday started with leftover pizza from Star Pizza, which, in hindsight, was most likely bad. Your Author was very, very hungry and ignored the fact that it tasted a little funny (it was vegetarian “gourmet” pizza anyway) and he was already on the way to rehearsal. By the end of the dress rehearsal with Steve Fulton things were queasy. But not too queasy to miss Kathy and Christine‘s birthday party that night, to which he was accompanied by Elissa. Too queasy to eat much there save a taste of really nice meat stick from Coffee “BBQ” Mike and a slice of cake, both of which were sorely regretted later.

Saturday night and Sunday morning were very harsh, and will not be discussed. Many thanks to my angel of a mother who helped smooth things over.

Sunday the Author was still sick, but knew he couldn’t miss the gig at Kemah, so went and played anyway. It went well, and many thanks to those such as Cody, Elissa, Greg, Sarah, and the others that attended. Food was still a bad idea though, and the trip had an early end. That night the fever came back strong and not much sleep was had.

Monday was a day of recovery. Tuesday was a return to normal affairs and catching up with things.

Which brings us to today. Things are very busy with many projects, but that’s par for the course. Tonight is the Radiohead concert which I’ve been looking forward to for months it seems. The weather is gorgeous. Can’t wait.

Kemah Jazz 2003

Jazz, Music

As I may have told some of you already, I’m performing in the Kemah Boardwalk Jazz Festival again this year. This year I’m performing with a different (and honestly much better) group than I did in previous years. So on Sunday from 2:10–3:00 I’ll be on the Kemah stage, jazzin’ it up. An interesting note about this performance is that I’m going to be making my public debut on flute. So if you can make it down come and say hi to me before or after the gig and we’ll chat.

If you’re interested in seeing some of the other performances as well this weekend probably the closest thing to a good schedule online is at JazzHouston. I have some pictures from last night’s performance forthcoming. All of the music was fantastic, and I really mean that. One of the non-music highlights of the night for me (besides the beautiful sky and good pizza) was Dennis Dotson saying my name from the stage as part of troubleshooting some amplicification problems. It’s the little things. 🙂

If you need any more information, feel free to contact me. Don’t be shy, no one else is: several days ago I got a call on my cell phone from a number I didn’t recognize. I said hello and an unfamilar voice asked me if I had this year’s schedule for the festival. Apparently from a search engine she came across last year’s schedule and assumed I was the authority to contact, on my phone nonetheless, for this year’s. I directed her to a website or two that would have more current information than mine. It was certainly an interesting experience, but now I’m faced with problems of transparency. I want it to be as easy as possible for my readers to get in contact with me, except when I don’t. We’ll see how this works out. Of course it never would have been a problem in the first place if the festival had a decent website or the schedule available in a non-graphic form. What if a blind person wants to go and can only get to the schedule through the web? I guess they’re out of luck. The festival organizers are very open to suggestions though, and I’m sure if this issue is brought to their attention they’ll address it, it just probably hasn’t occurred to them.

When Jish Comes to Town

Essays, Personal

It seems lately that the prolific Jish can’t get enough of Houston. He was just here last month and this Wednesday he made another appearance. (It’s even rumored he may be back next month.) Last time we all met at the Crazy Cantina and that was the plan for this month but apparently they were a little too crazy over there so the Cantina is no more. Christine luckily found this out last week and moved the party down the street to Cabo’s. There still wasn’t quite enough air conditioning (or maybe the company and conversation was just too hot) but it was all in all pretty cool as we got an entire room to ourselves. (For better or worse, some people had trouble finding it.)

There was just too much going on that night to even begin to cover it all but I’ll add that my photos from the night are now online.

Other posts about the night:

Note: I posted the first of what I hope to be many stealth disco movies to that album, but it’s too dark and I can’t figure out how I could adjust the levels to lighten it. If you have any suggestions regarding this please let me know.

Design SIG Meeting Tonight

Web Standards

I just wanted to let everyone know I’m going to be presenting tonight at the web design special interest group at HAL-PC. I’m going to be covering advanced CSS layout techniques, why CSS is easier for making sites, Topstyle 3, and we’re going to do a brief makeover of someone’s site at the meeting. I’ll be going through my personal methodology in making a standards-based website and redesigning legacy sites. If you have been struggling in trying to move away from table-based design or if you’d just like a free critique of your website, come out. The meeting is free and open to everybody.

Here are the details:

When? Tonight, September 18th, 7:00 PM.
Where? HAL-PC Headquarters, 4543 Post Oak Place Drive, Suite 200 Houston, TX 77027-3103.
Why? To learn and have fun.
How do I get there? Use the map linked above. Easy directions: Take 610 and exit San Felipe, head inside the loop (East) and then take a left at the first intersection. You will come to a stop sign, then pass Microcenter, and then at the second stop sign take a right. Go on that street until it dead ends in a loop, on the right end of the loop there’ll be a driveway going to an underground garage. Park, take the elevator to the second floor, and then the only office there is the HAL-PC offices. Once you’re in the office if you have any trouble finding the room we’ll be in just ask any of the friendly volunteers and they’ll point you in the right direction.

If you have any questions just drop me an email before the meeting and I’ll send you any additional information you might need.

Clever New Comment Spammer

WordPress

I think I’ve been hit with a new kind of insidious comment spam. At about four this morning I got a comment on an old entry that said:

Well, I just wanted to sign a blog on the first time in my life :))

Kind of cute, right? Isn’t that nice that some guy, “James Hatchkinson,” came across my site and was so enamored that he decided to leave a comment, his frist ever. Well, two minutes later the exact same comment, URL, and name was left on the WordPress blog. Clue #1.

The URL he left as his with his comment is nositeyet.com, which I’m not going to link because this may be this spam’s whole point. I clicked the URL from the comment before realizing it was probably just a newbie way of saying “I don’t have a site yet.” People I know have left similar things for their URL in the past. Well, the link takes you to some sort of web company with a hideous flash intro and an equally mediocre web site. Hmmmmm. Clue #2.

Clue #3, each comment came from radically different IP addresses. Let’s give this guy incredible benefit of the doubt and say just maybe he was a newbie user who just came upon an old entry, left a silly comment with what he thought was a fake website, and then continued browsing to another one of my sites, went to a slightly old entry, and left the same comment. So why did his IP change? The first comment came from 195.200.168.250, which resolves to anaconda.pacwan.net, and the second from 80.58.4.44, which is a proxy of some sort. Most users, especially the type that would leave this sort of comment, don’t randomly start using proxies mid-browsing. Strike three.

Finally, I decided to look up this guy’s IP in my access logs, to see what pages he visited. There were no records of his IP visiting any pages on either site in my PHP/Javascript based logging software, which means whatever client was used to leave this comment doesn’t support javascript or the <noscript> tag and images. Time to grep the raw logs. No referrer, none of any of the usual signs you would see in a log entry. Here’s the relevant lines from my photomatt.net logs:

80.58.4.44.proxycache.rima-tde.net - - [18/Sep/2003:04:03:50 -0500] "GET /p644 HTTP/1.0" 301 303 "-" "Mozilla/4.0(compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"
80.58.4.44.proxycache.rima-tde.net - - [18/Sep/2003:04:03:54 -0500] "GET /p644 HTTP/1.0" 200 15796 "-" "Mozilla/4.0(compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"
80.58.4.44.proxycache.rima-tde.net - - [18/Sep/2003:04:03:56 -0500] "POST /b2comments.post.php HTTP/1.1" 302 5 "-" "Mozilla/4.0(compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"

And from wordpress.org:

anaconda.pacwan.net - - [18/Sep/2003:04:01:35 -0500] "GET /development/archives/39 HTTP/1.0" 200 7220 "-" "Mozilla/4.0(compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"
anaconda.pacwan.net - - [18/Sep/2003:04:01:40 -0500] "POST /development/b2comments.post.php HTTP/1.0" 302 0 "-" "Mozilla/4.0(compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"

There’s got to be a good story behind this. If this is indeed malicious comment spam then this is the most clever I’ve seen yet. If I hadn’t been the author of two posts he spammed and gotten the email notification I never would have suspected a thing. Has anyone else seen this?

What’s worrying about this whole thing is IP filtering (reactive) techniques that are usually used to block comment spam or content filtering (proactive) techniques which we’ve been experimenting with on WordPress wouldn’t catch this guy. In fact I can’t think of any good way to preemptively block this sort of thing. If Google didn’t give blogs so much credence we wouldn’t be having this problem. I suppose now we have to watch every comment with an eagle eye, on the lookout for anything suspicious.

Update: I got it reversed above, “he” commented on the WordPress blog first and then here.

Assorted

WordPress,

A little of what’s going on in the corner of the world wide web I frequent:

Structure Updates

MRT, Web Standards

Just to update on some of the latest changes going on around here as part of the redesign.

The biggest changes have come as part of the new “photos” section. In moving the photolog from /p/ which I consider (in hindsight) to not be the best URI I thought about what sort of photographic content I have on the site now and what I’d like to have in the future. In my mind three sections came to mind, the photolog, selected series of works, and old photos. I’ve experimented with putting older photos into the photolog but it doesn’t really work well with the reverse chronological organization of the albums. Plus as part of my moving I’ve dug up a ton of old pictures that I’d love to scan and archive online. The series idea never really developed beyond the first two I did (and it’s built on the structure of the photolog) but I really like the idea of it and I’d like to keep it around. For instance it’d be interesting to do a “Best of 2003” series at the end of the year, or something similar. (Though the thought of choosing a dozen or two from over 7,000 photos is a little intimidating.)

The re-coding of the photolog itself is actually going much better than I thought it would. Finding things in Gallery can be frustrating sometimes, but I’ve managed to get the vast majority of the program completely free of tables, simple syntax errors, and it’s now using a CSS-based design. I am using one hack to get XHTML 1.1 validation, but it’s because of a bug in PHP that I will devote an entire post to. As soon as I finish cleaning everything up for the photolog section I’m going to copy the code over and use it to power the classic photos section.

I’ve been recoding many of the titles of pages to use the new CSS image text method, and I enjoy the results. When I recently upgraded to PHP 4.3.3 something changed in the Freetype library and now the letters are rendering at what seems to be a lower weight, which is a pleasant surprise because they were a little chunky before. I have no idea why it would do this. Unless perhaps a newer version of Freetype could better understand the font file, which I suppose is the only explanation.

I changed the text image generator script to turn underscores to spaces instead of hyphens. Though I like hypenated “filenames” better the problem came in the photolog where there were actual hypens needed in the titles, so having those translated to spaces was a little funky.

Finally I’ve done a little work on the jazz quotes section of the site. Although I have been neglecting it lately, these pages account for a good fifth of the traffic to this site and it’s really the only resource of its kind on the net. For some reason before I would seperate the first and last name in the URI with a period, which messed up some simplistic traffic analysis software (what sort of extension is .Coltrane?) but it’s what I chose for whatever reason. I’ve updated all the new URIs to use hypens instead of periods, which is much cleaner in my opinion. There are so many links to these pages and so much search engine traffic that it would just be stupid to break any of the links. Of course the old URIs still work, though I haven’t set them up to serve a permanent redirect yet, they just return the page like before. This section still needs a lot more work, in its styling and also just in the backlog of submitted quotes I have to catch up with.

The Zeitgeist has been updated to no longer return script errors, but it isn’t cached so it’s very slow, and it needs to be restructured.

Whip Gallery Into Shape

MRT, Web Standards

For too long this site has been beautiful XHTML 1.1 served with the correct DOCTYPE and MIME type save for one section. One major section, with thousands of pages. The photolog. Part of it has been that Gallery is so inflexible I have to make extensive modifications just to get it to look like the rest of the site. The logic and presentation is all a mess in the code, and it’s quite invalid out of the box. Well, version 1.4 has just been released, and I can live with that until 2 comes out, so I’m going to use 1.4 as my baseline and get it 100% valid to the point I can serve the pages with application/xhtml+xml without fear of the pages not working. Wish me luck. The photolog may look quite funny during the process, but give it time and it should be back to its rosy and frequently updated self.