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Monthly Archive for July, 2007
My day job, Digital Pulp, is seeking an eZ Publish developer and a Ruby on Rails developer. Tell all your friends!
Remember Leo Stoller? Get caught up on The Story So Far here.
Well Lance Johnson has written in again to let me know:
If you or your readers happen to be in Chicago on July 24, 2007 the bankruptcy court will be conducting an auction of Stoller’s trademark portfolio and corporate stock. A newly formed company, The Society for the Prevention of Trademark Abuse LLC, has tendered a bid. All are, however, invited to attend the show and try to take home a piece of IP history.
Wow, does that sound like a good time or what? If you or someone you know is a writer and will be in Chicago on the 24th, this could make for a fantastic quirky feature story. Justice is brought to a 21st century con man via the mass auctioning of his intangible belongings. Surreal, hilarious, and awkwardly relevant.
The auction will take place in the courtroom of Judge Schmetterer at 221 S. Dearborn Street. One hearing is at 10 am, another is at 11:30 am.
Lance also sent along a few documents relevant to the case: Exhibit 1, Motion for Sale, Sale Procedures Order
Update: Looks like things have changed a bit. From Lance’s comment here:
The auction process has not yet been completed. Stoller has been given a last opportunity to provide documents to the trustee. These documents would have to establish an intrinsic value for each of the marks in Stoller’s estate and corporations that is higher than the bid offered. He has until July 31. (Stoller has testified numerous times before this judge that he did not have these documents. Where he plans to “discover” them is anybody’s bet although parties experienced in Stoller litigation will likely have a pretty good idea of where the documents will come from.)
The hearing on the sale will commence on August 7.
[snip]
date +%s | md5 | cut -c -12
Okay, the consensus in the comments seems to be that this does not make great passwords. I’m happy with its level of randomness, but of course I agree that only numbers and lowercase letters does not provide for maximum security.
Looks like there is a password generating program called pwgen, or to generate acceptably random passwords without installing extra software:
openssl rand 9 -base64
(btw– my purpose here is to generate passwords for things like mysql accounts, so they do not need to be human-memorable)
Whenever I set up a new OS X box I drive myself crazy trying to remember which part of the Apache config needs to be tweaked to allow symlinks to arbitrary parts of the file tree from the document root. /private/etc/httpd/httpd.conf includes
Options FollowSymLinks for Directory /, and it’s tempting to think that should take care of it. Then I remember that there are sub config files for each user on the system, in /private/etc/httpd/users/. These do not specify anything for FollowSymLinks, so again, it’s tempting to think that this property will be inherited from Directory /, but then we realize, the Options directive in this file overwrites any previous Options directives.
Anyway, the solution is to tack FollowSymLinks onto the end of Options Indexes MultiViews in your user config file in /private/etc/httpd/users/.
The only other things I need to change from the default OS X configuration is activating php in the main config and commenting out AllowOverride None in the user config.
On twitter, I couldn’t get johnjosephbachir. And jjb was already taken.
Sigh. But that’s okay, I kinda like johnjoseph.
In my post a couple days ago about why I hate Network Solutions, I held up directNic.com as a not-sleezy alternative to Network Solutions. A friend of mine, who wishes to remain anonymous, commented and pointed out that DirectNic is also sleezy. Here is said friend’s experience with directNic:
The directNic guy is a major domain-stealer / squatter who abuses his position as registrar to that end. Sorta like a domain-squatter with superpowers.
I ran into trouble with them when my [first initial, last name]@rice.edu email address expired. I had some domains with DirectNic which were soon to expire, but I had lost my DirectNic password. I figured it would be no big deal to contact them and have my account changed to [first initial, last name]@alumni.rice.edu; the same person, obviously enough. This is what I got in response:
Greetings,
First of all, you are not the owner of the directNIC account whose username is ‘[character name used in paper-based role playing game in 8th grade]’, and login information will ONLY be sent to the owner of a directNIC account. Thus, you must have the owner of the directNIC account to contact us. Please let us know if we can be of any further assistance.
Thank You
Khanh Ngo
DirectNIC
At the time, I didn’t understand why they were stonewalling me. I didn’t care to deal with the attitude so I figured I’d just let my domains lapse. I backordered with another service, and I waited.
As it turns out, that’s exactly how DirectNic’s scam works. When a customer’s domain lapses, they don’t release it like you’d expect. Instead, they transfer it to a shell company and hold it for ransom. I didn’t want to suffer the indignity of buying my own domains back, so I switched all my sites to new domains instead.
I searched google and found that the same thing had happened to other people, such as this guy.
Holding expired domains for ransom isn’t the only way DirectNic abuses its power as registrar. It appears that they also register domains based on search results.
Anyway, that’s my experience with DirectNic. It’s been years now, and a directNic shell company is STILL squatting on one of the domains I registered through them.
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