CC in Sydney

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CC left a comment on one of Claire’s blog postings. The message seems harmless, but asked for information about where Claire lives. The e-mail address also looks a bit suspicious, and the MovableType spam rating did not like the i.p. address of the sender.

Since you should never give out personal information to someone you don’t know, I sent the e-mail below from my junk e-mail box. This could be a mendacious adult posing as a kid, but in the event it is a real kid, I thought it would be nice for her to get a response.

I really can’t think of a way for one kid to prove they’re a kid unlesss they meet in person or they have someone they know in common. Can you?

— Fishback wrote:

> Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2005 04:06:39 -0800 (PST)

> From: Fishback

> Subject: Hello from CC’s Dad

> To: [email protected]

>

> Thank you for your recent blog post. I’m CC’s Dad and I do not allow her

> to e-mail strangers. You asked her on your post where she is from. She

> lives in the southeast United States.

>

> I don’t know how two kids on the internet can prove they are kids and not

> someone trying to trick another kid, which is ashame.

>

> Hope the weather is nice in Sydney. We are very chilly here.

>

> Thanks for leaving a post!

>

> CC’s Dad

A Google Trap

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I’m posting this link for Google’s robot to find. I want it to follow the link and update the old page it has stored in cache. If this works, it will remove a resume I had posted back in 2002 (when I did not know Google was indexing Mac5.)

Here little google google google… (whistle)…

Snapz Pro X Screen Capture

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Mac OS X comes with a good screenshot utility called “Grab”. It lets you snapshot anything you see on screen and save it to a file. This is good for sharing quick snapshots in a report, e-mail, or blog. The problem is Grab only saves in a TIFF format. This large file format (high resolution) is good for printing, but not too good for e-mail, and useless on the web.

Ambrosia Software, makers of terrific games we’ve been playing on Macs for decades, makes a utility that puts Grab to shame. Snapz Pro X not only helps you grab a piece of photo or graphic, but you can add borders and effects on the fly and save the result in any format. (Typically jpg for photos and gif for graphics.)

The $29 version does everything I need. But the $69 will let you record movies, portions of movies, or just anything happening on the screen. This would be good for computer training videos or recording pieces of Uncle Bob’s homemade DVDs. (Of course it would be bad to record rented movies, but Snapz does that good.)

Having a good screenshot utility may be the easiest way to quickly share one or two photos so you do not have to get into exporting, resizing, etc.

Kelly and Claire will enjoy using SnapZ Pro X…

Kec-Halloween-05-Thumb
Pirate Zombie Clown

MCC-Halloween-05-Thumb
Princess Ballerina and Friends

Now playing: Three Marlenas by The Wallflowers

Googling T

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After reading Ted’s single letter posting, I wondered what would happen if I Googled the letter “t”. While Ted’s blog posting did not appear (yet) a little chart and stock quote for AT&T did. It turns out you can type any stock symbol in Google and get a quick chart and set of statistics.

Google-T-1

Google has a number of special searches like this. If you google my phone number it will show my name, address, and a map to my house! Scary.

I often use Google to do math and conversions. For example “cups in a gallon” or “feet in 5 miles” or “195435 kilobytes in megabytes” will automatically go to the Google calculator. Kelly reported last night that she has grown three centimeters since her birthday. Kathy and I both responded that we don’t talk metrics. I Googled “3 centimeters in inches” just to find out how much Kelly has grown…

Google-3Centimeters-1

Find out about Google’s other special features under Google help: www.google.com/features.

Now playing: Perpetual Change by Yes

Favicon Maker

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A “favicon” (favorite icon) is the small graphic that appears in front of a URL in an address bar. A web designer creates it and puts it in one or more of the web directories, typically naming it favicon.ico. It will also appear next to a favorites link. Many browsers will look for it, but to help guide browsers, an html line can be added in the header information:

<link rel=”icon” href=”favicon.ico” type=”image/x-icon”>

macfive-favicon.gif

I recently redesigned the mac.fiveforks.com favicon. It appears above (and should appear in your browser.) It is based on a FiveForks logo I’m working on. More on that later.

I used this on-line utility to create the favicon:

www.chami.com/html-kit/services/favicon/

Google Analytics

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Google is now giving away a free web analysis service. There is a limit to how much it will report unless you have Google Adwords (buy advertising.) It isn’t clear to me that our use of AdSense applies for the “no cap”, but I’m testing with Mac5 and will report.

From the official Google Blog: Circle of Analytics.

Now Serving: Seekers of Barbies and/or Trolls

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Ted and I have noticed in the Awstats web log analysis software that there are two words that bring more people to mac.fiveforks.com by far than any other words. While phrases like “unlock itunes” or “estonian girls” or “harry potter and the half blooded prince” are popular reasons people end up here, they pale in comparison to either of these two words:

trolls
barbies

In October, 252 visitors arrived from search engines looking for “trolls” while 227 visitors arrived because of “barbies”. We quickly figured out it had to do with the story of the Nekid Barbies and Trolls posted with a pretty funny photo. We figured the photo had something to do with it. Or maybe the word “nekid”. But we could not find this blog posting ranking very high in the search engines. Why were so many people finding the posting?

Today Ted figured it out. If you go to www.yahoo.com and click on the “images” tab, you can search for photos. You can type in either the word “trolls” or “barbies” and guess what photo has the #1 position!

I can only imagine that clicking on thumbnails in a Yahoo images search somehow moves a photo up in rank. If a lot of people click on it, then it must be what people are looking for, so move it up. Because our thumbnail (a row of flesh-colored nekid barbies with a troll) is unusual, it must have gotten a lot of clicks over time. It is now #1 and getting even more clicks because of that.

This is called an asset ready to be exploited.

Why has this article not generated more ad revenue? It turns out the link on Yahoo is to an old archive version (using the path and file name /archives/000709.html) instead of the newer archive structure (2004/05/nekid_barbies_a.html.) The older article did not have google ads, and it did not even display correctly because it was in the old template structure that did not work very well with the new css styles.

I’ve now replaced the 000709.html file with a nice new clean copy and added an extra google ad at the top. The money should start rolling in shortly. We could build a barbies / trolls empire off of this thing. Kathy is already checking eBay, looking for a wholesaler of troll dolls.

Now playing: Money For Nothing by Dire Straits

GMail’s Lead Engineer

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Comments on e-mail and Gmail from the lead engineer, Paul Buchheit. Our family has migrated to Gmail from Lotus Notes. Spam was getting awful, and because Gmail offers so much storage, I decided it made sense to outsource the whole problem of e-mail (technical) management to a company that is not likely to go away any time soon.

The “Conversations” concept is a real improvement in keeping track of the back-and-forth around a thread of e-mails. The new auto-save mode is TERRIFIC, especially given the problems with losing what you’ve typed in a web browser. Gmail saves whatever you have typed every minute or so. Your message sits in draft mode in the event you lose a connection.

Official Google Blog: Guess what just turned 34?