Ted's Blog – Page 66 – Can't tell you more than I told you already?

Freaky Facebook Friends

This weekend Jeb convinced me to sign up with Facebook again. I had done this before for a couple of weeks before I just got spooked by the excessive connectiveness and lack of privacy. Then I got an ad saying Mom had recommended some kind of dating service, when she says she didn’t do that. So then it seemed to be all about me sharing tons of private information which was being used against me dishonestly.

When I signed back up, they hadn’t really deleted any of the old information or my friends from the last time. Even my password was the same. So the first thing I did was set my privacy settings so only friends could see what I am doing, then I got rid of most of my old friends who were mostly people from high school that I don’t keep up with and some of them I didn’t even know.

So I had things a little more under control. And I like being able to see what’s going on with the family. So maybe I’ll stick with it. But Facebook continues to freak me out. I got some friend recommendations like Facebook does. Usually they seem to be people who are friends with my friends, like Bob. But somehow there were two people with whom I didn’t have any common friends. One was the person who found the dog I fostered this year, and the other was a guy in California that I bought some flashlight parts from. What? I sent these people e-mails, so can Facebook read my e-mails that had nothing to do with Facebook and were sent after I left Facebook? Who knows? Maybe Yahoo is sharing my e-mails with Facebook. Or it could be these people are sharing their e-mails or contacts with Facebook, so Facebook knows I know them.

So Facebook is still awful, but I think I’ll stay with it for another day or two anyway.

Fighting the Russians, Part 2

In Part 1, I was fighting bogus membership registrations on my community bulletin board by blocking IP addresses and certain e-mail domains. It was fairly effective for a while, but lately I was getting 10-20 bogus signups and the blocked IP addresses, which I could see were blocking people every day, could not keep up. It was also a pain to look up an IP address (to see where they were coming from, usually Russia, Ukraine, Poland, etc., but also France, China, Africa, even places in the US that wouldn’t be interested in my bulletin board). Given all the different IP addresses using the same or similar e-mail addresses, I think the spammers were somehow spoofing IP addresses. They may have been using computers in other places that had been infected or something, but that seems unlikely just because it would be harder to do (though I don’t know how hard it is to spoof an IP address either).

So I got rid of the Captcha (the blurry letters or numbers that you have to read to prove you’re a real person) and added a plug-in that asks a simple question like “What is the capital of our state?” (that question has the advantage that anyone local will know the answer, but you can’t Google the answer). I had never installed a plug-in with MyBB, but it wasn’t that bad actually. I downloaded a file, unzipped it, and had to place about 8 files in the right place on my installation, and then I was able to use MyBB’s control panels to activate the plug-in and customize the questions. I tried registering a couple of times and was able to register by answering the question correctly. The control panel for the questions shows me the percentage of people getting the answer to the questions correct.

After a day, I have gotten no spam registrations (and no real ones either since the bulletin board is barely active), though my IP blocks still show they are blocking some people. I am not sure if the Captcha was hacked so that a bot could read those letters or if people were reading them and registering or some combination where people read the Captcha and then a robot does the registration. Whatever, I like that the Captcha is gone because sometimes I have a hard time reading those anyway, and answering the question should be really much easier and more effective.

Cher Ami

This is a trip through Wikipedia I took recently. Earlier in the week I was in Wilmington for a Peace Corps reunion and as we were driving by the airport, one of my friends asked me to look up the symbol for the Wilmington airport, which it turns out is ILM. He was wondering where that came from. The article didn’t say (I suspect WIL was already taken, so they took the ILM from Wilmington), but had some other neat facts like the airport is a backup emergency landing strip for the space shuttle if something happened during launch. Originally the space shuttle needed 10,000 feet to land, but they improved the brakes and only needed 7,500 feet, which allowed ILM to become a backup.

The article said that at one time the airport had been named Blumenthal Field for Arthur Blementhal. His article said he was an All American football player from Princeton and the first person from North Carolina to die in World War I when the plane he was flying for the French was shot down by German planes. For this he received his second Croix de Guerre. So I looked that up and it turns out the “War Cross” is a medal given to foreigners who distinguish themselves fighting for the French. A list of notable recipients of the Croix de Guerre included Cher Ami, a British homing pigeon in World War I used by American troops. So I had to click on that and read the story of the Lost Battalion in World War I, about five hundred men who had been cut off from their lines during the battle of Verdun and were being attacked by both the Germans and the allies and had no way of calling for help except by sending messages by homing pigeon. They released two pigeons who were picked off by the Germans, but the third, nicknamed Cher Ami, made it through despite also being shot, and eventually the Lost Battalion was saved (or about half of them, the rest were captured or killed). Once I read that article, I think I remember reading a story about Cher Ami in grade school.

The Bellamy Salute

The other day at lunch we were talking about the Pledge of Allegiance for some reason and wondering when it was written. I thought it was written in the 1800’s. So I looked it up on my iPod’s copy of Wikipedia. I was barely right: it was written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy. The article has a good history of the Pledge. It has been revised several times since. In 1923, they added “of the United States” apparently so immigrants would know they were pledging to our flag and not their old flag. Still not specific enough, I guess, they added “of America” the following year. I guess there was a lot of confusion about which United States people were pledging their allegiance. It wasn’t until 1954 that “under God” was added.

Anyway, the thing that really cracked me up was reading about a salute that was added to the Pledge by Bellamy himself, called the Bellamy salute or just the “flag salute.” He thought people should stretch out their right hand upwards towards the flag with their palm down as they began reciting the Pledge. This continued to be practiced until 1939 when President Roosevelt decided it looked entirely too much like a Hitler salute and instructed people to put their right hand over their heart instead.

Carmageddon and an Engineering Pioneer

NBC News has had a couple of stories about “Carmageddon” which is a nickname given to the closing of the I-405 Highway in Los Angeles. I wanted to see how long they would be closing the interstate, so I looked it up on Wikipedia and wound up on the I-405 page, which told they are only closing it for a weekend which doesn’t seem that bad to me. In the article is an old picture of two of the engineers on the project. What I knew was very unusual about the picture was that it was so old and that there were two women engineers involved, including the designer of the bridge (the other unusual thing is that the engineers are given any credit at all for the highway appearing).

I honestly don’t think Georgia had any women bridge engineers until the 1980’s. So this was pretty impressive, especially because this was a pretty major project, using complicated designs with primitive computers, and in one of the country’s worst seismic zones. I wanted to see if I could find out anything else about the bridge engineer in the picture, Marilyn Reece (on the left, in the white coat). A Google search quickly found her obituary from 2004 in the Los Angeles Times. They had a great write-up about this pioneer who was the first female civil engineer to become a Professional Engineer in California. They said she became an engineer because she liked math and didn’t want to be a teacher.