China Telecom Auto-blocker

About a month ago, the China Telecom here started blocking my DSL account from downloading web pages. One of their network techs told me they stopped allowing the read more…

Science Creative Quarterly

the truth, an ipod, and toilet seats

This website thing

The zhongdian guide has turned into an all-time-consuming passion recently. Working on it is a lot cheaper (money-wise) than the other candidate project I had in mind to entertain myself, namely renovating the house. I go through the day thinking, "how do I get more people to use the site? how do I get more people to find the site? what kinds of features do i need to add to encourage people to add content? i wonder if people would switch from so and so other site if i did this? read more…

This website thing

The zhongdian guide has turned into an all-time-consuming passion recently. Working on it is a lot cheaper (money-wise) than the other candidate project I had in mind to entertain myself, namely renovating the house. I go through the day thinking, "how do I get more people to use the site? how do I get more people to find the site? what kinds of features do i need to add to encourage people to add content? i wonder if people would switch from so and so other site if i did this? read more…

Spammer-Powered Distributed Denial of Service

Don't stuff beans up your nose, and I definitely do not condone anyone trying anything like this, but it seems like you could use the read more…

Music and Emotion

Justin tonight sort of implied that he didn't like electronic music because there's just that something about people getting in a group and playing together.

I thought about this on the way home tonight. A thought occurred to me: maybe I think of music as a carrier of sound as opposed to a carrier of emotion. So I decided to list music that I can remember evoking some kind of feeling in me:

read more…

Y Combinator Interview Result

Dev interviewed for us at Y Combinator today, but they declined to invest. It sounded like they wanted us to reposition more toward technology, which makes sense because they invest in a lot of technology solutions for technology users — that's where their expertise is. I'm glad we got the (binary) feedback that our story could still use work, but my internal jury is still out on their particular suggestion.

read more…

Y Combinator Interview Result

Dev interviewed for us at Y Combinator today, but they declined to invest. It sounded like they wanted us to reposition more toward technology, which makes sense because they invest in a lot of technology solutions for technology users — that's where their expertise is. I'm glad we got the (binary) feedback that our story could still use work, but my internal jury is still out on their particular suggestion.

read more…

tinyurl command line tool

Create an executable file called "tinyurl" in your executable path which contains something like:

#!/bin/sh
wget -q -O - \
-U "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.8) Gecko/20071008 Firefox/2.0.0.8" \
--header="Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,video/x-mng,image/png,image/jpeg,image/gif;q=0.2,*/*;q=0.1" \
--header="Accept-Language: en" \
--header="Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7" \ read more...

shopsafe and credit card fraud

interesting kind of clever credit card fraud, and this shopsafe thing sounds interesting if it’s available to anyone.