seven-3-five

Vimeo

2011-06-28T23:43:00.000-07:00

What I love about Vimeo:Interesting projectsWhat I hate about Vimeo:Really bad/insipid music and especially music videos - ugh!

A Few Animals on Robson

2010-12-03T12:20:00.000-08:00

I took this pic around Halloween on Robson Street. Kudos to the models for there tenacity: it was frigg'n cold. They could have been closer to the action though, they were too far west on Robson to get any real walk-by traffic.

Slocan Grow-op

2010-09-23T09:42:00.000-07:00

He, heh, he ...I'm sure that many of us snickered when we read the news that Slocan British Columbia's Mayor Madeleine Perriere's husband and two sons were arrested on grow-op charges. If true, its too bad they got caught. Kudos to Madeleine for sticking to the job at hand. Apparently she told the city council that it is a private matter and they stay on council business.B.C. bud, B.C.

Ginger Beer!

2010-08-24T15:19:00.000-07:00

Yield: 4 litresMethod:Boil 1 litre water in large potDissolve in 1 kg sugar Add in 250g minced ginger in cheese clothAdd in 6 tbsp concentrated lemon juice Boil 20 minutesRemove gingerAdd cold water to make 4 litresCool mixture (wort) to ~ 68-70FTransfer wort to 4l primary containerPitch 1 tbsp dry yeast into wort (champagne yeast is best, bread yeast the cheapest)Let ferment 4-5 days, until

Crop White-space From Images

2010-04-05T15:16:00.000-07:00

One of the most frequent batch tasks I have to perform is to crop the white-space on multiple images. I find that a quick and easy bash script that uses ImageMagick's convert function is the simplest option. This is what bash is great for for the casual user.ImageMagick is a suite of command line tools for manipulating images. You should be able to install it on most linux type distributions via

Guerrilla Ads

2010-01-12T22:38:00.000-08:00

So I'm on the broadway 98, and its packed. A guy sticks a few postcard show announcements above one of the exit doors. I have to like this, attitude can go a long way with me, when its the right attitude. Translink is feeling very draconian lately, and with the big olympic thing, the city is starting to feel like a police state. Why does every major stop need two cops handing out translink

Telus Yellow Pages

2010-01-06T12:00:00.000-08:00

Got the new Telus Yellow Pages directory today, and guess where it went: straight to the recycle bin. Ga....ro...an, what a waste Telus. I guess they think that they still need a paper edition delivered, because their website is completely unnavigable.

The Nobel Peace Prize...

2009-12-10T22:50:00.000-08:00

is now worthless. A mere Academy Awards type celebration. A group of elite that enjoys patting themselves on their own backs to justify their positions.A person that is the head of a warring nation, a person that is willing to send countless people to their deaths, does not deserve a peace prize.

Olympic Grade Ectasy

2009-12-10T22:34:00.001-08:00

Hmm, Olympic grade ecstacy. I wonder if the Olymp..., I mean Van..., I mean VANOC police will sue for trademark infringementPeace out Y'all

Elysian

2009-11-26T23:40:00.001-08:00

FYI, my fave new coffee hangout is Elysian, on Broadway @ Ash,upscale service, great beans.

There will be a lengthy delay …

2009-09-16T16:55:00.000-07:00

There will be a lengthy delay … Everyone's favorite announcement on the Skytrain, Vancouver British Columbia, The Best Place on Earth, or some such thing. 3:40 pm, Wednesday afternoon. Ugh, stuck on the Skytrain between Burrard street station and Waterfront. Lovely view of a chain link fence separating the tracks from an underground parking lot. Dark and dismal, Vancouver's famous Skytrain

Bridgeport Station

2009-09-09T21:04:00.000-07:00

U_GLY!!Lots of renta-cops too. They're pretty ugly as well. River Rock Casino is a stone's through away. I went in to pee and got the shakedown by the kid on guard duty.Lots of security around, isn't there? No public, just uniforms.This shot is from the bottom of the escalator looking out to the bus loop. Bleak, gray, enclosed, and u_gly!.Here is the one lone bench I could find in the

Obama

2008-11-04T23:12:00.000-08:00

Well there is no short of commentary on the election results. All I can say is thank-you America for coming out in such force. The first decade of the 21st century has been nothing but hell with Bush. We can now breath a collective sigh of relief now that Obama has ben elected. I say this as a Canadian. Thank-you America for finally doing the right thing. Best of luck Obama. I've had close

Frankie Venom d. Oct 2008

2008-10-20T18:19:00.000-07:00

This is how I remember Teenage Head and Frankie Venom. Got to party with the band once in North York.Frankie and the band lived the dream. They were a big part of my T.O. experience in the 80's. Sigh.

How ordinary people become monsters ... or heroes ( Philip Zimbardo )

2008-09-29T23:03:00.000-07:00

Truly an amazing talk by a great thinker. Zimbardo explores how ordinary people can become bad.

Gay Bashing In Vancouver

2008-09-28T19:57:00.000-07:00

Every once and a while the CBC releases a story on gay bashing in Vancouver. I am always surprised when I read something like this, as not only do I see Vancouver as extremely gay friendly, but the gay and lesbian community is in fact a vibrant and key part of this city's social make-up and flavour.The CBC's most recent story, concerning Jordon Smith is disheartening, especially considering

O Canada

2008-09-25T23:45:00.000-07:00

O Canada! Our home and native land! True patriot love in all thy sons command. With glowing heartsTM we see thee rise, The True North strong and free! From far and wide, O Canada, we stand on guard for thee. God keep our land glorious and free! O Canada, we stand on guard for thee. O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.VANOC, F.A.

Prejudice in Vancouver

2008-04-24T23:05:00.000-07:00

I'm hanging outside the Starbucks at Granville and Broadway in Vancouver waiting for a bus. I see an older gentleman, white, perhaps early seventies, take a seat on one of the benches near the bus-stop. He is wearing a baseball cap and a dark jacket with a hood. He sits for a while, then casually gets up an walks towards the collection of newspaper boxes on the corner. I'm mildly concerned

No More Vancouver Sushi

2008-04-03T23:12:00.000-07:00

Today I learned of a completely reprehensible and probably illegal practice of a particular Denman Sushi restaurant in Vancouver, British Columbia. Unfortunately I suspect that this kind of practice may be common in these types of restaurants.The practice involves hiring servers on the condition that the server will pay a 6% cash premium on all food bills. The owners justify this premium as a

RCMP Hides Taser Use

2008-03-24T18:30:00.000-07:00

More than 2,800 Tasers are in use across Canada. The RCMP are supposed to report each incident of use or threatened use of Tasers. Records recently released to the CBC and the Canadian Press have been stripped of information of Taser use. This information was previously disclosed during 2002-2005 under the Access to Information Act.The information that the RCMP did release shows that Taser use

More Hidden Costs for 2010 B.C. Olympics

2008-02-14T12:29:00.000-08:00

The B.C. government is offering partially paid leave to its 30,000 public servants if they volunteer for the 2010 Olympics.B.C. government employees who volunteer for the Olympics will be able to claim part of that time as paid leave, said Colin Hansen, the minister responsible for the Olympics.Hansen confirmed that in some cases the government will be hiring replacements for the paid

Another Taser Death

2007-11-18T11:37:00.000-08:00

Or, Another example of Canada's finest at their finest.Near the end of the clip, one of the officers takes his club and uses the end of it on Dziekanski. Nice one guys.It seems that the police are particularly jumpy in Vancouver. This taser death is not an isolated event. There is a long history of perceived police brutality in Vancouver, both with the RCMP and the local police force going

LiteFinder/1.0

2007-10-22T21:51:00.000-07:00

Host: 74.53.249.34Agent: Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; LiteFinder/1.0; +http://www.litefinder.net/about.html)This is a horribly mis-configured spam bot. Best bet: forbid the damn thing from your site

Canada's Finest

2007-08-24T21:15:00.000-07:00

This is how the police act in Canada. The three masked men in the video are actually police officers at a recent peaceful protest rally in Montreal Canada. Police officials originally lied about the officers and their roles: "Quebec's provincial force has flatly denied that its officers were involved in the incident." Yet a few days later:"The police admission came after several days of

Rizler Gets 30 years

2007-08-02T10:47:00.000-07:00

Christopher William Smith gets 30 years for his 24 million dollar internet drug pharmacy. His co-workers get lighter sentences for their roles.Just read the story at StarTribune.com.

Garbage in Vancouver

2007-07-24T14:44:00.000-07:00

Hey Sullivan,Why don't you put down your Olympic toys and do your job?For example, get back to the table with CUPE Local 15.Vancouverites are putting up with enough already, with the snarled traffic, and endless construction projects, never mind another extended garbage strike. So ya know what? F. your garbage plan.It wouldn't surprise me if that millennial mess on Cambie starts to look like an

TMCrawler

2007-05-31T22:27:00.000-07:00

Host: 128.241.20.206Agent: TMCrawlerThis bad-bot visited a site, grabbed the robots.txt twice and started to follow links at a very leisurely pace: just sub-directories over a couple of hours.Then it started to explore a directory in a systematic fashion. It picked a sub-directory and began a numerical search: /directory/0, then /directory/1, and so on. I caught this bad-bot quickly because I

Beware of Telus

2007-05-23T23:26:00.000-07:00

The future is not friendly. At least if you have an account with Telus, based in Alberta, Canada.Telus offers telephone, cell-phone and internet services for individuals and businesses in in Alberta and British Columbia, Canada; and web-hosting for anyone who will sign up with a credit card.Just try to close your account at the end of your service agreement, however. Telus keeps on charging

Bad-Bot Trap Revisited

2007-03-25T00:48:00.000-07:00

There seems to be an increase of late in bad-bot activity with new ips, and new user-agents. So I thought I would add a couple of ideas to flesh out my original A Simple PHP based Bad-Bot Trap that seems to be rather popular.I'm flattered that people are posting and collecting the links to this blog. But some scum are stealing the articles and posting them on their own sites: you who do so

Internet Explorer 7.0 (MSIE 7.0)

2007-03-20T23:59:00.000-07:00

So, after spending some time with Internet Explorer 7.0 ( MSIE 7.0), I can't decide if its a move sideways or backwards. From a user's perspective, it certainly is prettier than MSIE 6. Unfortunately it's 'security' features get annoying really fast. Try it and you'll see what I mean.From a web developer's perspective, its a pain in the butt. Though some of the problems of MSIE 6 have been

Trapped Bad-Bots

2007-03-18T14:12:00.000-07:00

2007-10-22Host: 74.53.249.34Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; LiteFinder/1.0;+http://www.litefinder.net/about.html)2007-10-18Host: 99.238.107.208Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)2007-10-08Host: 213.189.25.182Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET2007-10-06Host: 82.99.30.27Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)2007-10-05Host:

BadVista.org

2006-12-16T18:29:00.000-08:00

Before buying a new computer or moving to Vista, read what many techies already know and believe about the system at badvista.fsf.org

MSIE 7 More Security Problems

2006-10-19T12:33:00.000-07:00

Secunia.com has identified a security problem with the latest release of MSIE 7 which "can be exploited by malicious people to disclose potentially sensitive information." See details and sample test at http://secunia.com/advisories/22477.Best to use the better browsers like Firefox and Opera.

BBC HoneyPot

2006-10-09T11:23:00.000-07:00

The recent BBC article by Mark Ward describing an unprotected computer/honeypot set-up is nothing but a piece produced to create F.U.D. He describes how an unprotected XP computer is attacked repeatedly when connected to the internet. Of course, as with most tech articles produced by the BBC, the only operating system that seems to exist is Microsoft Windows.The weaknesses in his article are

PSI/Cogent yet again

2006-10-07T22:07:00.000-07:00

Host: 38.100.41.107Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows XP)Its getting tempting to just block everything in the range from38.0.0.0 to 38.255.255.255, because the only visitors I've ever seen from this range are scum spam bots. Typical user-agents include Snapbot, voyager, cfetch, Java, as well as MSIE poser bots. They always run into a trap though, as the one listed here, and that

The New iPOD WOW!! (or not)

2006-10-07T21:36:00.000-07:00

Red Hot Chilli Peppers, U2, and now . . . wait for it . . .Tetris!!Sorry Steve, iPod has officially lost its cool.Perhaps the movie business will save ya.

Nusearch Spider

2006-10-03T23:59:00.000-07:00

Agent: Nusearch Spider (www.nusearch.com)Host: 84.9.136.223The Nusearch Spider dropped by for a visit. It only followed the first ten top-level html links. It was not interested in going to other directories, and even tried to load directory-names as files by dropping the trailing "/" then ignoring the resulting redirect.The Spider obeyed some of the directives in the robots.txt, but not all. My

Missigua Spam Bot

2006-09-30T00:14:00.000-07:00

Host: 70.86.142.210Agent: Missigua Locator 1.9This bot reads links from top to the bottom on the page. After visiting the document root on a site, it quickly ran into a bot trap, actually the first link it followed. It then tried all the links on the page, but of course, was denied access. It did not read the robots.txt before trying to crawl the site.Whois RecordOrgName: ThePlanet.com

Setting Bad-Bot Traps

2006-09-21T23:06:00.000-07:00

In A Simple PHP Based Bot Trap, I presented a fairly simple script for trapping, well really excluding, robots or site rippers that either ignore or surreptitiously use a site's robots.txt file.The trap was set by adding a link to an excluded file (via robots.txt) on the main index page as bait for the bad-bot. The trap is hidden from the regular user through CSS styles and by using a dot (.)

Performance Systems International Inc. Bot

2006-09-19T12:26:00.000-07:00

Agent: Java/1.6.0-beta2 and Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)Host: 38.99.203.110Whois RecordOrgName: Performance Systems International Inc.OrgID: PSIAddress: 1015 31st St NWCity: WashingtonStateProv: DCPostalCode: 20007Country: USThis bot visited an unprotected site last July. It grabbed the robots.txt and then proceeded to download every link on the site, including

Un moyen élégant de piéger les robots indélicats

2006-09-16T08:44:00.000-07:00

Salut Spitfire, forum.phpbb-fr.com! Merci pour la traduction!Une trés simple trappe à mauvais robots qui piège à la fois les robots qui ignorent robots.txt et aux aspirateurs de site qui ne lisent pas robots.txt.Il existe de nombreuses versions de cette trappe. celle-ci n'est pas particulièrement sophistiquée, mais elle marche.Utilisez-la avec prudence pour être certain de ne pas éjecter des

Probable Spam-Bot 59.26.150.110

2006-09-15T22:04:00.000-07:00

Host: 59.26.150.110Agent: - (empty string)visited this week. Note the lack of a user-agent string. Initial searches suggest that this is a spam-bot trolling for email addresses.

Another Bad-Bot Falls into Trap

2006-09-08T16:56:00.000-07:00

Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows XP)Host: 63.100.163.70This bot, disguised as MSIE tried to rip through one of my sites, and ran right into a bot trap. It started off looking like a regular browser: it loaded the site's root index and the page's .css. It didn't load the robots.txt.Nevertheless, several things in combination gave it away as a disrespectful bot or ripper:It wasn't

Spammer Jeremy Jaynes' Conviction Upheld

2006-09-08T12:44:00.000-07:00

Jaynes' nine year conviction for violating US state of Virginia's anti-spam law was upheld by The Court of Appeals of Virginia on Sept. 05-06.The N. Carolina man was originally convicted of illegally flooding A.O.L. customers with bulk email ads.Jaynes is out on a million dollar bond, but the Virginia Attorney General's office would like the bond revoked so that Jaynes can start to serve his

My Favorite Emacs Feature

2006-09-05T23:27:00.000-07:00

Currently, my favorite Emacs feature has got to be its ability to edit remote files. This feature is so handy for editing web-sites, a daily event for me.Most web hosting companies do not give their clients access to a command line interface, i.e. ssh access, without them buying one of the more expensive packages, something I cannot afford. The basic packages do, however, usually allow ftp

A Simple PHP based Bad-Bot Trap

2006-09-04T23:52:00.000-07:00

A very simple bad-bot trap that catches both bots that ignore your robots.txt, and site rippers who don't read the robots.txt. There are many versions of this trap out there. This one is not particularly sophisticated, but it works.Use with care to make sure you don't shut out visitors that you do want, or worse, shut down your site.If you don't understand the following code, don't use it!P.S.

Matthew Garrett Moves to Ubuntu

2006-09-03T10:44:00.000-07:00

To bad that Garrett has left the Debian project ... but to Ubuntu? Sure there is a lot of old school type flaming at Debian, but Ubuntu is kinda creepy in a sort of scientology way.And what's with the Mandela connection?I tried out Ubuntu 6.06.1 desktop on my old ibook (G4). The live CD worked fine, actually really well. But for some reason after booting back into Debian, I no longer need to

Java Site Ripper

2006-09-02T20:37:00.000-07:00

A Java Browser,Host: 64.105.113.204Agent: Java/1.5.0_04tried to rip through one of my sites last week and ran right into a bot-trap. Now the browser and ip are banned.deny from 64.105.113.204RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^JavaRewriteRule ^.* - [F,L]

pyscheclone as MSIE

2006-09-02T19:57:00.000-07:00

The bad bot that originally appeared as psycheclone last June had another go at one of my sites, now disguised as MSIE.Host: 208.66.195.3Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322).Too bad you tried to grab the robots.txt: 403, then a video file, still 403!