Actor, Comedian and Legend, George Carlin Dead at 71

George Carlin has died of heart failure at age 71, and the world is suddenly a less-funny place.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25322638/&GT1=43001

Email Posts from Blogger

Google offers an interesting capability which permits bloggers on its blogger.com service to create posts via email which are then sent to a specific address established the purpose.

Aside from the "secret" email address to which posts are emailed, there doesn't appear to be any other form of validation of the posts -- the prevailing notion appears to be "security by obscurity" on this one.

Then again, bloggers are provided the option of changing the "secret email address" through the Blogger.com settings of their account, so I suppose you could make adjustments quickly if problems are detected.

Nonetheless, I wonder if there will be a new form of spam attack on the horizon, derived from this very service from Google. That is, if the email addresses can be brute forced --and they CAN be-- then the doors are open to spam posts showing up on any Google-powered blogger blog near you.

Ideally, I would prefer to see Google at least accept a list of predefined addresses from which email posts are accepted (white list) -- I realize, of course, that sender email addresses are easily spoofed, but this is just another layer of security that has to be broken before the city gates to the blogging kingdom are thrown wide open.

I'm sure that compromised email accounts are already checked for sent messages destined for *@blogger.com.

If nothing else though, perhaps the default behavior for emailed posts would be for them to NOT publish automatically, and to await validation from the account owner.

All that said, Google may, in fact, also have some flood management methods in place to detect brute forcing of email posts -- if detected, perhaps email posts for a particular blog could then be disabled.

There's not much you can do when someone's email address is compromised and exploited.

Anyway, I'm just talking out loud here though, but I'll sign-off for now and proceed with emailing this post in.

Edit: Don't email your posts in Plain Text. Use RTF or HTML formating on your email client. Plain text formats funny when it arrives at Blogger.

Neat Little Google Maps "Hack"

On one of my professional list serves, I received this little tidbit -- its useful for determining the latitude and longitude of a particular spot on a Google map. You'll need to zoom-in on your target within the Google map and then center your view on the location (easily done by double-clicking within the Google map).

Then, paste the following code into your address bar as-is:

javascript:alert(window.gApplication.getMap().getCenter());

A pop-up window will then deliver a set of coordinates to you in decimal degrees format, which can then be converted into degrees-minutes or any other format you desire.

Remember, this isn't an exact method of determining coordinates for a particular object, and you'll lose further precision in the conversion between coordinate formats. All the same, this method can certainly give you "good enough" (40-50') coordinates to land you in the general area of your intended target -- for example, you might use coordinates found using this method to navigate to a place when a valid street address isn't available to plug-in to your GPS. Just don't try to use this for finding hide coordinates for a geocache.

Well, I found this kind of neat. I realize this tip isn't going to change the world and there are probably two to three dozen better ways of geocoding a location, including extracting the coordinates from the URL of a Google maps link. But this method is easy, and you can always set it up as a quick link within Firefox for easy access.

Anyway, take this tidbit for what you will.

30 second update.

On my way home and blogging via Jott -- which is very difficult to do when you are hitting every single red traffic light and have a manual transmission.

But anyway, games went well this weekend; one loss and one win. The win was well won over a very difficult opponent; the loss, unfortunately, due to lack of defense and walks via pitching. The two teams were very well matched.

More later...

listen

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So, on my way home trying...

So, on my way home and trying out this new JOTT service. And, I'm curious to know how it's going to actually post to my blog.

But at any rate, today was a tough day at work, mostly because of some programming flaws that came to light surrounding errors in the search process, and error in the spotlight area on the homepage.

Further compounding the difficult day was the revelation that my softball team will be missing our mid season tournament this weekend due to a lack of communication on the part of Chesterfield County. While I'm disappointed by this problem, I'm more astounded that Chesterfield County asserts that I have missed both email and mail communication about it. listen

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Fascinating

Well, the grim reaper may finally be calling for Detroit dinosaurs. What's fascinating to me is simply that it took this long for GM to see the writing on the tombstone. I mean, the run up in fuel costs hasn't exactly appeared out of the ether -- some of us, at least, have seen this coming for quite some time.

From the article:

"These higher gasoline prices are changing consumer behavior and rapidly," said Wagoner. "We don't think this is a temporary spike or shift. We think it is permanent."

Well, duh...