What is this all about?
I just read an article from Slashdot featuring Ball State! [Zonk (2006, April 15). Sculpture to Reflect Campus Wireless Traffic. Slashdot], posted during the day, which I echo with the reference to the corresponding article from the Star press:
"Ball State University, the top unwired school in the nation according to Intel survey, is set to unveil a sculpture that will reflect the wireless traffic on the campus network. From the article [Koch, G. (2005, April 15). Sculpture to reflect Internet traffic. The Star Press]: 'Beginning Tuesday night at 8 p.m., as people log onto the Internet via Ball State's network, their online activity will appear as sound, color, patterns and images projected onto giant screens set up around the base of Shafer Tower, located in the middle of campus on McKinley Avenue".

You'll find a concise what-where-when-how in the Star Press article and all the details in the original article from John Willfalk at Ball State.
As for the WHO, the project is lead by J. Fillwalk (Associate Pr. of Electronic Art), K. Kothman (Associate Pr. of Music Technology) and J. Allison (Instructor of Music Theory and Composition), supported by Information Technology and University Computing Services, sponsored by the Center for Media Design and a grant from Lilly Foundation ($20M).

This sounds like a WOW project. The only thing that bothers me is the lack of open source software involved in the project. But that's just me.

You do it in 3 steps : find StyleCatcher, select a style/theme, apply it to your blog.

Step 1: Find StyleCatcher

Step 2: Select a style

1. Any styles repository for MT 3.2 that you have found on the web. The default URL is the MT (3.2) styles library whose hyperlink is given just above the text box, in case you want to browse them on your own.
2. The URL to the stylesheet (file with extension « .css ») you want to apply. Example: http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/styles/bold_palettes/theme-forest_green/theme-forest_green.css

Step 3: Apply the style to your blog

N.B. : If you are afraid to lose your current style when you apply the new one, be aware that StyleCatcher creates a backup of it in your templates, so that you can restore it via the Templates page.

that’s it. You are done, go to your blog (you may have to refresh the page) and see for yourself.

Any question or issue is welcome.
Last but no least, if you are not happy with the MT themes you find, you can make your own one with the Style Generator. Experiment! Moreover, when you use StyleCatcher to apply a new theme to your blog, it is made available to everyone else. (Well, there is an additional tweak to make that happen though.)

<MTArchiveList>
[blablablabla]
</MTArchiveList>

Then, if you just want to add the date before the entry title with a new line (<br/> in HTML), make sure it looks like:

<MTArchiveList>
<li class="archive-list-item"><$MTArchiveDate$><br/>
<a href="<$MTArchiveLink$>"><$MTArchiveTitle$></a>
</li>
</MTArchiveList>

I just inserted <$MTArchiveDate$><br/> (22 characters), not more. That's the power of the template. You can use different attributes for MTArchiveDate to modify the date format or the language (RTFM).
Now that you feel like a master, you want to increase your power, so you want to number the list (because Dr. Groom told you so. Sorry, no inside joke on the blogs? Too late). (Footnote for non-CICS: Dr. Frank Groom teaches ICS 630: Research Methods where he insists on the necessity to number the list of subjects in the random sampling process.) In this case, you have to change the lines before and after the MTArchiveList element:

<ol class="archive-list">
<MTArchiveList>
<li class="archive-list-item"><$MTArchiveDate$><br/>
<a href="<$MTArchiveLink$>"><$MTArchiveTitle$></a>
</li>
</MTArchiveList>
</ol>

I just changed 2 letters: o instead of u in <ul...>. Example of the result of this change. You can now copy-paste in one shot the whole index or just give the link as I did, when you want to give your blog index. You don't have to waste a blog for it.
I hope at least it helps the geeks that still have to get a blog index.

Quod Erat Demonstrandum.

You are having a nightmare. In this nightmare, you are taking the final exam for ICS 620 AGAIN. (Footnote for non-CICS: ICS= Information and Communication Sciences, ICS 620 is a course on Telecommunication Technologies by Dr. Jones.) As usual, Dr. Jones, cheerful, tries to relax you by telling entertaining stories, yelling at GAs, playing with the equipment in the room, etc. (Footnote: GA= Graduate Assistant.) But this doesn’t work. You are striving to concentrate the few brain cells that you have left on this one damn question, the question that keeps you from the Perfect, this one blank in your paper (this is just a dream, I mean a nightmare, OK?).
This question is:
What basic principle would you apply whenever you do not know how to do [whatever]? 4 words, NO ACRONYM PLEASE

You are now the only one left in the room. Dr. Jones is staring at you with ball eyes, exhaling heavily and tapping on his watch. The exam is over. You give your paper back with this only damn blank in it, mortified. As soon as you go out of the room, before suiciding yourself, you remember the answer:
READ THE F_ _ _ _ _ _ MANUAL (RTFM) (Feel free to play hangman on this one.)
This is the trigger. The nightmare is over. You wake up soaked in sweat and realize this was just a nightmare. In a lightning reflex, you catch your todo list, to make sure you did not forget to come for the 620 exam. Yes, “620 exam” checked. All right, you move on. Something about 640 (ICS 640= Information and Communication Industry, by Dr. Bellaver), checked as well. Then, “602 blog index”. (ICS 602= Human Communication: Process and Theory) Not checked. The CICS still got you, you can’t escape, even in your nightmares (see above).

So you have to do this blog index. You have been such a great blogger that you have 100 blogs already. You want to get this done in a femtosecond because you are waiting for one thing right now: to be in the arms of Morpheus.
You lambda-user side suggests you to copy-paste everything in one document naïvely. But then you think:
"I am in a MASTER’S PROGRAM. I must think as the MASTER I strive to be. - Jedi or Sith? Pick one. - In any case, I have a new light saber: RTFM (see above).
Wait a minute. A machine could do it, faster than me. It is just indexing. This is an alienation for me. Let’s use the machine."
By the machine, I mean the software. The mass of engineers at Six Apart has certainly figured that out before you were born. Movable Type is a professional blogging software isn’t it?
How to do a blog index in a master’s way? RTFM and let Movable Type do it for you. OK, I applied the RTFM principle on Movable Type and give the solution in my next blog.

What is the big deal with open source?
The protections required by the DADVSI law rely on the secret, which secret guarantees the control over the end-user system.
By contrast, free software (open source, let's say it is the same thing for this article, I didn't say freeware, ok?) relies on openness and transparency, which prevent the control that I just talked about.
As a result, the authors of free software can't claim to provide the technical control measures - or any software interoperating with such measures - required by the DADVSI law, since the source code is open, everybody can tweak it and "hack" the control measure. You still with me?

That's why the government is facing two choices: allow free software to access the works (movies, music, images, even music scores, etc.) controlled by the technical measures mentioned, or ban free software. For the moment, the solution adopted by both the legislative and executive is the second one.

In short, the DADVSI law - these effects may extend to the rest of the European Union - will jeopardize free competition. Free software authors will be excluded from very promising markets: multimedia players, video streaming servers, systems embedded in portable digital entertainment devices, PDAs, mobiles, etc.).

Finally, I will give you one reason why governments - especially non-American ones - should not do anything threatening the freedom of open source (Actually, it is the main reason why some Minister and governmental services decided to move to open source and this is quite contradictory with the DADVSI.)This idea is supported by the FSF (FSF France in particular): you are well aware that the software industry and financial flows are controlled by a handful of big editors, mainly American. The development of free software enables Europe to take back the initiative in this field and fosters an industrial, economic and social potential that is thriving already. Moreover, the control of information and information systems are at stake. Unlike free software, proprietary software does not allow the users to control the tools. This lack is obviously critical in several sectors such as defense, health or police.

This may be too theoretical for some of us. So I help you out by giving you one common example. I will take an extreme case just to give you an idea. Let us assume that the department of Defense in your country is using Microsoft Access as a database to store data about the number of tanks, submarines, fighters, nuclear heads if you have any (always good to know), their properties, the codes, etc. Let us assume the system is connected to the web (I repeat this is an extreme case, you can find such sensible services connected to the web.) Have you heard about Microsoft spywares? Oh you are a smart guy, you have an anti-spyware, easy. So let's try something you can't really do something about, say MS Access just got in trouble (it crashed as a matter of fact, yes it happens), and you have the friendly message saying "Do you want to send the information to help Microsoft debug?" (or something like that). You think "yes, I want it fixed, I paid you for that". So you click yes, what guarantees you that there is not something else than the mere debugging information that is sent to Microsoft, let's say some of your critical data? First, you cannot prevent that because, you have no idea what is really going when you enter your data in MS Access. You can have the most secure system ever, you don't know what Microsoft is doing with it "inside"... and you cannot check that out and prove whether there is something wrong BECAUSE YOU DO NOT HAVE ACCESS TO THE CODE. So what are you really telling Microsoft when you are clicking "SEND" on the "Help debug" window? No idea, huh?

Of course, most people first want something that works and preferably something they have already used for decades, like Microsoft. Open source? free software? What is that? Something new? Oh, I am scared. You said "free"? Oh, it has to be something done by some incompetent nerds in their garage with a hammer and a nail... because it is free, right? Oh, you mean "freedom" ? Oh, ok, sorry. (The ambiguity of "free" in free software was the main reason why the term "open source" replaced "free software" in the business world.) Who is selling that stuff? What? Nobody? I just download it and play with it? Don't fool me, this is nothink like I am used to. Who can I trust then? The open source community? Is that a new club for nerds?
Enough, I could go on for a while with the scepticism that free software is facing all the time. But don't believe that governmental administrations can't move to open source. The french police (gendarmerie to be accurate, no american equivalent, sorry) has replaced MS Office with OpenOffice since January, and I have 3 or 4 recent examples like that but I am tired and this blog has been too long anyway.

39.7 %

35.9 %

29.8 %

There is more on the link...

[1] Le Journal du Net, Monde : L'usage des blogs, 12/09/2005

“VideoLAN might disappear due to new French/European legislation.” (VideoLAN, 2005)

What?? Do you mean the program that…

Needless to say I am slightly (I mean “very very” for those who do not get my irony) upset at that time. Then, I click on the link below without thinking - “Learn more”, it says – and the Awful Truth appears to me in all his scary dressing, here is the essence of the message, for those who are too lazy to click on the link:

“During the night of 22nd to 23rd December 2005, while everybody is preparing for Christmas, the French Parliament will rule about the "DADVSI" law. This vote will be made with minimal discussion, as an "emergency" has been declared on this law.
This law is the French transcription of the European EUCD (European Union Copyright Directive) text, which itself comes from the American DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act).
The main goal of this law is to restrict the rights of digital content purchasers. It most notably forbids them from working around technical content protection measures.
Doing so, writing or publishing software allowing to do so, or even merely talking about ways to do so becomes an offence that can be punished with three years in jail.” (VideoLAN, 2005)

Not only they want to vote for a law that might kill many open source multimedia and Peer-To-Peer software, but they also want to do this sneaky-sneaky while everybody is enjoying the preparations for Christmas. What a wonderful gift!

Then, in the French version (under the English one) exclusively, there is an invitation to fight this “freedom-killing” bill in various ways. Sorry, mainly in French, but there is a link for English readers and you can read articles and documentation in English on the EUCD website that supports the movement against the “European DMCA” law.

I will explain in a next blog why many open source software are threatened to death by this law and what kind of protections governments and large companies (these are the only ones benefiting from such laws) are developing to enforce the DMCA/EUCD. “Bear with me.”

References:
VideoLAN, VideoLAN and the issue of EUCD / DADVSI, Retrieved 12/06/2005, http://www.videolan.org/eucd.html

(The first part - out of 3 - only for the moment)

There are two HTTP servers that dominate the market: Apache (70%) and IIS (Internet Information Services).
Footnote
{
Apache is open source, lead by the Apache software foundation and sponsored by IBM. IIS is proprietary, edited by Microsoft.
}

To understand how blogs work, you need to understand the client-server model which is at the foundation of all Internet services. The most common version of it is the 3-tier client-server model. Below are figures about the 3 tier client-server architecture and the real version of it.

The client (browser) requests for the web page stored on the remote machine through the server software. The server locates this file, then...

• Case 1: the webpage is a static webpage (extension html, htm), which means it is created once and for all. The content does not change unless the webmaster (or anybody allowed to) deigns to change it. In this case, the server just sends it to the browser. The browser then interprets the the HTML (HyperText Markup Language) or XHTML (eXtensible HTML, that is to replace HTML) code of the page and displays this file on your machine.

• Case 2: the webpage is dynamic (extension php, asp,aspx, jsp, etc.). In this page, some code in a specific programming language is embedded in the webpage, and executed by the web/application server when the client requests the page.

Footnote
{
Different server side programming languages are available. These are the most popular: PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor, recursive acronym) which is open source, Java with JSP (Java Server Pages) from Sun Microsystems, ASP (Active Server Pages) and ASP.NET which is the last evolution of it, from Microsoft. ASP.NET is web development platform like JSP, but unlike JSP which only supports Java code, ASP.NET actually support different programming languages (C#, VBScript, J# and others).
}

The HTML code is generated and the result is sent to the client. Such pages usually contain some static HTML code and some specific tags that indicates the code within this tags is in another language, the appropriate module has to execute it and the HTML result has to be merged with the source page.
The contents of the dynamic page depend on the query passed to the program. In particular, the program may use the parameters in the query to query the database and retrieve the relevant information, and finally use it to build the HTML page.

Footnote
{
Three database/SQL server software prevail: MySQL (open source, very very popular), PostgreSQL (open source, enterprise-level, much more sophisticated than MySQL, therefore more complex), Oracle (proprietary, leader in the business world), for very large databases
}

Think of search engines for which you specify keywords on a web page. You request is sent to the server with the keywords in the query and the database is processed as a result.

• Case 3: this case is useful to understand the process. It is just a simpler version of case 2, where the client request is sent directly to a script (short program) – not a webpage - using a language like Perl, which script produces (prints) HTML code to be sent to the client. No tags here, but instructions executed in sequence.

Now that you have the client-server architecture in mind, there is one last point to explain before you understand how blogs work.
“Blogs differ from traditional web sites in that, rather than being composed of many individual pages connected by hyperlinks, they are composed of a few templates (usually Main Page, Archive Page, and Individual Article/Item Page), into which content is fed from a database.” (Wikipedia, Weblog, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weblog, retrieved 11/26/2005). Indeed, you have 3 dynamic pages at least in a blog site, to keep it simple (Main, Archive, Individual Article/Item). The form of the page follows the appropriate template and the content is build from a database of articles, the articles you have already submitted through the Individual Article Page, the page where you edit your article. When you submitted your article, a program is executed by the webpage (cf.CASE 2 above) and filled out a database with information about the article such as the date, the author, the title, etc. You notice on the main page that articles are displayed in reverse chronological order, which is very specific to weblogs. Again, this main page executes a code that fetches data about:
- you as an author because this is your blog, you want to see your articles
- the dates of the articles, to sort them out in the reverse chronological order
- some extra things, less significant.

You got the idea.

References:
1. www.webdevelopersnotes.com, The Client Server Architecture, 2005, http://www.webdevelopersnotes.com/basics/client_server_architecture.php3
2. See http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/~mick/academic/networks/msc/programming/server.shtml for extra references.

See Alok’s former blog for extra information.

I. WHY SPLOGS?

1) Spam filters for emails give headaches to spammers..
As spam filters are more and more efficient, spammers are looking for new targets.

2) Blogs are growing exponentially.
According to the search engine Technorati, there are more than 20 million blogs on the web, and 80,000 created every day. Ooh, I guess we have a new target.

3) Blogs enable spammers to improve the ranking of their website in Google or other search engines.
To illustrate my statement, Joe will be my man. Joe is a SPAMMER. And not the dumbest. (All characters are entirely fictional, blablabla, I don’t take responsibility for any fortuitous connection to CICS geeks or other real persons.) What is Joe’s purpose? To drag you to his website (to advertise, sell you products, to make you give critical information about you, which is called phishing in this case), no matter the cost. What is one of Joe’s best tactics to drag you to his site? To get an excellent ranking in Google’s results (or other major search engines like Yahoo !, MSN, Altavista). For this increases the probability you encounter a link to Joe’s website. How to improve the ranking? Well, first, you have to know that search engines compute the ranking of the results according to the number of links targeting a given website. To keep it simple, the more links are pointing at your website, the better you will be ranked in the results. Of course, this depends on the keyword specified in the request as well. That’s why the links have to be associated with keywords that are relevant to the activity of your website. A rational way to get better ranking is to invite partner websites to link to your websites, usually related to your activity. You can cut a deal by offering to link to their website from yours in exchange. What if your so-called partner has no interest in trading links with you because he’s so big already that it doesn’t need you to grow? (You may have to pay them or pay Google too.)
What if you are Joe the spammer, you use your website for your evil purposes and nobody wants to deal with you?
Well, Joe has the solution. Joe built a tool (program) that generates blogs automatically on platforms like Blogger, Google’s blogging service. This tool can create blogs, register them, insert a content into it. Joe uses this tool to create blogs, full of ranking-friendly keywords and full of links (hypertext, typically) to his website, for free. The ranking-friendly keywords can refer to the activity of Joe’s website. They can also state the names of reputed bloggers. Finally, a new trend consists to use keywords that generate juicy Adsense (Google’s program that integrates advertisement in the webpage dynamically, according to keywords found in the content of the page) advertisement.

II. THE COUNTER-ATTACK

To avoid being overwhelmed with splogs, some search engines stopped indexing weblogs, purely and simply. Google seems to have developed techniques that differentiate more or less splogs from genuine blogs, but did not communicate on the subject. Blogger also provides a “Flag” button that enables any user to denounce abuses on other users’ blogs.
Nevertheless, “flagging a splog” remain relatively as inefficient as captchas to prevent splogs from thriving. Cf. Wikipedia for a good definition of captcha.
Captcha of Dr. Gillette's email address:
Worse is splogs look more and more similar to genuine “human” blogs, and splog filters tend to put splogs and real blogs in the same bag!

III. THE FACTS

1) Fightsplog - blog specialized in the combat against splogs - listed 2,763 splogs of pornographic nature, created by the same person!

2) According to ZDNet.fr, out of 1.3 million posts or comments on weblogs happening every day, 50,000 of them are spam. Most of them are comments posted automatically by robots (programs).

3) Google indicated last week that his blog hosting service Blogger had been infested by 13,000 splogs.

N. B. (just for fun, I mean, just to add value…) : at the origin, the word « splog » comes from New-Zealand and refers to specific shoes, halfway between clogs and sheepskin slippers.

Weblogs's audience amounts to 25 millions of visits/month. Soon, links to these 85 blogs should be integrated into AOL's information channels such as « Personal Finance Channel », « Autos Channel », « Travel Channel », « Games Channel », « Television Channel », and AOL News.