Todd's Blog

This is a story reported today on a California TV news web site.  It's one of those stories that makes you realize that there is always something stranger out there than what you previously thought.

The only thing missing from this story is a report of an alien landing in their back yard.

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South Natomas Home Covered With Sheet Metal

Residents Claim Neighbors Bombarding Them With Radiation

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- A home in Sacramento's south Natomas neighborhood is surrounded by sheet metal, and neighbors are calling it an eyesore.

The D'Souza family lives in the home on Timberwood Court, and claims the aluminium pieces are necessary to protect them from unknown neighbors who have been bombarding them with radio waves and making them sick.

"(It's) a shield to protect against radiation, because microwave radiation is reflected off of aluminium, so it's a protective measure," resident Sarah D'Souza said.

The D'Souzas said the bombardment began after the first anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that the radio waves have caused them health problems ranging from headaches to lupus.

Sacramento Code Enforcement officials have gotten involved and ordered the family to remove the metal by Monday or face a misdemeanor citation.

"Eleven years in Sacramento and few other years in Southern California and this is the first time I've ever seen (anything like this). The inside of the house is also covered with foil and the beds are covered with a foil-like material as well," Sacramento Code Enforcement spokesman Josh Pino said.

The D'Souzas said they will comply with the order and remove the sheet metal, but they also plan to gather evidence to show city officials what they believe is a problem with radiation.

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VIDEO: Watch John Alston's Report

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This is just great!  This web site came up with a terrific little movie that is perfect to send to anyone who forwards you an annoying e-mail.

For example, so you still have people forwarding that stupid e-mail saying congress has a bill that they're going to charge you 5 cents for every e-mail you send?  Reply to them with a link to this!

http://www.softlab.ece.ntua.gr/~sivann/pub/swf/may02-smilepop-soapbox4.swf

All I can say is WOW.  What a great movie!  Star Wars Episode 3 is the movie all SW fans are waiting for.  Don't listen to anyone who says it has any slow-moving sections or dull acting.  It just ROCKED from start to finish.

There is so much to see, you can't possibly take it all in in one sitting!

The premier was a real class-act, and because Lottery Post was a sponsor, we had a nice mention in the souvenir booklet.

There were some celebrities there including Frank Oz (who autographed my booklet) and Liam Neeson.  Also some other celebrities who I didn't recognize.  An after-party followed at the 21 Club on 52nd street.

I had absolutely perfect seats in the theater (the Ziegfeld), sitting directly in the middle in all directions.  I sat two rows behind the celebrities.

One of the really great things was that the movie was presented in digital projection, and it just blew me away.  The clarity was so sharp and bright that it almost appears 3D.  It was stunning.  Likewise, the soundtracked just roared, and the bass was so strong in some sections that the floor literally felt like it was moving.

What a night, and what a way to see the last Star Wars ever!

I writing this Blog entry on the new version of Lottery Post.  It's working really well, so it's only a matter of time before I can release it.  Before doing so, I have a lot of testing to do, especially on IE 5.0 and 5.5.  I don't use those on my dev machine, so I'm a bit nervous that the testing will reveal some flaws in the CSS workings.

Anyway, when I was recoding the Inspector and Deflate pages, I discovered some glitches that the new version fixes.  The glitches don't affect the functionality — everything works just fine — but the code that automatically feeds the predictions and past results into the page is not perfect.  That has been corrected in the new version.

Today represents a major milestone in the reconstruction of the Lottery Post web site.  I have just finished taking one complete pass through the entire web site, changing every single page to the new XHTML 1.1 standards.  I had to recode literally every single page, in what was perhaps the biggest block of code I've had to edit.  (I learned just how big Lottery Post has become.)

(Nobody but I can see the new site - it only exists on a test environment at the moment.)

The recoding has been a huge learning process as well, as I was forced to learn a bunch of new techniques.  Lottery Post will truly be leading-edge design when it's finished. 

From a developer's perspective there are some very cool things, like completely table-less designs.  Every HTML coder learns to layout pages by creating a bunch of table tags, often nesting tables within tables within tables, in order to achieve the desired layout.  Table-less layouts do not use any tables at all to achieve the layout, instead relying on cascading style sheets (CSS) to position everything.

I have learned that coding completely with CSS is one of the most frustrating things you can do.  The thing that makes it so frustrating is that not one single browser brand has a bug-free implementation of CSS, and they each interpret code differently.  So when you finally get something working perfectly, you bring up the page on a different browser and it looks like garbage.  So then you have to go back and recode it again.  Then, it breaks on a third browser brand.  And so on until you get it working in every browser.  Pages even work different in different versions of the same brand of browser.

At this point I will be going through each page a second (and perhaps third) time, making more modifications.  But these changes will take nowhere near the amount of time as the first set of changes.  (I've been at this for about 3 months now.)

The ironically funny thing about this is that most people will look at the new site and say, "well, there's not much difference."  If that happens, in a strange way it will be a compliment to the work I've done, because the trick in this redesign is to make it appear the same as before.

However, there will be some very good changes (that I've mentioned before) like an all-new text editor.  Now, people will be able to create and edit tables right in the editor, and pasting stuff from other web sites will work better.  Plus, Firefox and Mozilla users will be able to edit using the rich text editor, and Safari is beginning to support it as well.  (The latest version of Safari has partial support.)

In all, a very exciting day for me personally, and a big relief to finally get to this point.

I have strong sense that biorhythms do in fact exist.  As hard as I try to keep things going when I reach a peak, they invariably fall again.  Perhaps the older I get the more I am able to recognize the peaks and valleys.  Too bad the valleys have to be such valleys. 

Just the fact that something important to me appears to be ending this evening is sad.  I wish there was some other way.  I can't really say what it is, but it means a lot.

Lottery Post now has more than 14,000 members - growing quicker every day.

This is offered for Hyperspace members to preview on the Star Wars website, so I figure it's OK for me to post here.  This is about the first minute of one of the tracks from the new Star Wars movie - ENOJY!

Click Here to Listen

The song will loop after it finishes, so just close the window when it's finished playing.  (Or keep it open to listen a few times.)

I was able to obtain the Star Wars Episode III Revenge of the Sith Soundtrack, even before it is released to the general public.  Like typical John Williams music, it is very invigorating.  Fitting for the dark tone of the movie, it is unlike other Star Wars soundtracks, although many of the familiar themes are there -- just in a very dark way.

I wish I could post it for others to hear.

I wonder how many other people noticed that we just went over 300,000 messages posted at Lottery Post?

That is a tremendous amount of lottery knowledge and data all in one place - a resource unlike anything else in the world.  I'm looking forward to the release of Microsoft SQL Server 2005, which has a number of programming facilities that will enable me to build a more robust and fast searching capability.  Then the whole Lottery Post forum database will be instantly searchable in many different ways.

As it is right now, the Lottery Post database is a very advanced database, again unlike most other sources out there.  It is a custom database structure I built on a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 platnorm, and allows a good amount of searching as it is.  Anyone can search the entire 5-year database, and can access any of the 300,000+ messages posted.

Many forums are cripled under that many messages, and as a result, delete or archive old messages , making them unaccessible to the public.

I also custom-built the Lottery Post database server (a dedicated database server), using 8GB of memory, and a RAID-5 array using 9 Hard disks, with a automatic hot-spare.  (All 10,000 RPM Seagate hard disks.)  One of these days I'm going to put together an article that details all the technology that goes into the production of this web site.

Anyway, that 300,000-message barrier has been reached, and things continue to grow faster every day.

Holy mackerel, I just installed a new piece of hardware which is WAY too cool.

My wireless Microsoft mouse broke, so I had to buy a new one.  (If you're not using a Microsoft wireless mouse, you are missing out on the best mouse out there.)

Anyway, I was just about to buy a replacement of exactly the same thing (Wireless Intellimouse Explorer 2.0) when I noticed that Microsoft now sells that same mouse with a "fingerprint reader".

I started doing some more reading and discovered that the fingerprint reader is encased in the same USB dongle that a regular wireless mouse requires, except that it has a small oval-shaped glass sensor on the top.  It takes up the same space that a regular dongle takes up.

The device is designed to use your fingerprint instead of using a username and password everywhere you go on the Internet.  It comes with special software that stores all your passwords for you.

A side track here: my first worry was that I don't want something storing all my passwords on my hard disk for someone to hack.  So I did some research.  It turns out that all the passwords are stored with a double non-reversible encryption technique, using a key that is based on random elements, plus your password.  Meaning that it is a very unique key that is as hard to break as any SSL connection on the Internet.  Plenty safe for me.

Getting back to the story, For an extra $20 over the cost of my regular replacement mouse, I bought the fingerprint reader/wireless mouse.  Installation was very easy, but I think it's important to install the software before plugging the new hardware in.

The first thing I noticed is that it asks you for your login password into Windows.  Once it learns your password, every time you restart your PC and come to the login screen, you just touch your finger on the sensor and you are instantly logged in.  I am totally amazed at how FAST it reads your finger and logs you in.  Plus it makes a cool subtle beep noise through your speakers to let you know you're recognized.

If you have multiple people using the PC, it recognizes every individual person, and logs into the correct account.

Then, when you're surfing the Internet and create a username and password somewhere, you tell the fingerprint reader to remember your login credentials for that page, and every time you come back, just a touch of the finger logs you in.  Plus, like everything else, it recognizes different people using the same computer - for that one page.  Really cool!

The first site I tried it with -- of course -- was Lottery Post.  I logged off, and went back to the login page.  Then I touched the sensor to let it know I wanted to remember my credentials, and it popped up a window asking for my Username and Password.  I entered them, and that's all I had to do.  Now, when I click Login and go to that page, I touch my finger on the sensor, and it instantly logs me in like magic.

The cool factor from 1 to 10 is an 11.

The real up-side to this, as I see it, is that I can now create longer and more complex passwords, because I no longer have to remember them.  By doing so, I will have increased my personal security greatly.  What a great thing that I can increase my security level, while making logins happen instantly.

The only downside that I have heard so far is that it doesn't currently work with the Firefox browser - just Microsoft IE.  However, I have no doubt they'll ad support in the future, when the outcry gets loud.

Highly recommended.

Here's a link to Microsoft's product page for the fingerprint reader/wireless mouse:

http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/mouseandkeyboard/productdetails.aspx?pid=035

Star Wars fans: do not miss the final Epsiode III trailer.  It is .... perfect.

I have noticed a lot of "extraneous" activity in the LP server's logs, so I did some investigation.  It turns out that a lot of traffic is coming through with designation of "FunWebProducts" in the browser User Agent string.  Well, doing some further investigation on that string turned up some interesting information.

I know that a lot of people are using a service called "Smiley Central", which allows them to insert smileys into messages and e-mails.  That service uses software that hooks into your Internet Browser.  There is another similar product calles My Web Search, which also connects to your browser.

As great as that is, nothing is free, and it turns out that people who are using that service are installing spy-ware on their computers.  Your business is your own, but you may want to consider using all possible means to get rid of it ASAP.

Here's an article that talks about the issue:

http://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/web/2003/1208web2.html

Here's some other relevant links:

• http://www.surfingshield.com/protect/FunWebProducts-Spyware.html
• http://spyware-removal.thrcomputer.com/how-to/remove-funwebproducts.html
• http://www.liamdelahunty.com/tips/fun_web_products.php
• http://forum.powweb.com/archive/index.php/t-31159.html

Wow, today I implemented substantial performance increases throughout the web site.  The main page, which typically took about a second to generate, now generates in about a tenth of a second.  Each forum page takes less than two-tenths of a second to create.  And so on.

This came about when I discovered a database programming technique, and implemented it in all the places where any substantial database transaction activity take place.