Individual Liberty — Individual Responsibility 

Wednesday Hero - Capt. Allan B. Rowe

This Weeks Soldier Was Suggested By Jenn

Capt. Alan B. Rowe 35 years old from Hagerman, Idaho 1st Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, I Marine Expeditionary Force, Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center September 3, 2004

The Perfect Marine. That's how many describe Capt. Alan B. Rowe.

Respected and dedicated to the Corps and still able to be a husband and father. Rowe, who was on his fourth deployment since joining the Corps in 1985, died with two other Marines, Lance Cpl. Nicholas Wilt, 23, of Tampa, Florida, and 1st Lt. Ronald Winchester, 25, of Rockville Center, N.Y., when a remote-controlled explosive device detonated as they returned to their vehicle after inspecting a bridge in Anbar province, near the Syrian border.

"He was a quiet, humble person and extremely polite," his widow, Dawn, recalled from their early days of dating. "He was a traditional type of gentleman. My mom was surprised to meet such a ... perfect-picture Marine."

"He did a great job balancing a pretty intense Marine Corps career with also being a great husband and father. He worked extremely hard to balance it."

"He was so dedicated to the Marine Corps. He was really driven and believed in what he did. He was a Marine’s Marine. Tall, blond and fit. Kind of the mental image you think of when you think of the Marine Corps."

A week after his death, Capt. Rowe was posthumously promoted to major. He leaves behind his wife and two children.

These brave men and women sacrifice so much in their lives so that others may enjoy the freedoms we get to enjoy everyday. For that, I am proud to call them Hero. We Should Not Only Mourn These Men And Women Who Died, We Should Also Thank God That Such People Lived.

This post is part of the Wednesday Hero Blogroll. If you would like to participate in honoring the brave men and women who serve this great country, you can find out how by going here.

Mid week open trackbacks

Here it is, the middle of the week again. I've finally gotten my main system in order. Life is good.

This is your open trackbacks post for Wednesday, March 21, 2007.

If you have something interesting you'd like to share, feel free to link it here and leave a trackback.

Just remember the trackback policy.

For the best exposure, go to the blogger's oasis and use the linkfest chooser to choose the posts you'd like to hook up with.

ieSpell

I just downloaded ieSpell. It's a free spell checker extension for Internet Explorer and IE based browsers. I think it may be handy, assuming it works.

When I use Windows Live Writer to post items to the blog I can take advantage of its built in spell checking. That works for most of the computers I use.

Unfortunately, I can't use Windows Live Writer on my primary machine at home. For some reason on that machine it fails to post. That's one of the things I'm going to have to work on soon.

When I use Firefox to post to the blog it highlights misspelled words for me as I type. I think that's pretty handy, but it doesn't give me suggested spellings. ieSpell does that.

Who knows... maybe the spelling in my posts will get a little better.

Every little bit helps.

SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM

I'm sure you all know how I feel about SPAM. Trackback SPAM. Comment SPAM. Email SPAM. I know I'm not alone.

How about "Search Engine SPAM"?

Researchers Track Down a Plague of Fake Web Pages

Tens of thousands of junk Web pages, created only to lure search-engine users to advertisements, are proliferating like billboards strung along freeways. Now Microsoft researchers say they have traced the companies and techniques behind them.

A technical paper published by the researchers says the links promoting such pages are generated by a small group of shadowy operators apparently with the acquiescence of some major advertisers, Web page hosts and advertising syndicators. The report is available at www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~hchen/paper/www07.pdf

The finding is striking because it hints at the possibility of curbing the practice.

The researchers uncovered a complex scheme in which a small group, creating false doorway pages, works with operators of Web-based computers who profit by redirecting traffic passed from search engines in one direction and then sending advertisements acquired from syndicators in the opposite direction.

“A small number of rogue actors who know what they are doing can create an enormous amount of disruption,” said David L. Sifry, chief executive of Technorati, a blog-indexing company that works to keep junk pages of this sort out of its indexes. “It’s sort of like putting a blindfold on you and spinning you around three times and then taking off the blindfold and showing you an ad.”

Using questionable or illegal techniques to improve the ranking of a Web site in query results is known as search-engine spamming. The practice has proved to be a vexing problem for the major search companies, which struggle to prevent both spammers and companies specializing in improving legitimate clients’ Web traffic — a field known as search-engine optimization — from undermining their page-ranking systems.

Surprisingly, the researchers noted that the vast bulk of the junk listings was created from just two Web hosting companies and that as many as 68 percent of the advertisements sampled were placed by just three advertising syndicators.

Search-engine spam is a small but growing component of the overall spam problem, which is predominantly junk e-mail sent from millions of Internet-connected home PCs that have been infected with malicious software. The overall amount of e-mail spam has more than doubled in the last year, according to Postini, a communications security firm.

...

The researchers’ specific findings included evidence that some blog-hosting services have permitted an explosion of phony doorway pages. For example, the researchers noted that such pages were far more prevalent in Google’s blogspot.com service than in other hosting domains. The Microsoft Research team has worked extensively with the managers of Microsoft’s Spaces blog-hosting service to detect and identify search-engine spam, Mr. Wang said. Google would not comment for the record on its own efforts to combat such practices.

The Microsoft research findings, based on a survey in October, also determined that much of the spam ad traffic was being funneled through the Internet addresses of just two Web-hosting companies.

Phillip Rosenthal, chief technology officer of one of the companies, ISPrime, an Internet services company based in New York, said the activity had been traced to a single customer and violated the company’s acceptable-use policy. He said the company’s relationship with the customer, whom he would not identify, had been severed after the company was notified about the Microsoft paper by a reporter.

But he was also pessimistic about permanently stopping operators who subvert search engines to gain advertising revenue in this way.

Every little bit that stops this plague helps.

My inbox was full of trackback and comment SPAM notifications this morning. Thank you AKismet for blocking another 150 SPAMS from hitting my website.

Glad it wasn't me

A friend of mine at work sent me a link to this article. Now I don't feel quite as bad about the Vista mishap that plagued me for the last week and a half. 

JUNEAU, Alaska - Perhaps you know that sinking feeling when a single keystroke accidentally destroys hours of work. Now imagine wiping out a disk drive containing an account worth $38 billion.

That’s what happened to a computer technician reformatting a disk drive at the Alaska Department of Revenue. While doing routine maintenance work, the technician accidentally deleted applicant information for an oil-funded account — one of Alaska residents’ biggest perks — and mistakenly reformatted the backup drive, as well.

There was still hope, until the department discovered its third line of defense, backup tapes, were unreadable.

“Nobody panicked, but we instantly went into planning for the worst-case scenario,” said Permanent Fund Dividend Division Director Amy Skow. The computer foul-up last July would end up costing the department more than $200,000.

Over the next few days, as the department, the division and consultants from Microsoft Corp. and Dell Inc. labored to retrieve the data, it became obvious the worst-case scenario was at hand.

Nine months worth of information concerning the yearly payout from the Alaska Permanent Fund was gone: some 800,000 electronic images that had been painstakingly scanned into the system months earlier, the 2006 paper applications that people had either mailed in or filed over the counter, and supporting documentation such as birth certificates and proof of residence.

And the only backup was the paperwork itself — stored in more than 300 cardboard boxes.

They managed to get the paperwork scanned and into the database, and they met their obligation to the people of Alaska, at a cost of about $0.37 per person.

All I had to deal with was the loss of a bit of email.

Trackposted to Blog @ MoreWhat.com, The Random Yak, Adam's Blog, basil's blog, Rightlinx, third world county, Faultline USA, Right Celebrity, Allie Is Wired, stikNstein... has no mercy, The World According to Carl, Pirate's Cove, Planck's Constant, The Pink Flamingo, Right Voices, and Gone Hollywood, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Man I Love those new 1X Robots

Downgrade complete.

"Oh Lord. He's made of wood."

The conversion from Windows Vista back to Windows XP SP2 was successful. The only thing I really lost was the email I kept in Windows Mail, and a few older programs that I stopped using years ago.

Most of my email was kept in Outlook's personal folders, but some of my newer email was in Windows Mail. The files are still there, and I might be able to recover some of it.

I've finished transferring all of my software. I've finished installing everything except for a few programs I don't use. I have a fresh full backup of the system to another machine running in the background. That's about 50% complete.

I won't be upgrading this machine to run on Windows Vista again. It's not worth the hassle for a few new features. Heck, some of those new features were more of an annoyance than they were worth.

Man, I Love those new 1X robots. The 1X robot is my friend.

I'm not sure I got that one right. My memory of the show is a bit vague... oh well.

The upgrade to Visual Studio 2005 was a success this time. That's not a surprise, since it was designed to work well with Windows XP. The upgrade to SQL Server 2005 was also a success.

I've copied the website's database from my host's SQL Server to my local SQL server. I never lost the web site source code, and I have a couple of backups of that on different machines and one in Visual Source Safe.

Tonight, I will try to recover my old email. I will also start converting the site code to run under ASP.NET 2.0.

We'll see how that goes. If it works, I may start using a few of the newer features built into ASP.NET 2.0 fairly soon. I've been using them at work for over a year now, so I'm not too worried about problems with that.

I've learned a few more things about CSS recently.  I've also learned a few tricks to using javascript with different browsers.

Recently at work I've been spending some time with a few newer technologies that are available with Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET framework version 3.0.

There's some fun stuff there that I'd like to explore here. I'm thinking of reworking some of the non-blog sections of the website using AJAX, and cleaning up the markup. We'll have to see.

I'm also thinking about doing some remote administration tools for the site using the Windows Communication Framework. Maybe a new service for posting and a new tool to do it with.

Now that the hassle with Vista is over, I can get back to working on upgrades to the site. And back to writing software instead of griping about it.

Previous Posts:

• Visual Studio 2005 and Windows Vista
• Ain't Technology Great?
• Windows Vista
• Incompatible Software...