The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Sunday, January 29, 2006

Might as well get free phone service if you're being tapped …

“Here's one more tidbit on wire-taps: They get you free phone service! The feds tapped the phone of the Sisters of Mercy in Washington D.C. because of some anti-war stance or something they took in the 1980s. The good sisters noticed some kind of clicking on the phone at times, and finally decided that someone must have tapped into their phone. Their solution: Don't pay the bill so the phone company will have to shut off the phone. The phone never went dead, and they quit sending them bills! The Feds wouldn't let Ma Bell shut them down, and probably began paying the bills. The sisters talked long and free with their friends across the country!”

I, Cringley—The Falafel Connection

Well … that's one way of getting free phone service.

The article does present a different view of the recent NSA wire taps—that they're less listening in on all the calls and more a “connect-the-dots” by looking at who called who. Defintely an interesting read.

Oops.

I must apologize to all that read my site via RSS, especially to those that read the LiveJournal feed (for essentially spamming your frends list) last night.

I upgraded mod_blog last night—a huge update. Months ago, I did a near complete rewrite, but was relunctant to put it into production despite testing and using the software on a few other blogs (that aren't mine—they're someone elses). But a few days ago I got an idea for a new feature for my blog, and of course I'm going to want to work with the latest codebase of mod_blog, so …

Only … well … I forgot I made some changes to the RSS templates processing in the program, but forgot to upgrade the actual RSS templates used by my blog. There was also a bug in generating the permanent links (I got a bit overzealous with the formatting), and those two issues caused LiveJournal to have a fit with my feed for a few hours.

It's been ironed out (well, there is still an issue where I have to manually nudge the program whenever I make a new entry) and the RSS feed is working properly now.

Again, I'm sorry.

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You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go ahead, I won't bite. I promise.

The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent links to that entry only. The format for the links are simple: Start with the base link for this site: https://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are interested in, say 2000/08/01, so that would make the final URL:

https://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01

You can also specify the entire month by leaving off the day portion. You can even select an arbitrary portion of time.

You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the page) the “brighter” it appears. It's an experiment in using color shading to denote the distance a link is from here. If you don't notice it, don't worry; it's not all that important.

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