Love the Drake

Middle East Oil Hoax

Please stop sending me this email. Don't believe the hype, it's a hoax.

Here's a little info I'm forwarding to you about gas stations and how we can help fight the war at home.

The Saudis are boycotting American goods. We should return the favor. An
interesting thought is to boycott their GAS. Every time you fill up the
car, you can avoid putting more money into the coffers of Saudi Arabia.
Just buy from gas companies that don't import their oil from the Saudis.

Nothing is more frustrating than the feeling that every time I fill up
the tank, I am sending my money to people who are trying to kill me, my
family, and my friends. I thought it might be interesting for you to
know which oil companies are the best to buy gas from and which major
companies import Middle Eastern oil (for the period 9/1/00 - 8/31/01):

Shell................................205,742,000 barrels
Chevron/Texaco..........144,332,000 barrels
Exxon/Mobil.................130,082,000 barrels
Marathon/Speedway...117,740,000 barrels
Amoco.............................62,231,000 barrels

If you do the math at $30/barrel, these imports amount to over $18
BILLION!

Here are some large companies that do NOT import middle Eastern oil:

Citgo.....................0 barrels
Sunoco............. ..0 barrels
Conoco................0 barrels
Sinclair................ 0 barrels
BP/Phillips.......... 0 barrels
Hess......................0 barrels

All of this information is available from the Department of Energy and
each is required to state where they get their oil and how much they are
importing. They report on a monthly basis.

Please do your share to help fight the war on terrorism.

Snopes.com has an excellent summary of which companies import oil from the middle east. Or, just visit the DOE website and get the raw details.

Friends don't let friends forward hoax emails.

Blog birthday

Today is my 1st anniversary of blogging. What a year it was.

I started this as an experiment, which was another way of saying 'if this gets boring, I can give it up'. I'm pretty happy with how the site is going, it's more a link site than a diary site.

This site went through a migration from Grey Matter to Movable Type back-ends, a domain change to www.dondrake.com, as well as a mention in the New York Times.

Postings that received large amounts of traffic are

• Football-pool.com closing


• Space Shuttle Radar Images


• Tyson's Tattoo recently generated some wild comments.
  

Much thanks to everyone posting comments and to Google for getting most vistors to the site. We'll just have to wait and see what another year will bring.

Tyson KO

Mike Tyson knocked out Clifford Etienne 49 seconds into the first round.

For all of his hard work in that 49 seconds, he reportedly made $5 million.

Now, maybe he can buy himself some sanity.

Tyson Tattoo

As if you needed another reason to think Mike Tyson is crazy, he went out last week and got a tattoo on his face. Looks good Mike.

After he got the tattoo, he waffled about actually going through with his fight this weekend.

The 36-year-old Tyson's erratic behavior took another twist Tuesday when he said he was feeling better and wanted to go through with the fight. The night before, Tyson said he wasn't 100 percent and didn't want to risk not being his best.

"In the world of Mike, it's normal," Finkel said.

Bono named for Nobel Peace Prize

For his work to limit third world debt as well as being vocal about the dramatic effects of AIDS in Africa, Bono has again been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The governor of the U.S. state of Illinois who spared all inmates on death row, Pope John Paul, a Cuban dissident and Irish rock star Bono are among a near-record 150 nominees for the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize.

The governor mentioned is George Ryan of the great state of Illinois. Ryan deserves this prize as much as I do - and I certainly don't.

Let's not forget the Licenses for Bribes Scandal and the death of 6 children in Wisconsin due to a careless truck driver who bought an Illinois drivers license while Ryan was Secretary of State. Ryan, of course, alleges no wrong-doing or knowledge of any of this. However, prosecutors say more than $150,000 of bribe money made it into Ryan's campaign fund.

Tenacious D - The Movie

Jack Black is back! These guys absolutely crack me up, I can't wait for this movie. They are the greatest band on earth.

Tenacious D, the self-proclaimed "greatest band on Earth," is headed to the big screen thanks to a deal with New Line Cinema. Actor-comedian-rockers Jack Black and Kyle Gass -- the duo that makes up "the D" -- will star in the film, to be directed by music video helmer Liam Lynch. Black, Gass and Lynch will also write the script, with Black and Gass producing as well. The studio is in negotiations with Ben Stiller's Red Hour Films to produce in some capacity. The specific story line of the "Tenacious D" film is being kept under wraps, but it is said to be a "creation" story revolving around how the duo became the greatest band on Earth.

Low-tech shuttle image

More information has surfaced regarding the USAF imagery of the shuttle Columbia.

Turns out it was just a bunch of geeks, geeking out.

But contrary to reports last week, the photo was not snapped by one of Starfire's extraordinarily powerful telescopes, which are designed to spy on enemy satellites and detect incoming missiles.

Instead, it was taken by Starfire Optical Range engineers who, in their free time, had rigged up a device using a commercially available 31/2-inch telescope and an 11-year-old Macintosh computer, the researchers said.

Stop the Spambots

Ever wonder how spammers get your email address?? One way (there's lots) is by scrubbing websites and simply looking for email addresses. The automation of scrubbing sites and following links on a page is called worming or spidering.

From looking at my web server logs, I noticed the following User Agent pop-up from different IP addresses: "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT; DigExt; DTS Agent". At first, I thought it was a web site monitoring service, but after searching Google, it turns out it's an evil email address harvester called "Beijing Express Email Address Extractor".

Since my email address is posted on the main page, and readers sometimes post comments with there email address, I'd like to stop these spambots from accessing my site.

Here's how I did it...

This works if you run a modern version of the Apache web server, but there's probably a similar way to do it under IIS. You can use the powerful Rewrite engine, but, it offers enough rope that you could end up hanging yourself.

First, you need to identify the User Agent requesting the web page. I did it with the following statement in my httpd.conf, preferably in your virtual server section, but before any Directory directives:

What this will do is create an environment variable called spambot with a value of 1 whenever the exact user agent is sent for any request.

Then, you need to deny access whenever that environment variable is set. To do that, you need to put the following 2 lines of code in a tag that points to your web server document root.

This tells the web server to deny access whenever the spambot variable is set, and to otherwise allow anyone else.

Now, my web server logs show the following from a spambot:

The server sent a 403 - Forbidden instead of sending a web page. Success.

As more evil User Agents are discovered, you can add more SetEnvIf's to prevent further harvesting.

Happy Hunting.

TIA Gift Shop

Found a link on MetaFilter to a cafepress store called the Total Information Awareness Gift Shop. You can buy all sorts of merchandise (t-shirts, mugs, underwear, etc.) with the TIA logo on it.

Here's a quote from the site:

This is the logo of John Poindexter's Information Awareness Office, home of the Total Information Awareness project. The logo was removed from the website a few days after its public launch following a torrent of criticism. The Latin motto translates to "knowledge is power". The Defense Department's Total Information Awareness project, or at least what we know of it, raises many disturbing questions regarding the privacy of Americans and the potentially inappropriate use of our personal information.

The logo of the Information Awareness Office does nothing to allay those concerns with its disturbing Orwellian imagery of the all-knowing eye scanning the globe. The Total Information Awareness Gift Shop is a modest comedic attempt to stimulate public awareness and interest in an issue which could detrimentally impact our civil liberties for years to come.

Any proceeds beyond the basic cost of each product will be donated to the American Civil Liberties Union.

Just in time for Valentine's Day, nothing says "I love you" like a TIA thong for the wife. But you already knew that.

Dude, you're getting a rap sheet!

The annoying Dell guy was busted for buying pot last night. Via Smoking Gun:

Benjamin Curtis, the 22-year old actor who portrays "Steven," the Dell Guy, in those bothersome computer commercials, was arrested late last night (2/9) on a marijuana possession charge, The Smoking Gun has learned. According to police, Curtis was nabbed after cops spotted him buying a "small bag of marijuana" from a dealer on Manhattan's Lower East Side (at Ludlow and Rivington for you Gothamites)

Part of Shuttle Wing Found

It was reported today that part of the left wing was found in Texas, offering hope that clues may still be found as to why sensors stopped reporting data that eventually lead to the shuttle disaster.

Also, the theories are starting to come in. An engineer that worked on the Shuttle, says corrosion in the left wing is to blame.

My guess (it's only a guess, not based on any hard data) is that damage to the left wing was caused by space debris during the flight or de-orbit. There's a lot of junk floating around, and our luck simply ran out.

USAF Imagery Confirms Columbia Wing Damaged

This story from Aviation Week, reports that Air Force imagery shows structural damage to Columbia before it broke up. Unfortunately, they don't show any of the images.

High-resolution images taken from a ground-based Air Force tracking camera in the southwestern U.S. show serious structural damage to the inboard leading edge of Columbia's left wing, as the crippled orbiter flew overhead about 60 sec. before the vehicle broke up over Texas killing the seven astronauts on board Feb. 1.

According to sources close to the investigation, the images, under analysis at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, show a jagged edge on the left inboard wing structure near where the wing begins to intersect the fuselage. They also show the orbiter's right aft yaw thrusters firing, trying to correct the vehicle's attitude that was being adversely affected by the left wing damage. Columbia's fuselage and right wing appear normal. Unlike the damaged and jagged left wing section, the right wing appears smooth along its entire length. The imagery is consistent with telemetry.

UPDATE: Here's the image.

UPDATE: Here's info on who took the picture.

Shuttle Images

SFGate.com has two stories regarding eyewitness accounts of the Shuttle and the appearance of streaks while over California and Arizona.

S.F. man's astounding photo. Mysterious purple streak is shown hitting Columbia 7 minutes before it disintegrated

Top investigators of the Columbia space shuttle disaster are analyzing a startling photograph -- snapped by an amateur astronomer from a San Francisco hillside -- that appears to show a purplish electrical bolt striking the craft as it streaked across the California sky.

The digital image is one of five snapped by the shuttle buff at roughly 5: 53 a.m. Saturday as sensors on the doomed orbiter began showing the first indications of trouble. Seven minutes later, the craft broke up in flames over Texas.

Home video suggests shuttle problems over Arizona; small object trails craft

A home video of Columbia appears to show a small, bright object falling off the spacecraft as it passed over Arizona, adding to the evidence that the breakup began before the shuttle reached Texas.

The video shows a bright object against the sky Saturday. After several seconds, a smaller bright object appears behind the larger one. Someone on the ground is heard saying, "Look at the chunk coming off of it. What the heck is that?"

Minutes later, Columbia came apart over Texas, killing all seven astronauts aboard.

Wealth of Information

This website was mentioned in last Sunday's New York Times in an article titled "Wealth of Information Online". The article described how the Internet has become a great resource in times of disaster.

This site was mentioned because of the radar loop showing the debris trail in Texas and how the information was distributed on David Farber's Interesting People mailing list.

Here's an excerpt:

Within hours of the disaster, a technology consultant, Don Drake, had gone to the radar Web site of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, downloaded images of the orange debris trail across East Texas and combined them into an animated image, moving every few seconds at www.dondrake.com/archives/000112.html.

A message from Mr. Drake appeared on a respected online
news source, David J. Farber's list, at
www.interesting-people.org /archives/interesting-people.

"There was no way to do it not that many years ago," Mr.
Farber said in a telephone interview. And speaking of the
radar images provided by Mr. Drake, he added:

"It turns out it's not something that the conventional
media does very well. It does not have the variety of
technical talent that pulls it all together. The online
world is like having, to use the vocabulary of journalism,
"thousands of stringers out there."

That page has been linked from many media outlets, personal websites, and blogs from around the world in the days following the disaster.

This is a prime example of the power of the Internet and some might say the power of blogs. I still feel that there is a ton of quality information out on blogs and other web pages, but the problem is finding it.

When the next crisis occurs, and joe-nobody is writing online about the personal impact he's witnessing or witnessed, how does he get that information to the masses? Certainly, not through a small article in the NY Times printed the next day.

How can we pull these thousands of stringers together?

Last email

Here's an excerpt of Laurel Clark's last email sent from the Shuttle Columbia to friends and family on Earth.

Magically, the very first day we flew over Lake Michigan and I saw Wind Point (Wis.) clearly. Haven't been so lucky since. Every orbit we go over a slightly different part of the Earth. Of course, much of the time I'm working back in Spacehab and don't see any of it. Whenever I do get to look out, it is glorious. Even the stars have a special brightness.

I have seen my 'friend' Orion several times. Taking photos of the earth is a real challenge, but a steep learning curve. I think I have finally gotten some beautiful shots the last 2 days. Keeping my fingers crossed that they're in sharp focus.

Shuttle Update

According to monitoring devices on the shuttle, the temperature on the left side increased by 60 degrees Fahrenheit during five minutes, while during the same period, temperatures on the right of the shuttle went up by only 15 degrees.

NASA has confirmed that human remains of all seven astronauts have been recovered.

In a desperate move to collect as much information as possible, NASA is asking the public to send any pictures and videos they might have for review in the shuttle investigation. An anonymous FTP server has been setup for the uploading of the media.

Iraqis Call Shuttle Disaster God's Vengeance

Why would The Wall Street Journal include this sentence in Kalpana Chawla's bio??

On her only other spaceflight, in 1997, she and the crew were blamed for mistakes that sent a science satellite tumbling out of control.

Shuttle Radar Images

The destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia was tracked by NOAA radar images this morning.

I was able to download images from the radar site this morning and create a radar loop of the shuttle debris trail.

Click for a larger view.

Space Shuttle Columbia Breaks Up Over Texas

Space shuttle lost over Texas

The space shuttle Columbia broke up as it descended over Texas Saturday toward a planned landing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, showering debris across southeastern Texas and into Louisiana.

Police in Nacogdoches, Texas, reported "numerous pieces of debris" both inside the city limits and in Nacogdoches County.

A grim log of the Shuttle re-entry status.

A terrible tragedy for all Americans and especially the families of the crew, our thoughts and prayers are with them.