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Programming, Publishing, Politics, and Popes

Language: en-us

Summary

1 - Deterring Spammers with Fake MX Records
2 - Former Sun CEO: Steve Jobs Threatened Patent Suit
3 - Meet Sarah Killen, Conan O'Brien's Favorite Twit
4 - Google Isn't Trying to Screw RSS
5 - Parenthood: So Heart-Warming It Hurts
6 - CBS News Whores for Cheap Hits from Google
7 - Real-Time Twitpic Images Coming from Chile
8 - SeaWorld Killer Whale Kills Second Trainer
9 - Review: Russell Baker's 'Growing Up'
10 - New Retort Feature Dies Horrible Death
11 - The Car for the Man Who Hates His Wife
12 - Article by O'Keefe May Explain Senate Stunt
13 - Creating a Closest Store Locator in PHP
14 - News Alert Banana Losing Appeal After Brown Victory
15 - Human Target's Opening Credits Hit the Mark

Items

1 - Deterring Spammers with Fake MX Records

For the past 48 hours, I've been dealing with a Sendmail server that was shutting down frequently with a load average above 13. The server's getting flooded constantly with spam attempts to non-existent users on more than 100 domains.

I've set up Sendmail to use a virtusertable that rejects every non-valid email address with a "user unknown" error. This is helpful, but Sendmail still has to take the time to reject each spam attempt. Since all but six domains on the server don't receive any mail at all, I wanted to find a way to stop Sendmail from receiving any requests for those domains.

After doing some research, I decided to try setting a fake MX record for the domains that do not send or receive mail. Here's how MX records are set for these domains:

IN MX 10 mail.example.com.

There's no mail server associated with that hostname.

On servers that do exchange email, fake MX records can be used to deter spammers. Most email servers are equipped to deal with mail servers that are unavailable. They queue the outgoing mail and try an alternate mail server, if one has been defined for the domain. Spam software can't take the time to queue an outgoing mail for delivery later because it is sending millions of messages. If it finds a mail server that's unavailable, it gives up and goes on to the next server.

Putting fake servers as the first and last MX record in a domain supposedly discourages spammers without affecting the receipt of legitimate email. Spammers hit the fakes and give up. Legitimate mail servers hit a fake, then try the next option and deliver the mail.

Here's how MX records can be set to achieve this:

IN MX 10 mail1.example.com. IN MX 20 mail2.example.com. IN MX 30 mail3.example.com.

The mail1.example.com and mail3.example.com servers are fakes that don't resolve properly. The functioning mail server is at mail2.example.com.

So far, the approach appears to work. Legitimate email is getting through and most domains aren't getting any spam attempts at all.

Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:17:53 -0500

2 - Former Sun CEO: Steve Jobs Threatened Patent Suit

Former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz began a new blog three weeks ago called What I Couldn't Say to "put context around some of the decisions I faced at Sun," now that he's free from the corporate obligations to watch his words.

Schwartz writes today about tech company patent wars, revealing a 2003 meeting where Apple's Steve Jobs threatened Sun over patents:

In 2003, after I unveiled a prototype Linux desktop called Project Looking Glass*, Steve called my office to let me know the graphical effects were "stepping all over Apple's IP." (IP = Intellectual Property = patents, trademarks and copyrights.) If we moved forward to commercialize it, "I'll just sue you."
My response was simple. "Steve, I was just watching your last presentation, and Keynote looks identical to Concurrence -- do you own that IP?" Concurrence was a presentation product built by Lighthouse Design, a company I'd help to found and which Sun acquired in 1996. Lighthouse built applications for NeXTSTEP, the Unix based operating system whose core would become the foundation for all Mac products after Apple acquired NeXT in 1996. Steve had used Concurrence for years, and as Apple built their own presentation tool, it was obvious where theyÃ¢ÂÂd found inspiration. "And last I checked, MacOS is now built on Unix. I think Sun has a few OS patents, too." Steve was silent.

As a longtime Java book author I can remember the Project Looking Glass pitch. I can't think of any reason why Jobs would threaten patent litigation to stop it. Sun proposed and abandoned countless big ideas over the years.

Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:49:57 -0500

3 - Meet Sarah Killen, Conan O'Brien's Favorite Twit

Sarah Killen

Since joining Twitter on Feb. 24, Conan O'Brien has amassed more than 534,000 followers and posted 10 tweets. Contractually exiled from late night television until September, O'Brien has embraced the new medium, sharing inane personal details of his life, airing petty grievances and even posting a Twitpic of how many people it takes for him to compose each tweet.

Friday afternoon, O'Brien announced that he has taken his first follower:

I've decided to follow someone at random. She likes peanut butter and gummy dinosaurs. Sarah Killen, your life is about to change.

Killen, a Fowlerville, Michigan, resident who has the username LovelyButton, has already acquired 10,200 followers and become one of Twitter's trending topics.

Furthering the insanity, her recent tweet calling Fowlerville resident Russell Bigos "an idiot" is making him a figure of scorn and sympathy. Killen's fiance John Slowik Jr. posted on Facebook Jan. 12 that he was "about to woop bigos in nba2k10," so this could be a videogame basketball rivalry gone terribly wrong. We'll have to wait for the media to dig for answers.

MTV did a video interview with Killen Friday night. She told MTV she was asked in advance by an O'Brien rep if it would be OK to pick her. Since her selection, she's received a free Apple iMac from HornBlasters and offered other freebies for her impending wedding.

Killen posted a link on Twitter to her Susan G. Komen 3-Day for the Cure donation page, where she's raised $1,100 towards her $5,000 goal in nine hours.

By the way, I've also decided to follow someone at random. He likes nipple clamps and the metric system. Jonathan Bourne, your life is about to change.

Update: Sarah Killen is friends on Facebook with Aaron Bleyaert, the former Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien blogger, so it's possible that the selection wasn't entirely random. This scandal could go all the way up to the top! What did Coco know and when did he know it?

Date: Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:26:59 -0500

4 - Google Isn't Trying to Screw RSS

Dave Winer claims on Scripting News today that Google is playing dirty with RSS in favor of Atom:

... Google is going to start reading feeds, but if I understand correctly, they're going to ignore the billions of RSS feeds out there, and ask everyone to convert to Atom to get more currency in search. You can imagine that I don't like this. I wouldn't like it even if I didn't play a big role in getting those billions of feeds out there. I wouldn't like because I have thousands of RSS feeds on my servers, and believe me -- they are not changing to Atom anytime in the next few decades. I don't think I'm alone in that.
Now a little preaching. Big companies always feel they can push the rest of us around, but I gotta say -- I've never seen it work. Usually the lesson they learn is that they would be better off if they would just Go With The Flow, and let the users guide them. Nothing wrong with reading Atom feeds, but to ignore RSS, well guys that's just plain dumb.

Give up the fight Google. You don't have to acknowlege me, but RSS -- that's a force of nature. That's why I did rssCloud -- for you -- to give you the impetus to do what you should have done naturally, support the formats that the users have chosen. It's not too late to get our relationship back on track. I'm not your enemy, I'm just one guy in an apartment in the West Village writing on my blog.

He understands incorrectly.

If he's talking about the news that Google may use PubSubHubbub (PuSH) to allow web publishers to submit new content to the search engine, there's no reason that this development would exclude "billions of RSS feeds." The PuSH protocol does not make feed publishers or software developers choose Atom instead of RSS. The protocol works equally well with feeds in both formats. If a hub is monitoring an RSS feed, it sends RSS data out to interested clients. If it monitors an Atom feed, it sends Atom.

There was some early confusion because the PuSH specification was not clear on this point. To address the issue, I made some spec suggestions in September and Brett Slatkin incorporated them into the current draft of the specification. The spec leaves no doubt that PuSH is designed for both formats.

This blog is proof of that. I upgraded my blog a few months ago to send out updates using the protocol. Although my feed is in RSS format, PuSH has no trouble transmitting updates. People who are reading my blog in Google Reader or Google Buzz -- two of the first popular clients to support PuSH -- will get this blog entry a few seconds after I publish it.

PuSH is the best way to deliver real-time updates to RSS or Atom feeds. Now that WordPress supports the format on all 7.5 million blogs on WordPress.Com, all of the leading blog platforms have adopted the format.

The alternative, RSSCloud, still lacks a specification seven months after Winer revived it. There's only some rough implementation notes and no process in place to enable interested parties to decide what features the protocol will contain or how the spec will be written.

Google, if you're reading this, I'm concerned about our relationship. Why don't you call me any more? Things can be good again, baby. I'm sorry I got so angry before. I love you so much sometimes it just makes me crazy.

Date: Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:17:10 -0500

5 - Parenthood: So Heart-Warming It Hurts

I posted a review on Mister Television of NBC's new drama Parenthood:

The Parenthood pilot on NBC was the most exhausting television I've endured this season.
The show begins with Peter Krause jogging down a Berkeley, Calif., street. The jog has left him wheezing for air, in spite of the fact that Krause is physically fit and doesn't appear to have an ounce of fat on him. (I make this observation in an entirely heterosexual way.) He's sitting on his taut buttocks (OK, that was a little gay) when he gets a call from his sister Lauren Graham. She's moving to Berkeley with her teen-age daughter, who is acting out sexually with boys out of frustration with the fact that her mom is hotter. Graham needs to know that she's making the right decision by moving, and if she's making the wrong decision she wants to blame Krause. In between his dying breaths, Krause agrees to this deal.

I challenge anyone to write a more detailed review while missing the last 50 minutes of the episode.

I run the site with television's Jonathan Bourne. We're going to start up a TV death pool there in the fall that's 10 percent better than the competition.

Date: Thu, 04 Mar 2010 09:32:55 -0500

6 - CBS News Whores for Cheap Hits from Google

Yesterday, the CBS News web site ran a five-paragraph story on the fact that Susan Dey was absent from a Partridge Family reunion:

The Partridge Family cast was one member short when they reunited on television Tuesday morning.
The cast of the popular '70s sitcom appeared on the Today Show as part of their "Great TV Families Reunited" series, but actress Susan Dey, who played eldest daughter Laurie Partridge, was not in attendance.
Danny Bonaduce, who in the years after his child stardom faced drug addiction and legal troubles, was present for the reunion.
Watch the Reunion

The show, which centered around a widow and her five children who embark on a music career, aired from 1970-1974.
A similar absence occurred Monday morning, when the cast of Eight is Enough reunited on the morning program minus actor Adam Rich. The actor endured many personal issues after his time on the show, including arrests and substance abuse.

This story, which contains no quotes and looks to have been written in about five minutes, was published solely for one reason: Dey was a volcanic search term on Google Trends yesterday. People wanted to know why Dey was absent, so they looked on Google.

CBS is promoting a rival network with the story and even links to video on NBC's web site.

There are a lot of online news sites and blogs that use Google Trends as their assignment desk, churning out poorly researched stories quickly to capitalize on a hot news search term. Weak-ass Dey stories were filed by such august journalistic enterprises as Puggal, Associated Content and Thaindian News.

So the network of Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow is in good company.

Date: Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:32:17 -0500

7 - Real-Time Twitpic Images Coming from Chile

When news breaks such as today's massive earthquake in Chile, one of the first places where images show up from the scene is on Twitpic, a popular image-posting service for Twitter users. You can find links to these images on Twitter search by including "twitpic" as one of your search terms, but that's not as useful as seeing thumbnails of the actual images. You have to click each link to see what it contains.

To make it easier to see the images being posted about Chile, I wrote a Java application this morning that uses the Twitter and Twitpic APIs to download thumbnails and display them in reverse chronological order. Each thumbnail can be clicked to open the photo on Twitpic's site.

The application produces a web page and RSS feed, updated every two minutes.

The application is a mashup that does the following:

Downloads a search feed of "twitpic chile" from Twitter in Atom format.
Extracts Twitpic URLs from tweets in that feed.
Calls the Twitpic API to get the thumbnail of each photo as a JPEG image.
Saves the thumbnail to a directory on my server.
Produces a web page and feed of the saved thumbnails, sorted using the creation time of its file.

I'll be releasing it under the GPL when it's done. This application includes support for PubSubHubbub, so subscribers can see new photos show up in real time with clients such as Google Reader.

Date: Sat, 27 Feb 2010 12:04:04 -0500

8 - SeaWorld Killer Whale Kills Second Trainer

Dawn Brancheau, a 40-year-old trainer at SeaWorld in Orlando, was killed today by a killer whale at the beginning of a performance. Eyewitness accounts differ, but she was reportedly dragged into the water, shaken violently and kept underwater until she drowned. The whale, Tilikum, is the largest in captivity and has been involved in two fatal incidents prior to this one. In 1999, a park visitor hid at SeaWorld until closing and jumped into the pool with the whale. The man was found dead in the pool the next morning and had suffered hypothermia and scrapes from being dragged along the pool's bottom. Eight years earlier, Tilikum was one of three whales who drowned Keltie Byrne, a 21-year-old trainer, at Sealand of the Pacific, after she slipped and fell into the pool.

The PBS series Frontline did an story on the issue of killer whale trainer safety in 1995, A Whale of a Business. The web site for the story includes a chapter from the 1992 book The Performing Orca: Why the Show Must Stop by Erich Hoyt.

The chapter makes interesting reading in light of today's events, since it focuses strongly on Byrne's death. Hoyt accuses SeaWorld of covering up training injuries and disregarding evidence that killer whales don't like to be ridden:

... it was all too late for Keltie Byrne. Her parents have decided so far not to sue Sealand, preferring to put the tragedy behind them. The jury at the public inquest was unable to agree on the real cause of Byrne's death, beyond drowning. Why did orcas, which had never killed a trainer in marine parks or in the wild despite thousands of encounters, suddenly kill a human? Was it "an accident waiting to happen," if not at Sealand, then at Sea World or almost any park, especially one where basic safety procedures are overlooked? ...
In September 1991, Sealand owner Bob Wright put the three orcas up for sale. But what marine park wants to take three orcas that killed their trainer? Even before Sealand announced the whales were for sale, Sea World was preparing an application to NMFS to import them.

Hoyt has a web site and remains active on the issue of using killer whales in performances. I asked him a few questions and here's what he told me in email:

I think that this is an awful tragedy for the trainer and her family. But that it is avoidable: orcas do not belong in captivity. What I worry about is that things will be focussed on Tilikum, that he is an older male, and his history of having been involved in the death of two other people. Sea World or others may try to say that it is this one older male whale's fault. There are quite a number of other accidents that could well have been fatal that were caused by other captive orcas, females and males, although they do tend to be animals that have been in the parks for awhile. As I reported in The Performing Orca and also in some detail in Orca: The Whale Called Killer, trainers have noted that orcas start to get bored and go a bit crazy after a few years in captivity. You must imagine a highly intelligent social mammal and a big predator normally travelling 100 kms or more a day, then taken from its family, stripped of its ability to socialize normally, to hunt and to travel. What it has left is its relationship to the trainer, but how long can that really keep them interested? It is not surprising that an animal starved of company and stimulation will pull a trainer into the water, or try to keep them in the pool...even to the point of drowning them. Very sad, but again, we know how to correct this situation. Orcas are too big, too social, too wild to be kept in captivity.

The picture of Dawn Brancheau ran Dec. 30, 2005, in the Orlando Sentinel.

Date: Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:37:38 -0500

9 - Review: Russell Baker's 'Growing Up'

On a recent trip to the local Barnes & Noble, I was surprised to see Russell Baker's Growing Up in the autobiography section. The book came out 26 years ago and Baker has faded from the public spotlight since his retirement in 1998 from the New York Times, where he was a popular columnist. I picked the book up, figuring it must be a pretty good memoir to have outlasted the author's fame, and noticed a week later that the bookstore had already reordered a copy.

Baker's book is a great memoir. He tells the story of his childhood growing up in the Depression, which takes him from a rural Virginia shack without electricity or running water to stark poverty in Belleville, New Jersey; and Baltimore, where his widowed mother must rely on the charity of family members to feed the family. Baker, born in 1925, frames the story with his 84-year-old mother's lapse into dementia at a nursing home, which has untethered her from the present and drops her into random points in her life. One day he comes to see her and is met with the question "where's Russell?" In her mind, she'd become a young mother again with a three-year-old boy and a younger sister. Russell's father, who she met when his car broke down leaving the local moonshine distillery, had not yet died in his early thirties from diabetes because insulin wasn't available.

Although the specifics of Baker's childhood are often grim, he writes with a sense of humor about himself that reminded me of Jean Shepherd's narration in the movie A Christmas Story. This is particularly true when he describes how his lack of aptitude for anything else led him to journalism. "The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer," he writes, "and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any."

Baker's modesty about his own abilities is misplaced. He writes well, telling the human cost of the Depression through the lives of his relatives. He focuses in particular on his mother and her diminishment of opportunities. A college-educated schoolteacher, she remains jobless for years and can't fulfill her dream of putting the family in their own home until he's almost in college. The Bakers are so poor that at one point she gives up her third child, still an infant, to be raised by childless relatives.

Baker's mother ends up living through her children, leaning hard on Russell to make something of himself and putting him to work on the streets selling the Saturday Evening Post when he's just eight years old. She's so miserly about affection and praise that by the end of the book, I needed a hug. Unfortunately, the story ends with Russell as a newlywed who has not yet made anything of himself as a journalist, so there's never the cathartic third-act moment where the mother makes clear that her sacrifices on behalf of her only son were worth it. That bummed me out.

Although he's retired from the Times and a second gig hosting PBS' Masterpiece Theatre, Baker still writes occasionally for New York Review of Books.

Date: Mon, 22 Feb 2010 14:20:30 -0500

10 - New Retort Feature Dies Horrible Death

After banning the same person more than a dozen times from the Drudge Retort, I decided to experiment with a new site feature this afternoon that turned into a failure of epic proportions. I'm documenting it here so that other people who run online communities will avoid making the same mistake.

Throughout its history, the Retort has attracted a small number of users who delight in creating a large amount of trouble. They want to prove that no moderation system has ever been devised that can hold them. I am not questioning their decision or their singleminded pursuit of this goal. It is important to have hobbies.

When I see a new user show up who acts like somebody I've kicked off, I have written code that determines whether other users have connected to the server with the same IP address. Nine times out of 10, this reveals the user's real identity and I drop the account.

Since Retort users are conscientious about flagging offensive comments, I thought it would be a good idea to let users check whether a user has shared an IP address with others on the site. No IP addresses were revealed. My site checked the addresses associated with a user and posted a report like this:

ToniTennille has used the same IP address as the following users:

TheCaptain, user level user
MuskratLove, user level user

Within an hour, it became clear that this was a terrible idea. So terrible, in fact, that I must downplay my own poor judgment by using the passive voice.

Mistake was made.

If an Internet service provider, employer or school assigns IP addresses to its users from a small pool of addresses, people who don't know each other will share the same IP. I thought the Retort wasn't particularly large -- the site has 18,900 users, 1,700 of whom have logged in the past 90 days -- so the chances were slim that users who don't know each other at all would have ever shared an IP address.

Inaccurate conclusion reached.

As it turns out, there are a lot of people who share IP addresses for entirely innocent reasons completely without their knowledge. This was particularly true on my site of people using BlackBerries. Before I took the new feature offline, there were a dozen false positives. The flaw in my thinking is that I only was looking at shared-IP information when I already had reason to suspect that a user was bogus. So I could tell pretty quickly whether I had caught a troublemaker or not. When I wasn't sure, I ignored the information.

Retort users, on the other hand, gleefully checked out everybody and reported back the results, whether or not they made any sense.

I have a good track record with user privacy on my sites. As a general rule, I don't provide any personal information about my users to people who ask, no matter what the reason. As I've told a few lawyers and one police agency, I only would reveal a user's IP address or similar identifying information in response to a court order.

The new feature never revealed any IP addresses. But it was still staggeringly stupid and misleading, and all I can say in my defense is that I recognized the error and killed the experiment 1 hour and 43 minutes after it began.

Apology offered.

Date: Wed, 17 Feb 2010 18:42:27 -0500

11 - The Car for the Man Who Hates His Wife

Here's an interesting message for 100 million Super Bowl viewers: If you hate your hectoring shrew of a wife ...

... you'll love a Dodge Ram Charger!

Date: Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:50:42 -0500

12 - Article by O'Keefe May Explain Senate Stunt

On Jan. 25, James O'Keefe and three other conservative activists were arrested after a weird incident in which they entered Sen. Mary Landrieu's (D-La.) office in New Orleans dressed as telephone repairmen and attempted to gain access to the closet where the phone system was serviced. They were charged with "entering federal property under false pretenses for the purpose of committing a felony," according to an FBI press release.

There's been a lot of speculation about the motives of O'Keefe, who led an attempted sting of ACORN offices last fall that was widely publicized and helped spur Congress to drop millions in funding for the voter registration and lower income charity. Messing with the telephones in a federal government official's office is a serious felony, whether O'Keefe and his associates were planning to bug the phones, vandalize them or achieve some other purpose. If they are convicted, the four men face up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

On a web site published by Andrew Breitbart, who has O'Keefe on his payroll but denies involvement in the Landrieu incident, O'Keefe issued a statement after the arrest claiming that "[n]o one tried to wiretap or bug Senator Landrieu's office. Nor did we try to cut or shut down her phone lines."

This statement doesn't explain why some of them were dressed as repairmen and tried to access the telephone closet, as the FBI alleges.

An article that O'Keefe wrote in November 2008 for the online conservative magazine New Guard may shed some light on his actions. In the article, O'Keefe describes a past sting project where he and a young anti-abortion activist named Lila Rose contacted Planned Parenthood offices seeking to donate money to fund abortions and reduce the number of black babies in the United States.

We were able to donate money to the organization for the explicit purpose of reducing the number of black babies born in the United States -- in line with the intentions of Planned Parenthood's founder, Margaret Sanger.
We carefully chose a dozen or so "one party consent" states, where it is legal to audio record someone without their consent. Not a single Planned Parenthood employee we spoke to was disinterested in the prospect of a donation for our stated purposes.

As he did later at ACORN offices, O'Keefe targeted low-level employees of liberal leaning groups and tried to get them to say something damning while he was taping the interactions. Although he says that the Planned Parenthood taping was legal, he also writes this in the article:

Leaders taking on power structures need to be raw, confident, fearless and impermeable. Lila received a letter threatening to prosecute the group for violating wiretapping laws, but it did not stop her from continuing the investigation. After the investigation aired nationally on Fox News, Planned Parenthood could no longer press charges, as Lila would appear the victim.

O'Keefe believed that even if he and Rose were putting themselves in legal jeopardy, the fear of bad publicity would make it impossible for charges to be pressed against them.

I don't know what O'Keefe and his fake telephone repairmen were planning to do at Landrieu's office, but he seems to believe that when you break laws in pursuit of a media stunt, the coverage will shield you from prosecution. That hasn't worked out for him this time around.

Date: Sat, 06 Feb 2010 19:13:36 -0500

13 - Creating a Closest Store Locator in PHP

Over the past year, one of my side projects has been the development of shopping directory sites for categories such as wargames, sports cards, videogames and farmers markets, the last of which I launched over the weekend. The sites are running on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) using my own code and the Smarty template language, which keeps me from cluttering up my web pages with PHP.

As I prepared the newest site, I decided to implement a feature that takes a user-submitted address and finds the closest stores. This functionality was the original impetus for the project -- I thought it would be cool if Wargames.Com had a store locator that could find the closest wargame store when I'm out of town.

To accomplish this, I needed to split latitude and longitude into their own fields in the MySQL database and use the following SQL query to find the closest stores to a user-submitted latitude and longitude:

SELECT *, (3959 * acos(cos(radians({$user_latitude})) * cos(radians(latitude)) * cos(radians(longitude) - radians({$user_longitude})) + sin( radians({$user_latitude})) * sin(radians(latitude)))) AS distance FROM stores HAVING distance < 250 ORDER BY distance LIMIT 0, 10

This query, which I found in a PHP/MySQL tutorial by a Google Maps engineer, employs the Haversine formula to compute distances between two pairs of coordinates on a sphere. The fields latitude and longitude are from the MySQL database. The PHP variables $user_latitude and $user_longitude contain the coordinates of the user address.

An address can be specified many different ways, but most people don't know the latitude and longitude of their location. Fortunately, Google Maps offers a web service that can take an address in a wide variety of formats and attempt to determine its latitude and longitude. The web service, which is a simple URL request, returns the information in either XML or JSON format. It requires a Google MAPS API key:

http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?q=ADDRESS&output=json&oe=utf8&sensor=false&key=YOUR+API+KEY

Plug the address and your API key into the request, changing "json" to "xml" if you want XML data. Here's example output for Disney World in JSON and XML.

I chose JSON over XML because it's easier to work with in PHP. PHP 5 has built-in support for JSON, but my sites are on a server running PHP 4, so I installed the Services_JSON library. After a brutal hour of trial and error that made me question programming as a lifestyle choice, I figured out that the following four lines of PHP code will pull a latitude and longitude out of Google's JSON address data:

$json = new Services_JSON(); $json_data = $json->decode($this->get_web_page($url)); $addr_latitude = $json_data->Placemark[0]->Point->coordinates[1]; $addr_longitude = $json_data->Placemark[0]->Point->coordinates[0];

The get_web_page() function returns the contents of a web page as a string.

I've added the closest-store search to all four sites, which you can try on the home page of Sportscard-Stores.Com. The next project will be to create mobile versions of the shopping sites so users can hunt stores with their phones.

Date: Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:37:30 -0500

14 - News Alert Banana Losing Appeal After Brown Victory

Last night on the Drudge Retort, I honored the request of a few Republican members of the site to bring back News Alert Banana when the Massachusetts Senate race was called for Scott Brown. The Banana is the Retort's version of Matt Drudge's siren.

News Alert Banana

The banana has never celebrated a dramatic Republican upset victory with so much glee before. I don't know how he lives with himself.

There are a lot of reasons being batted around today for how the Democrats managed to lose a Senate election in Massachusetts. My favorite is the idea that voters in a liberal state that has universal health care voted for Brown, a candidate who supports the state's health care plan, in order to send a strong message in rejection of health care reform. That's like buying a Red Sox jersey to indicate how much you love the Yankees.

One reason for the ass-kicking ought to be getting more attention today, in my opinion: The Democrat-led Massachusetts legislature changed the Senate succession rules twice in the last six years to benefit their own party.

In 2004, when Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts was the party's presidential nominee, the legislature faced the prospect that if Kerry won, the state's Republican governor Mitt Romney would be able to appoint his successor. They changed the rules at the urging of Sen. Ted Kennedy so that a special election would fill the seat instead.

Last year, when it appeared that Kennedy would die and leave the Senate Democrats one short of a filibuster-proof majority of 60 members, the rules were changed again with his involvement. The state's Democratic governor Deval Patrick would be able to appoint an interim successor to serve until the special election.

So when a little-known Republican state senator faced off Tuesday against the Democratic attorney general, who was supported by the Kennedys and the state's political establishment, this was the first time that voters had a chance to have their say in the choice of a replacement senator.

Message received.

The American public is sick and tired of insiders rigging the system for their own benefit, whether the system is politics, banking or Wall Street. Kennedy's gamesmanship with Senate seats helped elect the first Republican senator in Massachusetts in 38 years.

Date: Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:36:49 -0500

15 - Human Target's Opening Credits Hit the Mark

The new Fox series Human Target has amazing opening credits:

I caught the pilot during a special preview Sunday night sandwiched between episodes of 24. Regular airings begin Wednesday. The show, based on a DC comic book from the '70s, was a light escapist romp. Mark Valley, who was great a few years ago in a similar role as Keen Eddie, plays an out-of-his-mind bodyguard for hire who manages to get shot, stabbed, blown up and trapped on a runaway bullet train in a single episode. The great Jackie Earle Haley, Rorschach from Watchmen and Kelly Leak from Bad News Bears, plays his unscrupulous henchman Guerrero.

Date: Mon, 18 Jan 2010 20:01:18 -0500

BBC News | News Front Page | UK Edition

Summary

Items

1 - Apology for women raped by father

2 - Economic storm not over, says PM

3 - BA strike talks end without deal

4 - Scientists to review climate body

5 - Kidnapped boy's father back in UK

6 - Biden steps up pressure on Israel

7 - More schools fail Ofsted checks

8 - Berezovsky wins poison libel case

9 - SNP and Plaid's BBC debate anger

10 - Lost Boys actor Haim dies aged 38

11 - Oscar bosses defend Farrah Fawcett snub

12 - Parents complain that buggies are seen as a nuisance

13 - Live - Wednesday football

14 - Pompey axe 85 jobs to cut costs

15 - Onions ruled out of opening Test

16 - How can we reduce reoffending?

17 - Nick Robinson

18 - Jumbo job

19 - Junk mail quiz

20 - Medical records

21 - Fatwa flashing

22 - Fighting the tide

23 - Boy's torturers given jail terms

24 - Body found in missing mother hunt

25 - Man guilty of murdering daughter

26 - Renewed threat to crystal factory

27 - Nigeria charges over Jos killings

28 - Insurers 'face $7bn Chile bill'

29 - Egypt's top cleric dies aged 81

30 - 'Bali bomber' killed in Indonesia

31 - Spanish hostage in Africa freed

32 - Iran attacks US over Afghanistan

33 - Smaller losses at Northern Rock

34 - UK global clout 'waning' - Hague

35 - Call to halt NHS medical database

36 - School lotteries 'destabilising'

37 - EU set to ban bluefin tuna trade

38 - Daly 'fighting' to save marriage

39 - Internet up for Nobel Peace Prize

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