Dave’s Blog

I recently came across an old reel-to-reel recording of the band Shadrack, made back in 1973 or so. My friend Jim Shields invited me to tag along and watch as the band did their recording in Atlanta. I re-mastered the songs as mp3 files, and remembered I had some slides I had shot down there during that magical week.

I’ve put the whole thing together HERE if anybody is interested in a retro-ride back to the days when ELP and Yes were everybody’s heroes. Hope you enjoy!

I’ve been silent almost a year on these pages, and I have no excuse except that I’ve been busy.
I guess my pent-up editorial righteousness has finally reached the boiling point.
Either that or for the first time in almost a year, I’ve had time to inject my thoughts into the blogosphere.

Call me a grinch if you want to. I made it all the way through Christmas being polite and doing my best to be of holiday good cheer despite a growing annoyance with what Christmas has become. Its fairly obvious that the “reason for the season” has become quite simply: Money. I think its been that way for some time now, but its gotten worse. Much worse.
Read the rest of this entry »

Well I’ve finally done it. I’ve been thinking about doing this for awhile, but 2007 seems like a perfect time to start. The genesis of my concept for the ZFiles was that it seems like every conversation I have with people I know covers so many interesting areas that I thought I would share some of them with you. I hope you find them as interesting as I do.

Doc Sade sent this, tried to log in to the blog and got blocked. (I’m working on that!) He said:

Soooo…I was having this “old bull, young bull” discussion about IT in general and how    –back in the day–  we had to hand-carry bits in a bucket to create bytes; how the bits would fall off perfectly good magnetic tape (don’t get me started on cards & punch-cards); how I used to run an a-basic Star Trek mainframe rip-off on PolyMorphics 8080s, loading the game into memory each time because hard drives… well, didn’t exist outside of Sys36s’ platters; Read the rest of this entry »

I recently discovered some fascinating research into what I can only describe as anomalies in randomness. Before you decide I’ve gone off the deep end, hear me out. Quantum physicists have found that the deeper they dig into the behavior of elemental particles, the more chance comes into play. Einstein was said to be so frustrated by the inevitability of this Read the rest of this entry »

I have to confess I was a little worried there for a while. As an operator of a mail server for my web clients, spam is a huge concern. One of the best ways to combat it is to subscribe to the non-profit Spamhaus database of offenders. Based in the U.K, Spamhaus takes pains to ensure that their database only contains known provable sources of multiple unsolicited spam emails. So when an incoming email is from a host thats on Spamhaus’s database, we toss it. So do most ISPs and hosting providers. Its become one of the best anti-spam measures available.
Then in September, a Chicago bulk email company called E360Insight, got Judge Charles Kocoras to issue a judgement against Spamhaus. Spamhaus was ordered to pay $11.7M in damages, and stop blocking E360Insight’s spam. When Spamhaus refused, saying the judge has no jurisdiction over a U.K company, the judge issued a default judgement against them, and tried to get ICANN to shut down their domain registration.

Fortunately, so far, ICANN has stood their ground, and so has Spamhaus. But it just goes to show that spammers with enough money behind them can bamboozle judges and subvert the legal system to allow them to gum up everybody’s email inboxes with unwanted garbage.

Good for you Spamhaus! Keep up the good work!

Seems like everything is a war these days.  War on Terrorism, war on poverty, war on drugs… So I hate to add to the list of wars, but I can’t help thinking there is one looming - over Internet bandwidth.  Just when we thought we were starting to have enough Read the rest of this entry »

Been having Internet troubles lately? You’re not alone! A bunch of my clients, friends, and I have been seeing all sorts of “issues” with Embarq’s attempts to cut the cord between themselves and Mama Sprint. The DSL light stays on but there ain’t nobody home. When google’s skimpy start page takes 8 minutes to load, its enough to make you pine for a 24k dialup connection. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, SIGGRAPH, the big computer-graphics convention in Boston has announced there will be a special showing of “The Dream Machine”, the documentary I produced about the Scanimates!  Here’s the press release: Read the rest of this entry »

I frequently find myself trying to secure a good domain name for my clients.  Ever notice how all the good ones are taken?  Ever notice that if you try to access them you get what seems like a search engine page with a bunch of links?  Whatever you do, don’t click on any of them!  Doing so only helps encourage the practice of Domain Kiting Read the rest of this entry »