Rick Cogley's Delicious Bookmarks

BlankCanvas - Gmail Signatures in FireFox (or Flock) Posted: 28 Nov 2008 10:53 PM CST Blank Canvas makes a plugin for Firefox that works in Flock too - it lets you put HTML in your Gmail signatures. Excellent!

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HTML Signatures in GMail from BlankCanvas

I found a very useful Firefox plugin from "Blank Canvas", that enables your GMail to have HTML signatures. Because it is a Firefox plugin, I thought it might work in Flock, and sure enough, it does. Once you install it from this page on Blank Canvas' site, and restart your browser, you can create your signature in GMail's Compose window. This had been a GreaseMonkey script but the author converted it to a Firefox plugin. Thank you, Blank Canvas for a very useful tool.

Post Delicious Bookmarks to Your Blog

Delicious has an experimental service that allows you to enter information about your blog, and have Delicious post a summary of your latest bookmarks to your blog.

Assuming you are a Delicious member (free) you can get to the Blog Posting Interface via this URL:

https://secure.delicious.com/settings/blogging/posting

In the interface, the "out_url" section is where you put the so-called "XML-RPC" URL for your blog software. This is not your blog URL but rather the URL of the API for posting via blog publishing software.

For Blogger, the XML-RPC URL is:

http://www.blogger.com/feeds/YOUR-BLOGGER-ID/posts/default

You can get your Blogger ID by going to the Blogger web interface, making a new post, and hovering your mouse over the "Edit Posts" link. That said, I have tried this with various numbers for the "out_id" section, my Blogger blog ID, the numeral 1 and so on, as well as various variations of the Blogger XML-RPC URL, but, nothing works. So, I'll relay an alternative method.

Posting Delicious to Blogger via Feedburner

Here's how to do it:

1. Enter your Delicious RSS feed into Feedburner.
2. Republish as a Feedburner feed, and adjust in Feedburner as you like, including publishing the feed via email on the Publicize tab.
3. Subscribe to your Feedburner feed for your Delicious using your special post-to-Blogger email address. You can subscribe on the FeedBurner feed page - there's a link to subscribe by email, and you can enter your email-to-blogger email address there.

That should do it. Enjoy!

Update 11 Dec - thanks Adam. I incorporated your suggestions.

Consolidated RSS for this Site

I have RSS feeds from all different sources - my blogs, my topics Glossary, Flickr, SmugMug, Facebook and so on, and I imagine that this is not an uncommon problem for people using the latest technologies and social networking sites. I wanted a way to let visitors subscribe to the updates of my personal site, without complexity, and via either RSS if they are familiar, or, via the old standard email.

How to Consolidate your RSS Feeds and Allow Subscriptions

Here's how I combined the RSS feeds from all my various sites, and static pages, into one consolidated feed:

• Create a Yahoo Pipe, drag the "Fetch Feed" object onto the canvas and connect it with the Pipe Output object. Add all your feeds to the Fetch Feed object.
• Create an RSS feed from my site's static cycling training log, using FEED43.com, and add the resulting feed to the Yahoo Pipe.
• Save and publish the Yahoo Pipe, and add its address to FeedBurner.
• Use the incredible amount of settings on FeedBurner to customize your feed.
• Copy the HTML for the subscription form from FeedBurner to an appropriate part of your site.

In the end, I added my blog feeds, my FAQ feeds, my Flickr feed, my glossary entries feed, and the special "scraped" feed via Feed43.com for my cycling records, to the Yahoo Pipes pipe, to have a single feed with all my updates in it. You can subscribe here.

Chinese Domain Scam - Register Now or Else

I received the unethical blackmail email below, which upon doing some research is a scam. Here is a telling blog entry on the same with hundreds of non-victims compleat with saucy-yet-puerile rebuttals from the scammers.

Report the China Domain Scammers to CNNIC

I reported this to the NIC in China - CNNIC and to the Hong Kong Police Technology Crimes division. If you receive a mail with a subject line similar to "Subject: URGENT --dispute of internet intellectual property safeguard", forward it along to CNNIC who controls the registrars in China. Here is the contact info from CNNIC's website:

CNNIC Service
4, South 4th Street, Zhongguancun,
Haidian district,
Beijing 100190, China
POB: Beijing 349, Branch 6
TEL: +86-10-58813000
FAX: +86-10-58812666
E-mail: service@cnnic.cn
You can also report to the Hong Kong Police Technology Crime Division.

Technology Crime Prevention Unit,
Technology Crime Division,
Commercial Crime Bureau, HKP,
22/F, Arsenal House,
Police Headquarters,
1 Arsenal Street, Wanchai
Hong Kong.
TEL: (852) 2860 5012
FAX: (852) 2328 7128
Email: cpu-tcd@police.gov.hk
Here's the scam letter, for your reference:

(If you are NOT CEO,please forward this to your CEO, because this is urgent.Thanks.)
Dear CEO,
We are the department of registration service in China. we have something need to confirm with you. We formally received an application on November 17, 2008, One company which self-styled "Speed(China)Investment Co.,Ltd" are applying to register (esolia) as internet brand name and domain names as below (esolia.com.cn esolia.net.cn esolia.org.cn esolia.mobi esolia.asia esolia.hk etc.).
After our initial checking, we found the internet brand name and these domain names being applied are as same as your company’s, so we need to get the confirmation from your company. If the aforesaid company is your business partner or your subsidiary company, please DO NOT reply us, we will approve the application automatically. If you have no any relationship with this company, please contact us within 15 workdays. If out of the deadline, we will approve the application submitted by "Speed(China)Investment Co.,Ltd" unconditionally.
We would like to get the affirmation of your company,please contact us by telephone or email as soon as possible.
Best Regards,
Kevin Wu
Senior Director
TEL: +86 21 69929440
Fax: +86 21 69929447
Website:www.qipeng.org.cn
E-mail:Kevin.wu@qipeng.org.cn
Just what we need. More scammers and spammers.

Please Note - Christopher Laursen writes to mention:

I have created the largest online database of Chinese domain name
scammers. 

To date more than 200 scammers and 670 email addresses used by them. 

It would be great if you would refer to it, so we can warn others'
about this scam and reduce the number of victims. 

You can find the scammer list at the URL http://scam.europeandomaincentre.com . 

Best Regards
Christopher Hofman Laursen

Listing Open Directory Users on OS X Leopard Server

If you want get a list of your users on Open Directory in Leopard Server, you need to use the dscl command from the Terminal. SSH to your server, and do a sudo bash or su - to get into root mode. Then you can run dscl directly with arguments, or, enter its interactive shell mode.

Listing Users with DSCL

Here is how to list users from the command line in Leopard Server:

myhost:~ root# dscl localhost list /Local/Default/Users

myhost:~ root# dscl localhost list /LDAPv3/127.0.0.1/Users

Or, go into interactive mode:

myhost:~ root# dscl

>list Local/Default/Users

>list /LDAPv3/127.0.0.1/Users

You should also be able to email the list to yourself, or, send it to a file:

myhost:~ root# dscl localhost list /LDAPv3/127.0.0.1/Users |sendmail rick.cogley@gmail.com

myhost:~ root# dscl localhost list /LDAPv3/127.0.0.1/Users > /path/to/userlist.txt

An Easier Way with DSCACHEUTIL

There happens also to be a wrapper for this information, that makes things easy. You can use dscacheutil to get a list of users or groups and some relevant information. For example, use dscacheutil with the -q (query) switch and either user or group, like so:

dscacheutil -q user
dscacheutil -q group

The output looks like this:

bash-3.2# dscacheutil -q user
name: _amavisd
password: *
uid: 83
gid: 83
dir: /var/virusmails
shell: /usr/bin/false
gecos: AMaViS Daemon

name: _appowner
password: *
uid: 87
gid: 87
dir: /var/empty
shell: /usr/bin/false
gecos: Application Owner

Hope this helps someone. Enjoy!

Enable Google Labs in Google Apps Premier

If you read my post about enabling Google Labs in GMail, I'm happy to report that the trick also works in Google Apps Premier Edition "GAPE". Go to the Labs tab via an URL like this (edit it so that it has your own GAPE domain).

https://mail.google.com/a/your-gape-domain.com/?labs=1#settings/labs

Now you can have that Google Labs goodness in GAPE. Enjoy!

D90 Support - Apple Digital Camera Raw Compatibility Update

Now the Nikon D90 RAW format is supported by Aperture and iPhoto. You can get the update by going into Software Update in your OS X "Apple Menu", or, at Apple's Digital Camera Raw Compatibility Update 2.3 page. The supported cameras are:

• Nikon D90
• Nikon Coolpix P6000
• Canon EOS 50D
• Sony DSLR-A900

Thank you, Apple!