Wow, according to this article the guy from Wilson's farms got fired. I had no idea. I figured he just got slapped on the wrist.

Buffalo blogosphere
Web loggers build a wired community

By STEPHEN T. WATSON
News Staff Reporter
2/27/2006

Eric Levinson wanted to open a vegan-friendly restaurant in Buffalo, but he didn't know where to put it or how to publicize it.

His boss put Levinson in touch with the folks at the Buffalo Rising blog, who put an article on the Web site asking readers where Levinson should go.

"What I was looking for was feedback from the community. The people on there commenting are very involved in the community," said Levinson, a Rochester native and University at Buffalo graduate.

Blogs such as Buffalo Rising, which is an outgrowth of a magazine founded by Newell Nussbaumer, have exploded in popularity over the last couple of years, and their numbers are reaching a critical mass in Buffalo.

A blog - short for Web log - is an Internet site where people regularly post comments, links to other articles and pictures or video clips.

Though still in its infancy, the technology is building a social network and providing a new, freewheeling forum for political debate, bloggers said.

"Martin Luther was able to get the word out because of the invention of the printing press. Bloggers are able to get the word out because of this technology today. It's the same thing," said David Torke, 42, a student at Buffalo State College who hosts the Fix Buffalo blog.

Blogs combine the online diaries or personal home pages that became popular in the 1990s with the technology to make them more interactive, including feedback from visitors.

The Technorati Web site reported this month that it currently tracks 27.2 million Web logs, and this "blogosphere" doubles in size every 51/2 months. The site tracks about one new blog created every second.

A Gallup Poll from December, however, found that just 20 percent of Americans read blogs frequently or occasionally.

"It provides for a chance to enter into a new level of conversation," said Alex Halavais, a UB assistant professor of communication and a blogger. "It gives you an opportunity to form and maintain communities."

Buffalo ranked 63rd among American cities in blog density, according to research conducted by Halavais and graduate student Jia Lin in late 2003. Berkeley, Calif., ranked No. 1.

The Buffalo and Western New York Web ring, founded by Jennifer Smith, lists 41 locally based blogs, though that is an incomplete number.

They started blogging for a variety of reasons and tackle topics ranging from the war in Iraq to boosting a new business in Buffalo to an odd dream they had the night before.

One of the earliest bloggers was Smith, 32, the switchboard receptionist at a local nonprofit, who has hosted her All Things Jen(nifer) blog since late 2002.

One fellow blogger calls Smith the "grandmother" of Western New York bloggers, because she worked to set up a network of local bloggers who read and link to each other's sites.

"I think it is here to stay," Smith said. "Every other person I meet has a blog or seems to know someone who has a blog."

Those bloggers include Smith's housemate, Erin Nappe, whose site is Erin-Go-Blog.

"There's a group of people who say, "I live here, I like it here, and I want other people to know why,' " said Nappe, 31, a substitute teacher and part-time college professor.

Some grew out of a sense of social activism.

Paul Visco started his Elmwood Strip blog in September 2003 after watching an employee at the Wilson Farms at Elmwood and Auburn avenues berate and threaten a homeless person.

Visco's first post was a copy of a letter [inlink]news,29[/inlink] he wrote that urged the company to discipline the employee and called for a boycott until officials took action.

Tops, which owned Wilson Farms at the time, investigated the complaint and later fired the employee. (I had no idea he got fired!) [inlink]news,30[/inlink]

Elmwood Strip has grown into a site that allows nearly 300 registered users to document their lives - using words, photos and video clips - while connecting to and interacting with others on the blog, Visco said.

"I think it documents an important part of what it means to be a Buffalonian that previously was undocumented," he said.

The Fix Buffalo blog is an effort to preserve the city's architectural heritage, particularly overlooked and undervalued structures on the East Side.

Every month for the last two years, Torke has taken pictures of the Woodlawn Row Houses, located near Traditional High School. The photos on his blog illustrate what Torke contends is the deterioration by neglect of the city-owned houses.

"It's a good communication tool for people who really love the city and are trying to make things better here," said Alan Bedenko, the Clarence lawyer behind the BuffaloPundit blog.

The political debate on blogs can be raw and freewheeling.

Blogs and message boards are taking the place of the public square, or the office water cooler, where information spread in the past, said Kevin R. Hardwick, a Canisius College political scientist.

"Obviously, the politicians are looking at this stuff, and it can influence policy," he said.

SpeakUp Western New York, for instance, is a magnet for anti-county government rhetoric. A petition started on SpeakUp collected 5,000 signatures opposing an Erie County sales tax increase for 2005.

The site, which started in April 2003 and is the passion of Anthony Fracasso, owner of Online Media, had 87,878 posts on 6,356 threads (a string of comments) on the message board as of last week, Fracasso said.

"Sunlight, someone mentioned, is the best cure. And that's what SpeakUp is about," he said.

As for Levinson, the prospective restaurateur, nearly 20 people responded to the Buffalo Rising posting, plugging spots on Hertel Avenue, the Elmwood strip and downtown.

Levinson found a spot he likes near Lafayette Square, after the leasing agent read the Web article and contacted him. He plans to open his restaurant, named Tammuz, by late May. Quotes From:

I am at work wearing clothes that (e:matthew) wore before and he must have been around cats because I am covered in itchy spots and my throat and eyes are all itchy.

I think it is really time to seek alergy treatment as it seems to be getting worse. Man I hate cats.

This journal is realy a combination of the Squeaky Wheel Peep Show and the Geek Meet.



When I first got to the geek meet I seriously thought no one was gonna come. The screens weren't set up and I was convinced we didn't have enough speakers. I was definately wrong because we went way almost till 9PM and the discussion room was packed most of the time.

It actually seemed like a really sucessful show accept for the crappy sales pitch from 3created. Unlike (e:kara) [inlink]kara,35[/inlink] I have no problem saying that I thought that his work totally sucked. He offered nothing new or particularly original and was a sales. You guys know how I feel about that.

I got a couple job offers not that I ever plan on leaving my wonderful state job at Roswell Park.



My talk was about AJAX. It was really hard to balance getting into details with being general enough to keep peoples attentions. I think I did a good job of balancing the two. It is hard to describe a complicated set of tehcnologies in twenty minutes.



The night before was the Squeeky Wheel Peep Show at The Hotel Lenox. Each room of the eigth floor of the hotel was an installation with the them of a peep show. I really felt at home at this event because I knew some of the particpants and becaus eit was in a hotel where I was wearing pajamas. (e:robin)'s exhibit encourage the viewer to get into pajamas and lay on her bed with her. Needless to say I drank too much Tequilla for me first time drinking tequilla. It made my head hurt really bad in the morning, thanfully it went away by the geek meet.











After the hotel we I went we the epeepettes to the pink and the towne restaurant. When I came hoem (e:robin) and (e:terry) were playing with the sugar gliders. All in all it was a nice weekend.

Another twisted media clip, I know how you love your classic macs. Artvoice is hiring also.

This hotel art party is frakin insane. I am currently in pajamas in robins room sitting next to someone's sneakers and drinking tequilla. This remeinded me of twisted.

Turns out that microsoft has known about this since 2002 and has done nothing about it. Why not disable javascript pasting in the internet zone by default seeing as 90% of epople are not going to even know to do that. They have had a multitide of patches since 2002, so there is no reason this could not have been changed.

I decided to write to the Buffalo News about this as my newest version of the IE clipabord security exploit is so sinister that it can constantly monitor your clipboard data in IE for windows and send it to my database, no matter what app you are in as long as you leave IE open.

Although, there is a solution for this which I posted in the computer journal, almost no one has it installed as I have collected thousands of clipboard for my news epoem entitiled "Microsoft Security" which I am reading that I am reading at the e-poetry symposium next week.

Here was my letter, let's see where it goes.

Hey Steve,
I think you will find this extremely interesting. This week I accidentally discovered a major security flaw that affects IE for PC which allows me to read the visitors clipboard contents from a website with just a few lines of code. Just think what is in your clipboard, sensitive data such as passwords, account numbers, contact data, copied emails, copied instant messenging conversations, private documents, etc. Also, there is essentially no limit to the size of the clipboard, so the amount of data can be pages long including entire documents.

While people may have already known about this clipboard security exploit, as far as I know, no one has combined this flaw with current AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) technology. With this technology combo I can create a web site that continuously monitors the contents of a user's clipboard and forwards it to a database any time the content has changed without any indication to the user. It doesn't even matter what windows application they are using when copying new data, as long as the web page is open somewhere in the background. This is the global system clipboard, not something specific to the browser.

You can see it for yourself. Copy some innocuous data to your clipboard and then visit with IE for windows. You should see your clipbaord data echoed into the page. Then for the extraordinary part, leave the site open but switch apps. Anything you copy into your clipboard gets copied onto the page and sent to my database.

I think this particular security flaw is newsworthy because people can see the results right in their browsers. What is most incredible is that unlike flaws where you could say search for data on a users computer, using this method, it's almost like the users brings you their most sensitive data to you.

There is a solution to this that involves disabling paste scripting in your internet options but by default it is enableed which leaves 90% of people wide open.

You cannot believe the data I have collected with this, remember that each bit of data can be associated with an IP addr. If a particular organization was targeted your could definately compromise security in a serious way.

Feel free to email me if you have any questions.

Paul Visco

So (e:joshua) [inlink]joshua,119[/inlink] before you have a heart attack that I am a serial soldier hater, I thought I would explain why I am partcularly outraged with (e:be).

My attack on (e:be)'s journal may have seemed like some random attack on some poor little solder boy who didn't know better and just wanted to defend his country. Well that is not the case. Maybe you don't rememeber be|brandon that used to be the dread locked, hippy granola, anti-war boy that worked at coop.

You may, however, remember him when he lived as a woman. You would know him because he wore the skankiest mini skirts and looked a lot like a prostitute. I disliked him back then because I felt as though he was making it harder on gay people by living like she did for what I perceived to be pure shock value. Then, after a while, I felt bad for her because I thought, oh man maybe he is really a woman trapped in a man's body and I tried to learn to not hate him. His newest metamorphosis just makes me sick.

I am outraged not by the choice of a human to defend their country but by the choice of that particular human to become a solider.

And just as (e:be) has the right to make the choice he did. I have the right to criticize him and call him out on his disturbing choice. In fact I think I have a particular responsibility to do so as I am the one providing him with the public vehicle to brag about his new killing power.

I don't want to feel repsonsibile for giving someone a voice who is choosing to kill people just to see what it feels like.

Here is his repsonse to my comment.

Damn, that's some harsh shit. I wouldn't call it ignorance, really. I know full well that I work for an organization that does "bad things." I went into it knowing that. How much did I know it though? I've been anti-war and government forever, but what did I really know of such things? I'm going through alearning experience here that may very well cost me my life. This I also am aware of. Really, as I believe
I've wrote, I'm fucking over myself -seeing how it feels to betray completely everything I thought I had that made me "me." It's not something that most sane people would do, but I'm into it for an aspect of the depths of human experience that would be otherwise impossible to, well, experience. This puppet theatre of world events is going to keep playing out no matter which side I'm on. The sacrifice I make now will allow me to be able to converse intelligently about things that
before I could only have opinions about.

This is reality. If it weren't me, it'd be someone else, and they could've just as easily been me. I have so little time on this planet, and I need to see from as many viewpoints, and learn as much as possible. So, here I am, spending some time finding out firsthand about part of society that people either love or hate. Myself, I don't love or hate. Life is too short.

And shit man, you may as well laugh, because that brain matter dance isn't likely to happen any time soon. I'm more of a minor wound type. However, should my head succumb to entropy before the rest of me, I would invite such revelry. Just try not to feel too sad, just appreciate the absurdity of corporeal existence.
Rock n' roll...

I have been lifting like mad and my body aches everywhere. I seriously feel thicker everywhere which is kind of exciting although I am not ready for pictures yet. I just wish I had continued working out from back when I started back in november and didn't stop for the months in between.

I have to say I do not know if it will be worth it over the longhaul as it takes up valuable evening programming time but I suppose a little moderation is in order in my life.

Sometimes I want to look like this. I got the chest hair part going, lol.


Today (e:enknot) and I were talking about how we are not just professional but also recreational programmers. Speaking of recreational programming, I was so thrilled with fixing the mobile post from email bug followed by solving the PPC 6700 jpeg corruption error all in my spare moments within the last 24 hours. I think tomorrow I plan on turning the corrupt jpeg fixer into a native mobile phone application. I have a feeling that it will be ueber addictive. If microsoft won't fix it, I will fix it for them - which is ridiculous.

I also started writing about my mobile phone soap opera on my new web site which is barely populated with data yet.

The PPC 6700 which runs Windows Mobile 5.0 is my first truly futuristisic phone. I had a sidekick, I had a blackberry, I had a Nokia 7710 but this phone blows the other ones away in tersm of features, network speed (~200-500kps), includes Wifi, bluetooth, keyboard, IR. It is amazing.



The only problem is that the 1.3 Megapixel camera produces faulty jpegs that have 16 extraneous bytes in their EXIF data. The unfortunately cause the photos to not work with many web sites which use open source Jpeg libraries to resize images. I heard they even have problems being viewed in gmail.

In order for the phone to be truly useful I had to be be able to take images from the phone and use them on my journal. So it was time to get out the old fashioned hex editor and begin experimenting with which bytes were the extraneous ones. Turns out it was a regular sequence right at the end of the EXIF data. The etxra string looks like this:

"x00x10x4Ax46x49x46x00x01x01x00x00x01x00x01x00x00"

I found that this string identifies the images as from the PPC 6700

"x41x70x61x63x68x65x00x48"

Unfortunately, the string is sometimes repeated but only the first one was extraneous, so you can't just doa blind search and replace. instead you have to just repalce the first one. here is some PHP code that would allow you to use these images as normal ones using GD. You an find a copy of this


<?php
function checkFixPPC6700($orig){
    //get the file contents
    $data = file_get_contents($orig);
    //if its a PPC 6700 image cut out the extraneous 16 bits
    if(strstr($data, "x41x70x61x63x68x65x00x48")){
        $bad_data = "x00x10x4Ax46x49x46x00x01x01x00x00x01x00x01x00x00";
        return substr_replace($data, "", strpos($data, $bad_data), strlen($bad_data));
    } else {
        //if not from a PPC 6700 return data unaltered
        return $data;
    }
        
}

$data = checkFixPPC6700('IMAGE_006452.jpg');
//$im = imagecreatefromstring($data);

if (($im = imagecreatefromstring($data)) !== false) {
header('Content-Type: image/jpeg');
imagejpeg($im);
}

?>

They have lots of old pics

I can't believe how few people paid attention to my journal about the clipboard reading flaw in IE. I have read about 3000 clipboards to use in my newest epoem for the epoetry symposium at UB. It is entitled, "Microsoft Security" with a refrain of get firefox, get firefox.