IWebThereforeIAm

Barron's has a really nice page for market data. In addition to the front page with index levels and market summaries, it has US stocks, ETFs, mutual funds, credit market data, currencies, futures, and calendars (including IPOs and earnings).

A friend of mine has a studio that is available for rent stating September first. Here is her description:

My former apartment on West 81st Street at Amsterdam (prime Thanksgiving balloon-viewing real estate, as many of you know) is available for rent as of September 1. It's a large (550 square feet) sunny studio with high ceilings, a fabulous location, and great park views.

Please let me know if you or anyone you know might be interested -- act fast, as it will be given to a broker to rent by the end of next week if no one contacts me before then.

Also: doorman building, elevator, laundry facilities.

Please contact me through this blog to express interest.

A friend sent me a link to these photos of New York rooftop patios. Very nice.

Manning Publications has some of the best new technical books. I have a wish list, for anyone who cares:

• NHibernate in Action
  Describes how to implement persistence in a layered .NET application.
• jQuery in Action
  An easy-to-follow guide to this new, superior approach to JavaScript.
• IronPython in Action
  A comprehensive introduction to Python on .NET.
• LINQ in Action
  A fast-paced, comprehensive tutorial for professional developers who want to use LINQ.

I've been following the ultimate frisbee championships in Vancouver off and on over the internet. Partly I was interested because I play frisbee, partly because a friend, Arnold Sanchez, was playing for the USA Masters team, and partly because it was in Canada. The level of play looked pretty high, but it quickly became obvious that the teams from Canada, USA, Japan, and Australia were the ones to beat. They dominated in all divisions.

Final results:

• Masters: USA over Canada
• Open: Canada over USA
• Women: USA over Japan
• Mixed: Canada over Japan
• Junior open: USA over Canada
• Junior women: Japan over Australia

I have got to get a camera that can do this.

I am getting really tired of the trackback spam. I was looking around in my MySQL administrator and found the tables that Movable Type uses to track tentative trackbacks (mt_tbping) and banned IP addresses (mt_ipbanlist). I wrote up a little SQL to copy IP addresses from unapproved trackback locations to the banned list:

INSERT INTO mt_ipbanlist
(ipbanlist_blog_id, ipbanlist_ip)
SELECT MY_BLOG_ID, tbping_ip
FROM mt_tbping
WHERE tbping_ip <> 'MY_HOST_IP_ADDRESS'
AND tbping_ip NOT IN (
	SELECT ipbanlist_ip 
	FROM mt_ipbanlist
	WHERE ipbanlist_blog_id = MY_BLOG_ID)

Of course, I'll have to check that all unapproved trackbacks are spam first, but I am hoping that the volume drops in time.

2008-08-13: added my list of banned IP addresses, trackback spammers one and all.

So today I got more hits than in all of May 2008. It's really not clear where the traffic is going (since I don't have access to the raw logs) nor where it came from. I can say that the IP addresses are from everywhere: India, Japan, Australia, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Germany, France, New Zealand, Canada, USA, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Hungary, Belgium, Greece, Croatia, Italy, Austria, Portugal, Denmark, United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, Poland, Spain, Finland, Israel, Guam, South Africa, Jamaica, and Romania. You know -- everywhere.

I suppose I'll figure it out in awhile. IWeb will show up in google as linked to something interesting that will explain it, like slashdot or something.

Yes, finding custom bingo card generators on the internet is the kind of pseudo-technical challenge I occasionally get roped into. My sister-in-law is getting married, so my wife needed some sort of bingo cards for a bachelorette party. I'm not asking what that's all about. Anyway, I didn't want to write software for this, so finding it on the internet was my best choice.

There are a lot of amazingly bad choices out there, but the most common failing is the creation of cards where the text is only one text line high per row. Sheesh!

This is clearly the best: print-bingo.com. Here are the features:

• configurable free square (free or not; text in free square)
• size of text
• cards per page of paper
• size of bingo card
• configurable word list
• words appear in designated column only or any column
• column headers

Have a great bachelorette party, Lisa!

LinqPad is a subsystem interpreter for LINQ in the same vein as:

• regular expression tools
  like RegexDesigner.NET or Expresso or RegexDesigner
• C# snippet compiler
• ADO.NET CSV file tester
• .NET Format Designer

It allows you to test out all the LINQ features in .NET 3.5 against any data source of your choosing, plus it provides lots of test cases and sample data sources. I recommend LINQ Pocket Reference to go with this.

Here are two videos of a catch made by a summer league teammate of mine when he played in the Ultimate Frisbee finals in 2005.

• View downfield (see 1:03 to 1:11)
• View crossfield

You can see how he had to follow the arc of this throw while outrunning his coverage the whole time. It's amazing. I can watch these videos over and over.

[Video source: UltiVillage.com]