Posted in Computing: General on December 25th, 2002 No Comments »
Who the hell would want to clone the XP interface? Apparently a few people want to do so. XPde.com is set up just to do that, in fact. The funny thing is, at this time, KDE and Mac OS X are both beating XP in their "Which desktop environment do you think is the best?" [...]
Posted in Computing: General on December 24th, 2002 1 Comment »
From a 1998 rec.humor.funny post: better !pout !cry better watchout lpr why santa claus town cat /etc/passwd > list ncheck list ncheck list cat list | grep naughty > nogiftlist cat list | grep nice > giftlist santa claus town who | grep sleeping who | grep awake who | grep bad || good for [...]
Posted in Computing: General on December 22nd, 2002 No Comments »
In response to my previous post on open sourcing software, I decided to come up with a list of similar things to including the source code with all software. If software was required to ship with the source code, then: All novels should ship with every note and draft the author took during the writing [...]
Posted in Computing: General on December 21st, 2002 1 Comment »
Here is an interesting article. Not interesting because it's so right, but quite the opposite: interesting because the main subject, Barry Shein, is such an incredibly poor example of someone "fighting spam the right way" that the article is tainted beyond the point of recovery by his, i dunno, "crap."
Posted in Computing: General on December 18th, 2002 2 Comments »
Could they make it any easier? The first vulnerability is present in the Microsoft Windows XP operating system. This vulnerability can be exploited when a user simply lets the cursor hover over the file icon for the malicious MP3, or opens a folder where the file is stored. Jeez… And people wonder why I run [...]
Posted in Computing: General on December 18th, 2002 1 Comment »
Gabe and I were flipping through our respective spam corpuses (corpii?) today and came across some interesting statistics or examples. The word "unsolicited" appeared in 144 spams, 0 real emails. The benign "trust" has appeared in 47 spams, 0 reals. "toner" is 181/0, but that one's pretty obvious if you've ever gotten those stupid ink [...]
Posted in Computing: General on December 17th, 2002 No Comments »
First Amazon patented clicking. Now, it seems, AOL has been granted a patent on instant messaging networks. The patent (6449344), originally filed in 1997, and granted in September this year, gives AOL instant messaging subsidiary ICQ rights as the inventor of the popular IM Internet application. The patent covers anything resembling a network that lets [...]
Posted in Computing: General on December 16th, 2002 No Comments »
Perhaps someone can explain to me just why in Sam's tarnation XML is so wonderful. Why? Because I'd really like to know. I feel like I'm missing the boat here, and that XML is something I've already seen and done. Except I called it "tab-delimited text" or something.
Posted in Computing: General on December 13th, 2002 No Comments »
In Hackass, John Gruber writes about Leander Kahney, the Apple beat writer for Wired "News." At the end, after a fairly brief but accurate disassembly of what I would agree to be the work of a "Hackass," Gruber proposes that we "simply ignore" comments like this.
Posted in Computing: General on December 11th, 2002 1 Comment »
Spam. It's not just for dinner anymore… it's for dinner, lunch, breakfast, and, if my case is considered normal (it's not), it's for while you're sleeping. I receive about 350 emails per day. A little under half are spam. If I had to sort through spam at a pretty fast rate of one second per [...]
Posted in Computing: General on December 11th, 2002 1 Comment »
Interland recently deleted some very precious files from /usr/home/barzeski (my main user) on my Freedom Unix (FreeBSD) box which hosts this site (and every other one). I called their tech support line (their email system being ineffective) and spoke with someone who may as well have stuck his index finger between his lips and hummed [...]
Posted in Computing: General on December 10th, 2002 10 Comments »
I hate perl. I really really do. Sometimes. And yet, I realize it's a powerful thing. I realize it actually DOES something with the billions of bytes it downloaded to my server just a few hours ago. Granted, I'm not sure where Perl 5.8.0 WENT after it downloaded, configured, and installed itself (the server still [...]