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Archive for the 'Computing' Category

Hacking XP

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 […]

“Unsolicited” is Right

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 […]

Patent Schmatent

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 […]

XML? Phooey

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.

Ignoring the Pundits

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.

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 […]

Fanatical Support

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 […]

I Hate Perl

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 […]