was just thinking about one of my favorite songs, as a friend of mine leaves the house–Chant a Psalm by steel pulse. how i love that song.
in other news-i got my first spam comment today–about penis enlargement. who in the world really buys this PE stuff anyway?
with little fanfare, diary therapy is live. with a tiny bit of work to do here & there, most notably getting the comments to not appear in a popup. easy stuff; just haven’t gotten to it. i hate popup windows, still. it’s been since about 1995, and i still haven’t warmed up to ‘em. the only place i like frames is in my javadoc, and the only frames i accept wholly are iframes. okay forgive me i’m rambling. peep the game:
we talk about whatever.
i see my wife already posted a link to a scan of the article–she’s crazy hip hop, violatin’ the copyrights and stuff :)
so i got this email that is very elaborate. just wanted to throw it out there. it’s obviously not legit, and contains a file called “INSTALLATION.exe”. it’s amazing how elaborate these worms are these days.
(click for image)
the tipper (besides the obvious that you just don’t freaking open attachments without contacting the sender first) was the fact it “came from” confidence.ms.com — ms.com is morgan stanley’s website.
the stupid thing is that these modern virii rely on social engineering, which is soooo 1990. apparently many fall for it though, still.
my favorite line?
“The names of the actual companies and products mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.”
at least they won’t get sued by microsoft.
so i’m watching this flash tutorial on TV (catching the butt end), and thinking about the many times i’ve tried to sit down and learn Flash. I am amazed that it eludes me as it does. I used to be a wiz at Harvard Graphics 3 back in the day!
i was introduced to this happy present today by an associate on this contract i’m on. Indeed, a happy present. They apparently sell it “at Target, in the Oriental Section”, here in Eau Claire Wisconsin. Got to get me some more. spicy hot good.
Universal PGP, link courtesy of slashdot.
i want to highlight a point made in jakob’s alertbox –
Security as default: …no email should exist in an unencrypted state unless it’s being read or written.
a hearty AMEN! from head to toe, email is badly designed, and it’s a shame that it’s been in use this long in its broken state. Was just listening about how the creator of the MTP (predecessor of SMTP) admits that email was not built with security in mind…and with (somewhat) good reason — back in the day, email was not nearly as ubiquitous as today, and its usage was, for the most part, not as “important” as it is today. There are folk who store extremely important, extremely sensitive info in emails. The transport isn’t encrypted by default, nor does it offer decent protection (without being an SMTP wiz) from UCE.
as far as the storage–on most standard systems (unix, MS i’m familiar with), it is not stored encrypted, it is not sent encrypted by default. To add encryption to a standard email client (on Windows, at least) is so stinking annoying and not worth many non-powerusers’ time. The more i think about this the more ridiculous it sounds, that email is in a bad state.
Yeah, I’m aware of “better” transports (although i don’t know of the ability of any publicly available ones that offer easy to configure filtering and encryption options), and better clients, but apparently they ain’t in place, ‘cos we have these virii spreading. what the deal?
i guess i shouldn’t expect much, though. at more than one of my previous jobs it was expected that people on my team have my personal login info. Coming from a Unix Sys Admin background, that just ain’t right.
aight, so he’s hitting the nail on the head with the latest alertbox — This is a classic struggle, i think, of any software developer–it’s not as glamourous to focus on bugfixing and making a solid product, when there are so many fancy things i could do! this is precisely what i’ve run into with my blog updater software–i wanted to add a “config wizard”, and do a little check for the .NET framework in the installer, provide drag & drop image uploading in a post, among other things…but the time i spent doing that is so much better spent refactoring, and making the software less bug-prone. The refactoring is *essential*. This being my first C# nontrivial project, i spent my time learning how everything works and while in the beginning started out nicely, at points where the analogy between java and C# broke down, and i was green at (particularly this UI from “scratch” thing), it appears as if i hacked my way to a solution.
at any rate, yes yes, i’m enjoying the article, and hope you do too
okay so i’ve gotten enough for a (very) early alpha of a piece of software i wrote to crosspost to blogs. It’s my first C# app so don’t rank on me too hard :)
i’m letting friends hit it up, but incase anyone else wants to test it out:
MegaBlogUpdater setup zip (exe in a zip file, ~239k)
You’ll need the .NET framework to run. you can get it from windows update.
feedback is appreciated, as i’m now learning to get used to the nuances involved in creating a UI for the people. :)
this initial release is 0.1 – Works for Me. ;) so far on win2k, and winXP with .net framework installed.
my audience is those who need a “quick and dirty but useful software” for updating multiple blog sites. i wrote it for me, but of course you got to put it out there to get some kind of feedback, and, you know; it’s like music; you always feel you got to share it!
the Readme.txt outlines the kinks.
(hey i posted this with the software, even)