Third Horse"man" 2004

As a harbinger of the Macopalypse, I feel a trifle undressed without a lovely TiBook like the iTriumverate wield. Not that I don't love my iMac, she's a beaut, but oh portability just went sashaying past in a short skirt and I almost got whiplash.

*sigh*

Oh and one of them there 30" cinema displays would be dandy too. Ta.

Not According To Plan 2004

It's a beautiful day and perfect for the activity I'd intended to do - a motorcycle ride with a friend, a little shopping, and then in the evening, a potluck and party. And such a party too, with a theme of Drag, it's bound to be a good time. Hard to go wrong with a room full of giggling boys in dresses and girls with false moustaches.

Alas, it is not to be. Wednesday evening I came down with a head cold and it's been plaguing me since. Achy muscles and head, sneezing, coughing, just general snorkiness all through. So I'm resting, drinking the first of many cups of hot herbal tea, and gazing wistfully at the lovely weather outside.

To distract myself I thought "what better than a big time-consuming game?" and I have a couple for the PC which I haven't played for years, having made the switch to Mac. I thought "well, they're old games, not 3-D shooters or anything, surely they wouldn't be that taxing to the system..." and so laid down my $220+ for VirtualPC. Alas, though they run, they don't run well. Pharoah is terribly slow to respond to mouse-clicks and Grim Fandango has stuttering sound, which is a damned shame because the sound is the best part of the game. I think I probably would need a faster CPU to handle this (I have a 700 MHz PowerPC G4), though maybe more than my 512MB of memory would help too. Can the Mac be made into a decent gaming machine?

Small plates and a full course meal on a Friday night 2004

Last night was an excellent way to round out the week. I walked from the transbay terminal to the Mission district and had dinner with my friend Lenny at Esperpento (mmm, spicy potatoes, spicy chicken, grilled asparagus, garlic shrimp, good bread to sop up the sauces, and the best sangria in town) followed by the benefit for Right to Write at Amnesia.

That was a hell of a show. As much as I adore Amnesia - gotta make it down there more often - I think this line-up better do a repeat performance at a larger venue. The Whoreshoes are a ton of fun (I need to hear the song about "let me be your bull" again); Lord Loves A Working Man is getting amazingly good (and should really start thinking about their first CD); and good ol' Rube Waddell, even with Max and Freddi just having done a fantastic set with LLAWR, can get the whole place on their feet stompin' and hollerin'.

So, I stayed to the end. Closed the bar. Caught a cab home. Got to bed a little before 3am and slept pretty solidly.

Now it's coming up on 2pm, I've had my shower and a great big glass of water, but no breakfast. Today being officially "Stairway Day", I had planned on doing another nice big walk and making sure to include one of the city's many beautiful staircases, but I find I have a blister starting on the ball of my left foot. I guess the only walk I'll be doing is to the drug store to buy insoles for my newest shoes. I'm hoping if I am nice to it today and wear the right things tomorrow, I'll be able to get some walking in.

Larry (Reverend Whupass of Rube Waddell) said that he'll be playing at the Odeon Bar tonight and I would like to see what he does when he's not being a Rube. Plus I feel I ought to give the poor ol' Odeon a second chance. Larry says the porn isn't usually on the screen and it would be nice to be able to write up a review of an evening there that wouldn't scare away quite so many folks. (I do note though that my previous review is now no longer the #2 hit for a search for "odeon bar" on Google and is instead one of the last. Not sure what prompted that demotion, but I'm betting it has something to do with last week's comment spam attacks.)
Given how I'm feeling right now though, I don't know if I'll make it down for the show. Not even sure if I'll try to get out for the KFOG Kaboom. Too many late nights in a row and now my body clock is all discombobulated.

(It's now almost 3pm. I got distracted by the Google result thing and then reading some email and having a little snack. I think maybe it's just going to be a spacy day.)

The Horrible Plot Is Revealed 2004

I had always held off on learning how to use CSS (cascading style sheets) to control positioning in HTML pages because I'd heard many warnings about how spotty the support for this can be in different browsers. I saw the wonder that is CSS Zen Garden and at SXSW I attended a panel on CSS and then I thought "Hmm, maybe it's time to give it a try. It sure seems friendlier and more fun than I'd thought before."

It was all a terrible ruse.

I've spent a lot of time over the past few days at work wrestling with a layout that doesn't depend on tables for positioning and I now know the truth.

CSS positioning is a plot to make web designers' heads explode.

I haven't quite figured out what purpose this will serve, but I do understand a bit more about the methods being used by the shadowy figures behind this terrible scheme. Just take a look at some of the enablers:

Eric Meyer seems friendly; always ready with a sly joke, he wards off suspicion by making silly faces.

Tantek Çelik certainly appears calm, cultured and concerned for our well-being.

Doug Bowman is pleasant enough, perhaps inclined to overcompensate a little with the "I am a person" shirt, but you wouldn't necessarily suspect him of being an evil cyborg.

Everyone likes Dave Shea and look at that face, I mean, come on, how could he be planning destruction?

And just in case that wasn't enough to lull you into a false sense of comfort, how could you mistrust sweet, innocent little Matt Mullenweg?

Oh, I was taken in. Doug almost let it slip when I was talking to him at a party. I told him I was going to start learning CSS positioning and he said "Are you sure you want to do that? Are you really really sure?", but then before I could really consider the question he got me over to the bar and talking about high quality alcohol and typography. Silver tongued devil; he knows just how to distract this grrrl.

Now it's too late for me. I'm slipping into their dastardly clutches, but I still have enough independent willpower to warn the rest of you. You must avoid this peril! Beware of...

Oh no! I think they're on to me!

Flee!

More comment spam 2004

Slept in this morning and so only caught the tail end of today's assault on my comments. Same pattern as yesterday - a bunch of Alexander Morozov/3FN.net sites - only this time on the theme of incest rather than beastiality. I deleted the 350 or so comments and hope that they were gone before Google's indexing 'bots came through. Then again, though, since this pattern has been going on for a while and is such a blatant attempt to jack search engine results, I wouldn't be surprised if most of the search engine sites have or are considering blocking these sites from appearing in results at all.

The only way to cure comment spamming and fake portals and bad keywording and all those other techniques is for them not to work in driving visitors to the promoted URLs. The responsibility for that lies with the search engine makers, though the rest of us can help by deleting the stupid content when it's under our control.

Blocking by IP won't work, I'm fairly well convinced. In the attacks on this site the originating IP changes every 10 or so comments and I'd not be surprised to find they belong to insecure servers the spammers are illegally using as origins, much as they would for mailing spam. (Thus the other thing we can do to protect the Web from these abuses is to keep any servers under our control very secure).

The latest spammer scam: sophisticated comment abuse 2004

Over the past few days I've noticed a pattern: four new comments on my weblog for which I did not receive a notification. When I checked the comments, they were completely unrelated to the post on which they'd been made and had websites which seemed like larger, general interest ones. One on Macs and one on Linux. Odd. I did what I always do - ripped out the URL so they won't get any Google love from being linked to - and blocked the IP from future comments.

Tonight's was different. Now they're trying to take on a blogger's identity. Look at this comment. The bracketed part is my comment on the comment. Notice the URL - "bllogspot". I looked at that domain and it redirects to the real blogspot.com. But stuarthughes dot bllogspot doesn't; it looks, on the surface just like stuarthughes.blogspot.com. Until you view source. There is the text for a page promoting a bunch of beastiality sites which I'm sure they're hoping will rise in Google's rankings due to being "linked to" from a blog.

So why doesn't the regular visitor see that text? Because they're drawing Stu's site in right on top of it with Javascript and, if I read this rightly, storing the text of Stu's site encrypted and then unencrypting it on the fly when the page is drawn. Maybe they do this to prevent those terms being indexed?

Who's doing this? Well, that's easy to figure out, up to a point. bllogspot dot com is hosted by 3FN dot net who are in Malta. If anyone knows anyone in Malta and if 3FN are a legitimate company, someone might suggest to them they should clean up their act. That IPO could buy Google a lot of lawyer time and they are infringing on copywritten material and a trademark, as well as soiling Google's well.

And who's behind the linked sites? Whois says it's
Registrant:
Crutop
Alexander Morozov (webmaster@se-traf.com)
Volgogradsky prospekt, 16
Moscow
null,126003
RU
Tel. +1.4156656387

and

Registrant Contact:
Fethard
Andrey Shchegolikhin (dyakon@pisem.net)
1-800-342-6424
Fax: none
Servibox, buzon N 442,
Patrisio Ferrandiz 40
Denia, NA 03700
ES

[Actually posted on Sunday, May 23rd, after my blog-software-producing pals had a chance to respond to the scam]

How Good Design Happens 2004

This little story from Folklore.org: Macintosh Stories: Inside Macintosh illustrates why I think products should be developed with the participation of all the involved players - documentation, QA, support, sales, implementation, trainers, customers - and not just engineering and product management.

The next week I sat down to meet with Caroline for the first time, and she couldn't have been more different than the previous writer. As soon as I began to explain the first routine, she started bombarding me with questions. She didn't mind admitting it when she didn't understand something, and she wouldn't stop badgering me until she comprehended every nuance. She began to ask me questions that I didn't know the answers to, like what happened when certain parameters were invalid. I had to keep the source code open on the screen of my Lisa when I met with her, so I could figure out the answers to her questions while she was there.

Pretty soon, I figured out that if Caroline had trouble understanding something, it probably meant that the design was flawed. On a number of occasions, I told her to come back tomorrow after she asked a penetrating question, and revised the API to fix the flaw that she had pointed out. I began to imagine her questions when I was coding something new, which made me work harder to get things clearer before I went over them with her.

As I embark on my second full development cycle at the good company where I work, I'm writing my initial design documents with an eye to the specific information I'll need when I'm handing off the finished version to other departments and customers.

Foresight. Yes, it's partly that. But it's also those great virtues coming around again: Laziness, Impatience, Hubris.

(Thanks to Chris P. for pointing me at the Folklore.org story)

Boy, do I feel stupid. 2004

So the reason I've been getting fewer & fewer benefits from being in the Amazon Associates program? At some point, at least a year ago, probably longer, I misremembered my account ID and have been entering it wrong ever since. What a dipstick.

Natural Selection 2003

I just read Bruce Sterling's artice for MIT's Technology Review Ten Technologies That Deserve to Die. It's a fun little piece that attempts to draw a bullseye on some technologies which we should be striving to eliminate or replace.

I generally agree with the list, though I thought the argument presented regarding DVDs was a bit weak - newspapers are flimsy too, but very popular & satisfying to many people - and I would add Car Alarms.

I thought I'd check the discussion and see what other people had suggested. This was my first experience of discussion on MIT Technology Review's site and the signal-to-noise ratio was incredibly poor. Most posters appear to have completely missed the point that Bruce wasn't saying, in most cases, that it'd be great to wave a magic wand and have these things vanish instantly, but that they should be targeted for obsolescence. There is almost no intelligent discussion there at all. I wouldn't be so disheartened if people disagreed and explained why without resorting to personal attacks against the author. Don't people know that weakens your argument?

When I went to add a comment to that effect, I discovered something which may at least partially explain the low caliber of discourse: the site requires a name and email address to post and they put your email address in your comment where it can be trolled by spammers. Thanks, but no thanks, Technology Review. I'll wait until you come up with a better way of "verifying" the legitimacy of those adding comments.

I am a sucker for snide programmer humor 2003

From a programming change log:

After careful review, I have determined that it works better if TRUE has a distinct value from FALSE

Don't be suckered 2003

Lots of you probably already know this, but for those who don't, please be careful when you get email from someone you're using for a web service like eBay or Amazon asking you to update your personal information.

They don't ask for that stuff via email.

Pay attention when you get a request like this.

Today's claims to be from eBay. It looks like a block of text saying that they weren't able to verify my current information. There's a URL to click on: http://scgi.ebay.com/saw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?VerifyInformation

Sounds like a legitimate eBay URL. Malicious jerks couldn't spoof a page on one of the big guy's domains like that, right?

Not quite. What they can do is show you what you expect to see and hope you don't notice it isn't what you think.

I clicked on the header information in my email window (the from, to, subject stuff) and holding down the mouse, selected the whole message. The "text" and the link included in it are not text. They're an image and that image is actually linked to this URL:

http://211.217.224.102:4901/stats/

That page has some easily stolen graphics from eBay and asks the visitor to provide information such as social security number, passwords, credit card numbers and ATM pin codes. (No one ever asks you for the last one, people; if you lose it even your bank resets it!)

Note that it is not at eBay.com; it's just showing an IP address: 211.217.224.102.

So who are these assholes hoping to sucker some idiots into giving away the farm? The lookup service I performed a Reverse DNS lookup at takes a little trip to some server in Korea and then says there is no domain name associated with that IP address.

That ain't eBay, gang.

Not the article I expected 2003

Chris said I might be interested in the latest essay from Clay Shirky, and he was right.

It wasn't what I expected though. I thought it was going to talk about the impracticality of micropayment solutions from some technical or business perspective. Instead, it's a much broader observation about fundamental changes in our use and production of content which render payment itself, regardless of size, undesired.

I need to read it again and let it percolate for a while, but it has brought to my attention the fact that what was really making me interested in micropayments was how fun a technical and user experience problem I thought it would be to solve. Reminder to self: cool tools which no one needs should be thought of as art projects.

Wise Guy 2003

When one is reading Jeffrey Zeldman's writing (and one should, really), one is pleased by commentary such as this:

In the book* we point out that merely converting from HTML to XHTML does little good unless you also reassess the way you approach underlying document structure. Otherwise, you’re merely replacing “last year’s tags” with this year’s. Likewise, converting from complicated, nonsemantic table layouts to complicated, nonsemantic CSS layouts does little good. It may give you warm feeling, but so does peeing in your diving suit.

*It is courteous when possible to provide the author's own Amazon Associate's URL in one's link to a work. They actually make more off that form of sale than they will off an ordinary royalty. Or so I am given to understand by pb.

World of Hurt 2003

If anyone knows any good resources on developing internationalized applications for wireless devices, I'd be grateful if you passed them along.

I'm particularly looking for easier ways to demonstrate CJKV (Chinese Japanese Korean Vietnamese, oh and Thai, Arabic and Hebrew too while we're at it) on web-enabled mobile phones. I need an introduction to things like "How do you input alternate character sets on this device?", "How will the device transmit the input to the server? What special parsing, if any, is required server-side to process the input?" Specific examples for the Kyocera Smartphone running the Palm OS would be particularly helpful.

Ah, the fun of being the person who's supposed to be able to explain all this stuff to customers!

Having a great relaxing time in San Francisco today. 2001

This city is good for my soul. Nice to get out of the office and think longer, uninterrupted thoughts from time to time. I'm alternating between planning, small to-do items and reading The Mythical Man Month, which I'm enjoying very much.

Say, does anyone happen to know if you can use CSS to control the appearance of the tool tips which you create by adding a title attribute to a link? Like this. Is that a browser-controlled thing or can it somehow be addressed in a style sheet?

New computers are great, except for having to get all the preferences set again. 1999

ICQ, for example, doesn't appear to keep track of your contact list, so I'm having to wrack my brains remembering who was on there. Someday someone will solve these sorts of problems...

I really should have gotten hazard pay 1999

Last night Peter said "I don't use that word" and I admired him for it, but today my corporate masters referred to our new vortal project. sigh.

so much to code, so little time 1999

Did I mention that I really do intend to learn PHP someday? sigh, so much to code, so little time.

At least I have my blogger.