Monthly Archives: February 2005

Bring It On

Posted on February 16, 2005 by Kelson

[Internet Explorer]As reported all over the place, Microsoft has reversed its previous plans and will be releasing a new beta of Internet Explorer this summer instead of keeping it locked to the next version of Windows.

About frelling time.

Of course, there’s no word on whether they’ll actually improve page rendering—all the statements so far have focused on security, anti-phishing, and the like—so we web developers will probably have to continue using hacks to work around buggy rendering and missing features that are so much easier to build for Firefox, Opera and Safari. And even if they do fix things in IE7, they’re focusing on Windows XP (we might get it in Windows 2000, if we’re lucky), and there are still people using on Windows 98/Me who will still be stuck with IE6.

Of course, unlike Microsoft, Mozilla hasn’t stopped working on their browsers. By the time IE7 is out, Firefox 1.1 or 1.5 will be available, and they may be well on the road to 2.0.

Congratulations to Mozilla and Firefox for convincing Microsoft to get back to work!

Competition is good.

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Mage Guild

Posted on February 13, 2005 by Kelson

This one threw me for a second until I realized I was only seeing the plain-text part:

Before you can purchase magical spells at the Mage Guild, you will have to find Orations by Poggio in the monastery of St. Gall A.D. 1416.

Once I noticed the message had HTML and a GIF image, I realized it was just another image-only spam with random words and random code.

But, hey, I liked the opening line!

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Fallen Angel Returns – For the Moment

Posted on February 12, 2005 by Kelson

[Cover]In the first week of March, Peter David’s series Fallen Angel returns from hiatus with issue #19, the first part of a 2-part crossover with Sachs and Violens, a classic pair of Peter David/George Perez characters.

Fallen Angel follows the enigmatic title character through the city of Bete Noire, Louisiana. Lee—known to some as the Fallen Angel—protects the city at night, but the city isn’t sure it wants her there. Duality and moral ambiguity are the series’ central themes, as it becomes clear that you can’t always map protagonist to heroine or antagonist to villain. Intrigue and action with a twist of film noir.

So far, DC hasn’t ordered anything beyond #20, but no one can confirm whether the series has officially been cancelled. Word is that if the next two issues sell well enough, the series could continue. If not, it’s toast.

We’re down to the wire. If you’re curious, pick up the Fallen Angel TPB (collecting issues #1–6). See if you can find—or borrow—the later issues. And if you’re interested at all in seeing the series continue, pick up or pre-order Fallen Angel #19–20.

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Random Links

Posted on February 11, 2005 by Kelson

AKA stuff I wanted to write about earlier this week but need to just slam out while they’re still topical.

  • Judge slams SCO’s lack of evidence against IBM. Also Groklaw’s take. After all the wild claims they’ve made without providing evidence, it’s nice to see even the judge is getting sick of it.
  • Coke may try out coffee cola – Yeah, it’s a month old, but it’s news to me. (Incidentally, I hate CNN’s practice of deleting stories from their website. That’s where I read about this earlier this week, and I had to go hunting for an article that was still up.) [Note: I've had to track down a third copy of the article.]
  • MP3tunes.com shuns DRM – former MP3.com founder starts a new legal download service, and sticks with unencumbered MP3s instead of messing around with ultimately-flawed digital rights management. I’m reminded of Cory Doctorow’s famous talk on why DRM is bad for everyone.
  • Beware the unexpected attack vector – Your enemy may not come at you from the direction you expect. Set up sentries around the beach, they’ll get you through the ocean. Set up a firewall, they’ll get you through web browsers. It’s mainly about computer/network security, but it has an interesting story explaining why there’s only one major newspaper in Los Angeles.
  • CSS Zen Garden parody: Geocities 1996 – I’ve been meaning to post a link to this for over a month. It’s fully valid code, and manages to bring back the worst of 1990s web design.

Posted in Food, Linux, Music, Web Design | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

And the junk kept rolling in

Posted on February 11, 2005 by Kelson

In the past two days, one of my spamtrap addresses—one that only exists on one page, albeit a highly-trafficked one—has received 51 offers of cheap Rolex knock-offs. Somehow, that seems a bit excessive. If you called the same person with the same offer 25 times a day, I think they’d file harassment charges against you instead of buying your product.

And yet, Project Honeypot hasn’t picked up a single spam sent to addresses on the page I set up with them.

I’m beginning to suspect a lot of the harvesting is being done not by bots, but by using virus techniques and grabbing addresses from the infected system’s web cache.

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It worked for DIVX, right? (Oh, wait…)

Posted on February 8, 2005 by Kelson

You know, when Napster announced its subscription music plan, I never gave it a second look. Not because I assumed it wouldn’t work with my Linux box or Katie’s Mac, but for one simple reason:

No matter how many songs you “buy” on the plan, once your subscription lapses, they’re all gone.

Want to stop paying $15/mo? Say goodbye to your music.

Napster goes out of business? Say goodbye to your music.

On the other hand, suppose I’ve bought a bunch of songs from iTunes at 99¢ each, and I decide I don’t want to buy any more from them? No problem. If the marketplace changes two years from now and Apple decides to abandon the iTunes music store, I can still listen to songs I bought from them.

Amazingly, some people still need this explained to them. John Gruber of Daring Fireball writes, “I thought this was obvious, but, judging by my email, there seems to be a fair amount of confusion…” Forget the math, do the logic first!

There is one flaw in Gruber’s logic regarding CDs vs. subscription music: while I expect CDs will be playable over the next decade or two, eventually they will go the way of vinyl records. However, if I were to bet, I’d expect my CD collection will be playable long after Napster To Go has, shall we say, gone.

Posted in Computers/Internet, Music | Tagged , | 3 Comments

On to step 8

Posted on February 2, 2005 by Kelson

Hmm, CNET reports that spammers are starting to route zombies’ mail through the ISP’s servers. (Hmm, that sounds familiar.) I don’t know about the “email meltdown” Linford warns against, but it will require a change in tactics. And so the escalation continues…

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Sticker series

Posted on February 2, 2005 by Kelson

I’m sure you’ve seen the bumper stickers that read:

Visualize World Peace

and the parodies that read:

Visualize Whirled Peas

…but we saw a new one this morning:

Visualize Grilled Cheese

Posted in Signs of the Times | Leave a comment

Spam claims a life

Posted on February 1, 2005 by Kelson

Remember Charles Booher, the spam victim who was arrested for making death threats to the sender? (Early reports were that the person on the other end of the phone was an innocent third-party, but that turns out to have been a smoke screen.)

Aunty Spam reports sad news: apparently Booher committed suicide last month, just a week before his court date.

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