K-Squared Ramblings

Neocons, combine!

Is it just the fact that I was up way too late last night, or does the term “neocon” sound like a Transformers faction?

Drowning in spam

These people are no longer amusing. I’ve been getting about 10 messages a day from them. On Friday I actually had to add a rule to the server config to detect their domain names, since half of them didn’t score high enough to get labeled as spam. (Bayes training helped, but not enough.) And some of their ads are for really sick stuff - not just garden-variety porn, but fetishes I don’t even want to hear about.

They all have the same structure, the same types of misspellings, the same type of Bayes poison, and point to a website named after food. And while names like “hot carrot soup dot com” and “sexy naked sushi dot com” (I won’t list the exact URLs, since that would only improve their page rank) were funny at first, their persistence has gotten %@*! annoying. Why the heck do they need to send me 10 messages a day advertising what’s clearly one site? And why cluster them?

Mandated opt-out links aren’t enough. Even if spammers weren’t already known to ignore/abuse requests to be removed, it’s obvious that these aren’t complying with other provisions of federal law (fake return addresses, no street address, no “SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT” tag on the subject line), so why should anyone assume they’ll honor the unsubscribe links?

The two main email accreditation companies (OK, the only two I know of), Habeas and Bonded Sender, hold their clients to opt-in only criteria. So did California’s stillborn anti-spam law (superseded by federal law the day it was to go into effect). Why couldn’t congress do the same? I do think CAN-SPAM is better than nothing, but it’s done little to stem the tide in the 5 months it’s been active.

Wise words, indeed

I’m sure you’ve seen spam that includes random bits of text, maybe out of novels or legal documents or lists of sayings. They do this to confuse filters that learn based on messages people classify as spam or non-spam. The idea is that if there’s enough garbage mixed in with the spam, these filters will see non-spam patterns in the spam — or just miss the spam patterns in all the noise — and be less effective.

Well, one just came across my desk that started with this highly appropriate phrase:

Doubt is the beginning of wisdom.

This was followed by sensationalist “best product” and “unbeatable” deals. (You know, the $50 copy of Windows XP that they’ll probably claim fell off a truck or something.)

In other words, the kind of post that just needs more salt.

Unusual server request

This one was sent to ftp@(a domain name we host):

Your Loan/Mortgage Application has been processed and
we can finance you at a low 3% rate.

Funny, I don’t remember “applies for refinancing” on our FTP server’s list of capabilities!

Clearly, they didn’t learn spelling!

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen so many misspellings of “college” in one email! Excerpts:

Real Cllgeoe Girls

Neeswt Tnocoelhgy for Gteting Off!

Find out what these cleolge girls REALLY learend at shocol….

And my favorite bit, the label for the unsubscribe link:

Hold Off This Rubbish

All the obfuscation did nothing to disguise the spam - it still got labeled - but it does make for some entertaining reading!

At least it’s not a dance mix

On the drive to work this morning, I noticed that KCRW was playing Pachelbel’s Canon in D in the background of their traffic report. As usual, the orchestration added several layers over the course of the report…

…and then, just as they were finishing, the drum track started.

Casting call

Maybe it’s egotistical to keep a list of who you would want to play your characters in a visual media production, but I do it. Some characters started out looking like celebrities; others grew into them. Sometimes I’ll see a star I’ve never seen before and think they look familiar, and a second later it’ll hit me that they’ve lived in my head for lo these many years.

So I’ve got this running tally. Last night, I added one to it and another character–there’s no other way to describe it–got jealous. Read the rest of this entry »

Something Myth-ing

Things that went through my head while watching Troy:

• That’s a bloody awful lot of ships.
• OK, so where’s Cassandra in all this?
• Gee, the way they’re portraying Agamemnon, I’m glad his wife is going to kill him when he gets home.
• That’s odd, the computer-generated orc army looked more realistic than the computer-generated Greeks.
• Ah, political context. They’re right, it doesn’t make sense to send that many soldiers just to avenge one man’s honor. There’s usually something else going on.
• Where the hell is Cassandra?
• Wait, wasn’t this supposed to take 10 years?
• Aeneas, eh? Nice throw-away line!
• Wow, this Agamemnon really is a bastard. I wish I could remember what happens to Brise– uh, waitaminute.
• Uh, what happened to Cassandra?

Van Helsing captions

More coming when I find a better screencap library. Suggestions are welcome.

Focus!

While working on a website for work, I inadvertently discovered why a web application I use frequently has the annoying habit of moving the cursor to the username field when I’m halfway through typing the password.

The basic way to set initial focus on a form field is to use JavaScript like this:

document.loginForm.usernameField.focus();

You can either embed it in the HTML after the form, or call it in the page’s onload() function. The problem with using onload is that it fires when everything is loaded, which means it waits for images, plugins, and so on. That’s very useful for some tasks, but isn’t the best choice here.

I’m impatient, especially with login forms. I don’t need the logos and background, I want to type in my username and password as quickly as possible and start using the app. Since this particular site isn’t exactly the fastest around, invariably the images don’t finish loading until I’ve started typing the password — and suddenly I’m typing the second half of the password in the username box.

Needless to say, I’m using the inline method on the site I’m building. Not that the login page has any images right now, but if I add any later on, it’ll save the users some aggravation.

Interesting use of technology

Yahoo has finally released its specification for its DomainKeys email authentication scheme. Included is the following patent license (emphasis added):

Yahoo! will grant a royalty-free, worldwide, non-exclusive license under any Yahoo! patent claims that are essential to implement or use any Implementations so that licensees can make, use, sell, offer for sale, import, or yodel Implementations; provided that the licensee agrees not to assert against Yahoo!, or any other Yahoo! licensees of Implementations, any patent claims of licensee that are essential to implement or use any Implementations.

Yodel?

Give me a break.

I was about to post this over at my LiveJournal, when I discovered my journal was offline due to a massive server outage. Nice timing, as you’ll see:

Well, the phone’s acting up again. Oddly enough, DSL is working most of the time, even though we can’t get a dial tone. An SBC tech is scheduled to come out tomorrow afternoon, but the guy I spoke with had some suggestions for self-troubleshooting (since if it turns out to be a problem with our equipment, we get charged.

So now that we’ve moved the full-height bookshelf out of the way of the phone jack, I’m about to disconnect the last phone line and see what I can find out. Whee.

On the other hand, now that the shelf is out of the way, I can try rearranging cables to see if it gives us the full DSL speed. We’re supposed to get about 600K, but only ever get half of that, and I suspect it’s the ancient 20-foot phone cable. If I move the modem closer to the jack and use a short phone cord and a long network cable, it might speed things up.

Mood: Resigned.

Update 9:32 PM

Well, that was a colossal waste of time and effort. After disconnecting everything, rearranging the DSL/network structure while I waited, then hooking phones back up one at a time, it seemed everything was working. Same old DSL speed, but at least we had a dial tone on each phone. So I canceled the call forwarding, and called SBC to cancel the dispatch. Then it occurred to me I’d better try to make an incoming call. Half a ring, and suddenly there’s static (and nothing else) on both lines.

So it’s disconnect everything again, wait 5+ minutes again, and this time… nothing. Static, and only static. At least the DSL came back up. That would have really ticked me off. And another call into SBC to reinstate the tech dispatch. Fun, fun, fun! (Grumble.)

Anyway, we’re back to square one. I can only hope anyone who needs to call us before tomorrow afternoon tries one of our cell phones instead.

Now that’s irony

I noticed a new comment this morning on an 8-month old post about a case of comment spam.

And you know what? It was cleverly disguised comment spam. It actually quoted the post, but it linked to a site (in Japanese) full of links to online casinos and similar junk.

It’s gone now…

Shipped!

The delayed PowerBook has shipped, and is scheduled to arrive on Tuesday!

Woo hoo!

Follow that car

On the way to work, Kelson and I often end up pacing a red Mustang with license plate letters ZAR. This would be very cool if I could find something to go with it, but so far I’ve had no luck. This is partly because there are so few choices of matching plates and partly because commuter traffic tends to have the same cars going to the same place at the same time every day. It’s also partly because the black generic small car with letters TMN that takes our route is in the batch of cars on the road about 15 minutes before the Mustang.

There is hope, though. Until yesterday, I’d never seen ZAR on the way home. Now I know that it’s on the road again between 5:30 and 6 pm, and it follows the same route we do for about half our trip. This could be cool…..though it remains to be seen whether I’ll be able to get the camera out in time should the need arise.

Free as in lunch

A long-standing challenge for advocates of Free and Open Source Software (a.k.a. FOSS) has been explaining just what the term Free Software means, because in English, the word “free” has several unrelated meanings. The classic explanation has been to compare “free speech” and “free beer.”

You see, when the average person hears the phrase “free software,” they generally assume it means the same kind of thing as “free beer.” But it’s really about the software being unencumbered - it’s about your ability to use, study, learn from, and improve the software. It’s not about the price tag.

The problem with the “free speech” label is that the phrase has its own very specific meaning and political overtones. As a result, people tend to focus on the ideas inherent in freedom of speech, dealing with software as a form of expression and focusing on issues like censorship. These are valid issues, but not the heart of what “free software” means.

Today I read a post on Groklaw describing it in terms of “free as in coffee” vs. “free as in liberty” - primarily because he didn’t like the association with beer - but I liked the use of liberty rather than speech, because it conveys the meaning without bringing in other issues.

(Ironically, the FSF page explaining the phrase links to a list of confusing words and phrases that are worth avoiding… that doesn’t include “free!”)

Power Outage

It looks like it wasn’t quite the perfect time I thought to order a PowerBook. I received confirmation today from TerraSoft that the delay is due to the changes in the PowerBook line (which were half the reason I chose now to order it). It seems they’re still waiting for a shipment from Apple!

Presumably they had some in stock when they updated their store, in which case this is probably a good thing: it means not only are the new PowerBooks selling faster than expected, but they’re selling well through a Linux shop!

That said, if I have to wait too long I may just cancel this order and drive down to the Apple store. Of course, then I’d have to deal with repartitioning and trying to set up dual booting myself, and not only is it more complicated than dual-booting a PC*, there’s a lot less information available.

Ah, well.

* In particular, I don’t know of any utilities like Partition Magic or Parted that will allow you to resize an active Mac OS filesystem, so I would have to wipe the disk and reinstall Mac OS along with installing Linux.

Mrifk!

After reading a scathing review of Van Helsing, which differed from my own experience more in reaction than in fact (mine was much closer to the experience excellently summarized by sekl—which makes sense, considering I was two seats away), I started thinking about just why I enjoyed the movie.

Because, to be honest, it was terrible.

But terrible in a strangely entertaining way.

While watching it, I thought—many times—that this is what happens when you put every cliché you can think of into one movie. (”Oh, of course the road goes along the edge of a cliff!”) Depending on your mood, it could be the most tedious or most hilarious thing you’ve ever seen. I also spent most of the movie trying to figure out whether or not it was intended to be a comedy.

And thinking back on that, it hit me. Van Helsing is the monster movie equivalent of The Eye of Argon.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, The Eye of Argon is reputed to be the worst fantasy story ever written. It’s the tale of the barbarian Grignr and his quest to steal the titular jewel, filled with cruel swordsmen, an evil wizard, disgusting creatures and a beautiful, captive princess, written with prose so purple it’s a wonder it doesn’t creep into the ultraviolet. And yet, reading it, you can never be sure whether it’s intentional parody or an earnest effort by someone who just didn’t realize how bad it was.

Traditionally, Eye of Argon is read as a group, each person trying to keep a straight face as long as possible and passing it on to the next once he or she bursts out laughing. Sometimes getting through a whole sentence about “livid wilderness lands” or “keen auditory organs” is a real challenge!

Read The Eye of Argon… if you dare!

Edited June 19: The the site I originally linked to has vanished, so I’ve re-linked to a copy that’s still up.

Trekking to the fridge

In light of the recent announcement of boxed sets of the original Star Trek (Region 2, but Region 1 sets are on their way next year), I found myself thinking of some of the fizzier nicknames for the shows.

Since Next Gen came out just a few years after the New Coke fiasco, the names Classic Trek and New Trek stuck. Early in DS9’s life I remember hearing someone refer to Diet Cherry Trek. Which leads to an obvious question:

What types of soft drink are Voyager and Enterprise?

Click where?

I just received spam advertising a book about fascism. It’s not your typical spam — it just looks like the introduction to a book, placed in email and sent — unsolicited of course — to random people around the net. It was fairly well written and not obfuscated, so it didn’t trigger much in the way of spam filters. (The great irony is that by misspelling and breaking up words to get past filters, spammers are making it easier for people to spot, making themselves look horribly unprofessional — would you really trust the product from someone selling “druuugs?” — and creating new, definite spam signs. When you see 10 drug names all misspelled with strange symbols, you know it’s either a spammer or a 14-year-old IRC junkie trying to be L337.)

They even made the effort to include a full plain-text equivalent alongside the HTML version, for the benefit of people who don’t trust or can’t read HTML mail.

And that brings me to the funny part, this statement from the plain-text version:

If your e-mail software does not support html, please click here.

Two problems: aside from violating W3C QA guidelines on link text, it makes no sense, because there’s nothing to click on!

They tried. They really tried. But they forgot to ask whether I actually wanted to be on their mailing list. (Oh, and the “click here” thing was funny.)

Randland Corporate Yellow Pages

Just imagine……

Trakand Leadership Services
Aybara Industries
Al’Thor Wrecking, Inc.
Al’Vere Management Consultants
Al’Meara General Hospital (and the Flinn Specialty Clinic)
Mandragoran Security Personnel
Kinderode, Mosalaine & Larisett, Attorneys at Law
Telamon Landscaping, Ltd.
Farshaw Vocational Consulting (”Be all you’re gonna be!”)
Mervin’s of Cairhien

and many more……