K-Squared Ramblings

Government computers hijacked for spam.

Via The War on Spam and The Spam Weblog:

Hackers hijack federal computers. Apparently the DOJ discovered, during their crackdown on cybercrime, that hundreds of Department of Defense and Senate computers had been turned into zombies.

Nice.

Can we really be sure they were only used to send spam? After all, zombies are generally the result of viruses, worms or trojans that install backdoors, so that the attacker can run anything on the system. Setting up a distributed and disguised spam-sending network just happens to be the most profitable application right now, but you can bet there are a lot of people out there who would love to take over — or just look through — US military computers.

I don’t know about you, but I find this really disturbing.

“Would you like to play a game?”

Do You Speak American?

Via WebWord:

Do You Speak American? is an upcoming documentary about the many dialects that make up American English.

Some interesting observations include:

• Major cities’ dialects are actually diverging, not converging as people predicted with the spread of TV and travel.
• Another “great vowel shift” is underway in the Great Lakes region.
• Most Americans consider the midwest accent closest to “normal” English.
• Southern is the largest dialect group in the country.

And for local flavor, the writeup mentions that they interviewed teenagers in Irvine, obtaining slang terms like “uber” and “tight.”

Oh. My. Grodd.

While looking at website referrer logs, I came across an article at Radio Heroes detailing Gorilla City (Or, What if Grodd Was One of Us?)

The site is all about “reviewing—well, okay, making fun of” a series of audio-drama comic books, and this one tells a tale of Batman in Gorilla City, and how he uses trancendental meditation to defeat Grodd, the Super-Gorilla!

No, really!

I haven’t listened to the sound clips yet, but the write-up is great!

I’m not even supposed to film here today!

Via this week’s “All the Rage”:

Apparently Kevin Smith is planning a sequel to Clerks [note: originally linked to Yahoo! News], called The Passion of the Clerks.

WTF? I thought Jay and Silent Bob was supposed to be the final entry in his Jersey series. Or whatever it’s called. Something that doesn’t include Jersey Girl. You know, the movies with Quik Stop and, well, Jay and Silent Bob.

Apparently it’s a “Whatever happened to…” story that picks up Dante and Randall’s lives 10 years later, and… you know, they haven’t changed all that much. “It’s about what happens when that lazy, 20-something malaise lasts into your 30s. Those dudes are kind of still mired … but in a place where it’s time to actually grow up…”

Who knows, it could actually be good. Or it could suck. Kevin Smith is kind of hit-and-miss.

• Clerks: Brilliant!
• Mallrats: A festering pile of… well, anyway…
• Chasing Amy: Good.
• Dogma: Good, if a bit over the top in places.
• Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back: Had its moments, but overall… eh.

There is no The

Every once in a while I listen to Star for a few minutes. And every once in a while I catch their station break. And I cringe whenever I hear them talk about being the whatever station for “L.A. and the O.C.”

I’ve lived in Orange County most of my life, and I have never heard anyone here refer to it as “The O.C.” Sometimes just “O.C.,” but really—when was the last time you heard someone say “I live in the L.A.” or “I’m from the New York?”

Incidentally, it seems that as far as IMDB knows, the show is filmed in L.A. Excuse me, the L.A.

They just can’t win

Microsoft has spent the past few decades focusing on convenience and backward compatibility. As a result many of their products are so riddled with security holes that worldwide virus outbreaks hit every few months, and unpatched Windows systems are compromised within 20 minutes of being connected to the Internet. And let me tell you, Microsoft has gotten a lot of flak over this.

Windows XP Service Pack 2 represents a major shift, promoting out-of-the-box security at the expense of compatibility and convenience. So what happens? Just about all the coverage I’ve seen looks like this:

• Windows XP SP2 could break existing applications
• Windows XP SP2: Trouble Ahead for Developers, Users
• Windows XP SP2: What to do when the Windows break
• Windows XP SP2’s Trail of Broken Apps
• More Vendors Report SP2 Woes
• Is Windows XP SP2 Worth Your Pain?
• 200 apps clash with XP SP2

Come on, people. You’ve spent the last five years criticizing MS for neglecting security in favor of compatibility, and when they finally switch gears, you criticize them for that?

Certainly you should check the list of compatibility issues before installing — you should do that with any upgrade. And of course SP2 won’t solve everything, but it’ll help considerably.

I just find it amazing (although I suppose I shouldn’t) that they finally do what people have been saying they should do for years, and they still get criticized.

Technology and context

We were at the grocery store earlier today, and Katie was grumbling about the stylus-only touch screens they had for entering a PIN. Unlike actual keypads, you can’t hide the number you’re entering, because you have to move that stylus around instead of 10-keying it in.

On one hand, a touch screen with a stylus is great for visual feedback and for collecting signatures, because the store can keep things on file digitally instead of or in addition to a paper copy. And once you’ve got that, it’s reasonable to drop the keypad, since you can simulate it in the touch screen. But unless it can react as quickly as actual buttons, and react to fingers instead of a stylus, it can’t completely replace the way a keypad is actually used.

An even better example is checkout line at Fry’s. Read the rest of this entry »

The Beer Bear

And via Begging to Differ, there’s the story of the beer-guzzling bear.

Yes, it seems that last week a black bear broke into a cooler at a Washington campground, drank 36 cans of beer, and passed out.

The funniest part: the bear went for the microbrew. It apparenty tried a Busch beer (I don’t think they market that brand here, do they?), then switched to local Ranier Beer.

This is the kind of stuff you just can’t make up. Or rather, if you did, no one would believe it.

Alt Rock Lyrics or Spam?

By way of The Spam Weblog, we have…

Alt Rock Lyrics or Spam?

Can you tell the difference?

Fast OS Updates

Lately there seems to be a lot of concern with how long Microsoft is taking to develop the next version of Windows. Since people clearly want their operating systems updated faster, allow me to provide a list:

• Red Hat or SuSE Enterprise Linux. New versions every 12-18 months. (Mandrake Corporate Server seems about the same.)
• Mac OS. The past few years have seen yearly updates as OS X has settled in, although they plan to slow down now. Last I looked, they hadn’t announced a release date for Tiger (OS 10.4).
• SuSE Linux or Mandrake Linux. I’m not sure what their timetable is, but they each tend to release at least one new version each year.
• OpenBSD. New version every 6 months.
• Fedora Core Linux. New version roughly every 6 months.
• FreeBSD. New version roughly every 4 months.
• Gentoo Linux. Quarterly releases.

Of course, those who really need their upgrade fix can go for development branches like Fedora Rawhide, Mandrake Cooker, or Debian Unstable. Not that I’d recommend this for anyone who wasn’t actually working on the product, but hey, you can upgrade your system every day!

Linux everywhere!

This looks cool: GlobeTrotter [archive.org] is a 40 GB external USB hard drive that comes pre-installed with Mandrake Linux. Basically you can carry it around and temporarily turn any computer into your Linux box!

It should be more flexible (and run faster) than CD-based distributions like Knoppix or Mandrake Move, although it’s bulkier than carrying a CD and a keychain.

Hmm, I wonder if I could get Damn Small Linux to boot off a USB keychain…

Apple users are happier (with their computers)

Apple computers score 81% in customer satisfaction, followed closely by by Dell at 79%, according to CNet. Gateway comes in third at 74%.

Source: American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI)

Of course, Apple marketing has been saying this all along, but then again, they’re biased.

MirrorMask Shots

Neil Gaiman has just posted a bunch of stills from MirrorMask.

Not even with strawberries?

There’s at least one company based in Greece that distributes authentic Greek yogurt in the U.S. The stuff can be tricky to find, but incredibly worth it. It’s very thick and creamy and doesn’t contain any gelatin or preservatives. The fat-free version could probably help a lot of people lose weight, as it tastes like sour cream and tzatziki made with it is addictive. Trader Joe’s has been carrying it pretty reliably, but as Whole Foods is closer, we don’t get to TJ’s on a regular basis. However, on our last trip to Whole Foods, they had it, right there in with the rest of the yogurt. And the peasants rejoiced.

Tonight, I went looking for it and instead found a sign: “Whole Foods Market has temporarily decided not to carry Fage Greek Yogurt. Please look for this product again in the future.” So let me get this straight: you just recently decided to carry it and now you’re putting it on hiatus for some unknown reason. What the hell? Or do I want to know what the reason is?

Counting Goldfish

Neil Gaiman writes about the re-release of The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish:

There were copies of the new edition of THE DAY I SWAPPED MY DAD FOR TWO GOLDFISH, with the Enhanced CD in it. It’s bigger than the original edition, has a new Dave McKean cover (mostly because people seemed convinced that the old cover had something to do with Counting Crows, and because the cover didn’t really reflect the art style inside) and I wrote a new afterword for it.

I mentioned this to Katie (a Counting Crows fan), and of course we both wondered about the comment. So I tracked down a copy of the original book cover:

One look at this, and Katie said, “That is the album cover!” She immediately ran into the next room to pull out This Desert Life:

Sure enough, a quick look through the liner notes yielded, “Illustrations by Dave McKean. Cover illustration adapted from the book, ‘The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish,’ by…”

For those who are interested, here’s the new edition of the book:

Clearly he’s changed his mind

I found this while looking for pictures to scan for some new profiles on my Flash site. It’s very interesting in light of where Hal Jordan has gone since:

This is from Flash #276 (1979), right after the Flash’s wife, Iris, has been killed. Barry goes straight to the JLA satellite HQ and asks Superman, Wonder Woman, and Green Lantern to bring her back from the dead. Hal, being sane at the time, refuses. (The others don’t have the ability.)

The thing is, in the past decade or so, Hal Jordan has become DC’s poster boy for the phrase, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” He’s tried to recreate a major city and its inhabitants, destroyed a planet, destroyed the universe and attempted to build his own universe to replace it — and that’s just before he died. He’s now tied with the Spectre — a powerful supernatural being — and he’s brought at least one person (Green Arrow) back from the dead, and mindwiped the entire human race to forget the identity of the current Flash. He’s probably done even more questionable stuff in his own series or in JSA.

Suggestions for Comic Con

Based on experience from the last few San Diego Comic-Cons, here are a few recommendations:

1. Pre-register, as early as possible! Not only will it save you money, but the line to pick up badges is always much shorter than the line to sign up. (If you’ve ever stood in line to register, you know what I mean. If you haven’t — well, let’s just say you might not get in until afternoon.)
2. Go for at least two days. One day is no longer enough time to see everything.
3. Do not set foot on the convention floor on Saturday. Go to panels instead.
4. Stay somewhere nearby, preferably with convenient trolley, bus, or shuttle access. Barring that, leave really early so you can find parking.
5. If you’re getting a hotel, reserve your room early. Perhaps as much as six months early. Otherwise you’ll end up paying way too much to stay at the Super 8.
6. Get a Day Tripper bus/trolley pass. You can get one for 1-4 days, and you can even order it online and have it mailed to you. There are two trolley stops in front of the convention center (yes, it’s that big): Convention Center (of course) and Gaslamp Quarter. In downtown San Diego, trolleys run every 15 minutes during the day, every 30 minutes in the evening, and run until around midnight (later on weekends).
7. If you’ve got a good costume, this is the place to wear it.
8. Don’t forget to bring a camera and lots of film/memory!
9. Bring a change of clothes so that you can wear your T-shirt or costume at the con and then go to a nice downtown San Diego restaurant for dinner.
10. Speaking of dinner, make reservations! This is A) downtown in a major city, B) a weekend, and C) during a convention with 100,000 people, most of whom will be looking for a restaurant. Alternatively, look for dinner as far away from the convention center as possible.
11. Pre-register for next year, if you plan to come back. We saved $25 each.

(Note: the target audience for this list is the type of person who has already mastered the concepts in Aubrey’s Guide to Con Hygiene.)

Old school

I accidentally hit ctrl-H in our computer system today…..and it acted like backspace. I have never before run into a modern, GUI-based program where that would happen. Then again, I don’t recall ever trying it, either.

Fruit salad on speed

Now here’s a prep time I’d like to see someone achieve:

MELON, PINEAPPLE AND GRAPE COCKTAIL

(can be prepared in 6 minutes from start to finish)

1 melon
1 fresh pineapple
1 c seedless green grapes, halved
3/4 c white grape juice
fresh mint leaves for garnish

Remove seeds from melon. Use a melon baller to scoop out melon. Remove skin from pineapple; core and cut into bite-size pieces. Combine fruits in serving bowl and pour white grape juice over all. Serve immediately or cover and chill until ready to serve. Garnish with mint leaves. Serves 4-6.

**********

Now, if you were to start counting from the time you finish slicing grapes, an Iron Chef (or the French guy who can debone a whole chicken in 60 seconds) might be able to do this in 6 minutes. But unless you’ve got the world’s smallest melon (what kind, anyway?), even I, trained by a mom who trained with Hawaiians in the art of butchering pineapple, would be hard pressed to make it in even 10. I’ve also noticed that this calendar seems to think it impossible to make fruit salad without some kind of juice marinade, which is a foreign concept to me. Is it a function of California versus the Midwest again? Something to do with having better and juicier fruit here? Or do some people just think all salad has to have dressing?

Gravatars

Well, I signed up with Gravatar, mainly so I could test the plugin.

Basically the idea is that you can define an avatar that will follow you around the Internet, anywhere you post. All that’s necessary is for the site you’re commenting on to be Gravatar-enabled at the time someone visits.

The one thing I’m not entirely thrilled about is that it uses your email address as the basis for your ID. They really didn’t have many options to choose from, since most blog comment forms only have space for your name (not always unique), email address, and website (not everyone has one). To avoid publishing addresses accidentally, they one-way encrypt it using MD5. (MD5 is a hash function, so while you can have two systems generate an MD5 signature from the same data to see if it matches, you can’t restore the original from the signature.)

If you’re interested in Gravatars, head over to their site, see if you agree with their policies, and if you enter your email address when commenting (don’t worry, current and future WordPress versions never display it outside of the admin area), your avatar will show up next to your comments.

Anyway, once I had gravatars showing up, I had to find a layout that (a) looked good and (b) worked in IE. (Yes, that again.) Read the rest of this entry »

Targeted Advertising (really)

Something interesting: Of the comics I picked up today, three featured prominent ads for the new Babylon 5 Movie Collection DVD set:

• Supreme Power (written by JMS)
• Doctor Spectrum (spinoff of Supreme Power)
• Fallen Angel (written by Peter David)

Security Perspectives

When I worked at a computer lab in college, the main security focus was preventing lab visitors from screwing around too much with the computers. We just ran Windows NT and locked it down as hard as possible. The worst network-based threat I remember facing was WinNuke, and that was just as likely to be another lab tech. Some of the early email viruses started circulating while I was there, but since it was a public lab, we didn’t provide any email programs; people would telnet into the mail server and use Pine. (This was pre-Hotmail, too.)

In my wired-for-ethernet campus housing, however, all bets were off. I watched people remotely controlling each others’ computers as pranks, or discovering hackers had gotten onto their systems from halfway across the planet, and figured it was safer to use Linux most of the time. This actually got me in trouble with the network admin at one point, who decided I must be running a server and shut off my port. It did at least teach me to disable services that were turned on by default, though I saw no indication that anything on there was actually being abused.*

Then there were firewalled environments. Still back in college, we rigged up my parents’ house for a home network. My brother put together a Linux box to dial into the Internet and act as a gateway, and effectively everything inside the network was safe from direct attacks. No point in internal firewalls, and since everyone was savvy enough to avoid the really nasty stuff (which was easier at the time), virus scanners were only a precaution, rather than a necessity.

For the past few years I’ve mainly worked with Read the rest of this entry »

Spec Check

I’ve been thinking about adding memory to the PowerBook for a while now, and for various other reasons we ended up at Fry’s last night. I figured, we’re here anyway, why not at least price the RAM?

Well, here’s a big fragging “Why Not:” I couldn’t remember the exact specs required. There was, however, a chart listing various laptop models, and the employees could look up requirements by model in the computer. The problem there was that I knew it as “the new 12″ PowerBook G4,” not as “Model A1010,” so they ended up (as near as I can tell) pulling up the specs for last year’s PowerBook (the 1 GHz instead of the 1.33 GHz). Naturally, the two models use different kinds of RAM.

When we got home last night, I cracked open the manual to compare the specs. Tonight, I waded through the Fry’s return line, and this time I brought the manual along — as I’d intended to do in the first place.

Everything went smoothly except for one glitch. The memory slot is covered by a panel with four size #0 Phillips head screws. I do have a size #0 screwdriver, and three of the screws came out easily. One of them refused to move, and the head ended up getting stripped somewhat. Eventually I was able to get it.

So, now the laptop has gone from having the smallest amount of memory at 256 MB (barring the ancient Mac clone in the closet) to having the most memory of all our computers at 1.25 GB.

Say what?

Today’s Studio Foglio newsletter explains:

We often receive phone calls of this nature on the steam-powered studio telephone:

Steve Jackson: “Phil. Space Pirate Amazon Ninja Catgirls. Are you in?”

Phil Foglio: “Okay.”

The result, it seems, is a Foglio-illustraded game called Spanc. (Work warning: “features PG-rated cheesecake photo of a pirate catgirl-in-bikini.” ) I haven’t checked it out yet, but it sounds appropriately bizarre.

In related news, the latest Girl Genius is out!

Netscape Returns!

Well, it’s official. After months of rumors and vague announcements, Netscape 7.2 has been released!

It’s been just over a year since AOL closed down Netscape and spun off the independent Mozilla Foundation. Despite the uncertainty of that transition, no one can deny that Mozilla has flourished. People everywhere are switching to Firefox and recommending it on security, usability, and capability grounds.

It’s really quite surprising, particularly since Netscape the company no longer exists. But Mozilla has been marching ahead, and all that stood between AOL and an updated Netscape was updating their proprietary features, like the AIM sidebar and access to AOL email, to work with the new Mozilla code.

For the past year, I’ve been advocating that people switch from Netscape to Mozilla, since it seemed the best upgrade path. (Someone on Mozillazine pointed out that AOL is actually promoting the Mozilla connection — an interesting switch.) I’ve been skeptical about the new version actually materializing, but here it is.

I’m going to stick with Firefox myself, but for Netscape fans and those looking for the full browser suite (complete with AIM/ICQ)…

• Download Netscape 7.2

Federal pyramid

Well, I’ve finished The Illuminatus! Trilogy (the novel, at least — I’m still working on the appendices), and in honor of that dubious accomplishment, I present this photograph of the Laguna Niguel Federal Building:

Snapped last week while trying to locate the movie theater showing Donnie Darko, just down the road from Pepsi and Wolverine.

It really makes me wish we’d had the better camera with us, though. We got a cheap one we could leave it in the car and have it for unexpected finds like this, but the image quality really is pathetic.

Officially grossed out

In the immortal words of the Internet: WTF?!?

Candy meets toilet humor: Read the rest of this entry »

Autumn in August

One interesting thing about Southern California is that there’s far less difference among the seasons than there is in other areas. Sure, temperature may range from 40° F to 100° F, but it’s not enough for some imported trees. And so trees that, in their native habitat, will shed their leaves in the fall, may stay green halfway through winter.

Last Friday on my way to lunch, I spotted a number of trees like this one, that seemed to have given up figuring out when fall was, and decided, “Heck with it, I’m ditching these leaves now!”

XFN Updated

A new version of XFN has been released, with a few changes and a few new attributes. (XFN, the “XHTML Friends Network” is a simple way of adding information to a link to indicate your relationship to that person.)

New relationship types include kin and contact, expanding the family and friendship dimensions, and me. The primary reason to add me seems to involve linking together profiles at multiple social networking sites - Friendster, Orkut, etc., but it brings up an interesting question:

How do you handle a site run by more than one person? We’ve had XFN info on this page since sometime last year, and it’s worked, because we share mostly the same circle of friends. But we also have links to our individual websites. Should these both be marked “me?” Presumably not, since the separate sites wouldn’t represent the same person. Perhaps something to consider for XFN 1.2?

One door closes…

Since we’ve started showing Babylon 5 to a new group, I’ve been surfing the Lurker’s Guide and other sites. I came across an interesting tidbit about the spinoff series Crusade that I had forgotten.

At the point that TNT cancelled Crusade (13 episodes into filming, and months before it aired), Warner Bros. tried to sell it to the Sci Fi Channel. SciFi was interested in picking it up — and they actually did buy the rights to show reruns of B5 — but they had already committed their original-programming budget to several new shows. No mention of what shows they were, but…

Something jogged my memory. “What year was this?” I checked; it was 1999. “What year did Farscape start?” Sure enough, 1999.

Church to 8-year-old: Drink the Kool-aid

Time to add an “outrage” category. This is just insane: A church panel has invalidated a girl’s communion because she can’t eat wheat (original article here).

The girl has celiac disease, which means any amount of wheat can cause her serious health problems. A local priest was willing to let her use a rice-based wafer, but higher-ups declared it was invalid — that if there wasn’t wheat, it didn’t count. She can either take the communion with a wheat-based wafer, or not take it at all.

For all intents and purposes they’ve excommunicated this girl because of a medical condition.

Good thing I’m not Catholic and the sacrament doesn’t involve peanuts.

I wonder if the church would be willing to pay for emergency room visits (or funerals) resulting from this kind of situation?