K-Squared Ramblings

Honeypot Paydirt!

Whew! After 6 weeks, Project Honeypot has identified a spam harvester trolling one of the sites I signed up with them. Considering it only took 3 days for them to hit some of the local spamtraps I set up at the same time, I’m surprised. I’m especially surprised that it was found on the least trafficked site.

Manual off-topic

I picked up a new mouse to use at work yesterday, mainly because I wanted a scroll wheel that actually turned. (The old one was jammed.) I figured I’d go optical as well, since I much prefer optical mice. I ended up getting a basic $15 Microsoft mouse, though I would have gone for a more expensive Logitech if I were getting one for home.

When I plugged it in this morning, I was surprised to find that it skipped all over the place. Not constantly, as if the KVM had gotten its signal mixed up, but enough that it would be a real pain to use. (Oddly, it worked more smoothly on my Linux box than the Windows box. I have no idea why.)

So I pulled out the manual, looking for a troubleshooting section. Something like “If your mouse skips, it may be caused by XYZ.” Nothing. The contents were:

• One page on how to plug it in
• One page on which button does what.
• One page on cleaning instructions (half of which was for ball mice).
• Five pages on ergonomics and how to arrange your chair, desk, monitor, keyboard and mouse to avoid eyestrain, carpal tunnel syndrome, etc.
• One page titled “Be Healthy,” advising you to eat a balanced diet, get plenty of rest and exercise, see your doctor on a regular basis, etc.
• The usual radio interference and legal information. And another health warning about RSI.

Useful information to be sure, but not quite what I was looking for.

As it turns out, I just tossed away my mouse pad and tried the mouse directly on the desk. It works like a charm now. I guess the pad was too reflective or something.

Marvin the Martian could use this

In the tradition of the Evil Overlord List: How To Destroy the Earth.

The Earth was built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you’ve had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.

For the purposes of what I hope to be a technically and scientifically accurate document, I will define our goal thus: by any means necessary, to render the Earth into a form in which it may no longer be considered a planet. Such forms include, but are most definitely not limited to: two or more planets; any number of smaller asteroids; a quantum singularity; a dust cloud.

The site then goes on to list possible methods ranked by feasibility.

(via Cruel Site of the Day [archive.org])

Cancellations

Fallen Angel is ending with #20, and Babylon 5: The Memory of Shadows has fallen through.

However, JMS has always said, “If they can do a Brady Bunch movie, you
can be sure that sooner or later, somebody’s going to do a B5 movie.” Even better, it turns out that while Warner Bros. owns the B5 TV show lock, stock and barrel, JMS owns the movie rights…so he’s in a position to make sure that whoever does do a B5 movie will get it right. “To that end,” he says… “I can wait.”

As for Fallen Angel, I suspect the timing of the decision means DC either wasn’t waiting for sales after all, or was going on pre-orders from stores. Peter David cryptically remarks, “We are not, however, quite dead yet.” It’s not clear what he means, but the characters are creator-owned, and the series isn’t tied to the DC Universe, so it’s entirely possible for them to pop up again at another publisher. Only time will tell.

New meaning to PDA

OK, this is bizarre. Apparently a Hong Kong software company is preparing to release a Virtual Girlfriend for high-res mobile phones. It—or I suppose I should say “she”—is structured as an online game, on the virtual pet model. (Remember the tamagotchi fad?) You hold conversations with “Vivienne,” give her virtual gifts, even work up to a virtual wedding—which adds a virtual mother-in-law to the game.

The graphics are nice, and apparently they’ve put together a very elaborate conversation engine, but I have to wonder who this will really appeal to. The way she’s described she’s pretty high-maintenance—why go to all that effort when you don’t get the benefit of a real person?

Of course, there are other possibilities for the technology:

Vivienne, for instance, will double as a translator for travelers. Type in the desired words in English while traveling and, with additional programming in the next few months, her synthesized voice will coo it back in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Spanish or Italian.

Just as games have driven desktop computing to keep pushing the envelope, this could lead the way toward the conversational interfaces that are so prevalent in science-fiction.

Firefox 101

Or rather, Firefox 1.0.1 has been released. It fixes several bugs and security holes found in the 1.0 release, including the frame/pop-up injection and a workaround for the the IDN (internationalized domain names) spoofing flaw (which I thought I’d posted about, but can’t find).

Anyone using Firefox should upgrade. Anyone curious about Firefox should check it out.

Update: Looks like the site’s getting swamped again. Read the rest of this entry »

1.5 is alive!

K-Squared Ramblings is now running on WordPress 1.5. I’ve let it use the new default template since a) I’ve been meaning to overhaul the layout anyway, b) the theme system is completely different, so I may as well start building a new one instead of trying to cram the old one into the new framework and c)…it looks nicer than the old layout.

I do plan on re-enabling things like related posts, recent comments, etc. as I learn my way around the new template, figure out what nifty new features are available, and figure out which plugins are still compatible.

Update 11:00: I’ve got a more personalized header up, and some of the basic add-in features like related posts and Gravatars. Categories appear hierarchical again, and the sidebar badges are back.

And best of all, Spam Karma is still standing guard.

More Linux Consolidation

Remember UnitedLinux? It was a consortium of Conectiva, SuSE, TurboLinux and Caldera to build a common distribution that could compete with Red Hat. That effort got derailed, in part because Caldera decided they could make more money by changing their name to SCO and extorting suing the market into oblivion. Now Novell owns SuSE, TurboLinux is facing competition from Red Flag, and Conectiva is merging with Mandrake.

Mandrake’s a nice OS. I keep trying to switch, but I keep coming back to Red Hat Fedora. While my own experience with Conectiva has been, shall we say, less than stellar, they did port Debian’s outstanding package manager APT to work with RPM, and started the development of Synaptic, which should (in my opinion) be the standard way to install and upgrade software on any package-based Linux distribution with a GUI.

For now it looks like they’ll be maintaining separate brands based on a common core (hmm, sounds familiar), but I wouldn’t be surprised if they end up merging the products in a few years.

Hey, if it means Mandrake replaces their clunky update system with APT and Synaptic, I’m all for it.

(See also CNET’s take.)

Billion-year-old Nuclear Reactors

From the Astronomy Picture of the Day, it’s the remnants of a two-billion-year-old nuclear reactor discovered in 1972 in a mine in Oklo, Gabon.

Apparently in the old days there was enough uranium-235 in the Earth’s crust that, under the right conditions, nuclear fission could occur naturally. Over time the fuel was used up, and now uranium deposits are mostly ²³⁸U, so we don’t need to worry about any new nuclear reactors popping up without our help.

What’s really odd is that this reactor produced plutonium naturally. There’s still some there. Most periodic tables I’ve seen label plutonium as a synthetic element, so the idea of natural plutonium takes some getting used to.

Kind of like the idea of a natural nuclear reactor.

Form and Function

Buzz pointed me to an interesting ZDNet article on the future of web forms.

Let’s face it: 10 years in, forms on the web still suck.

Oh, sure, we’re used to it, but the tools for web-based forms are still light-years behind the tools for building them into actual Windows, Mac, or Unix applications. Developers either make do with what they have, or they put together a complicated, hard-to-maintain, incompatible mess to work around the shortcomings and give you something that works the way you might expect it to. (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to just put a combo box on a page instead of having to use both a drop-down and a text box, then have the server try to figure out which value to accept.)

There are two main groups pushing for the next generation of website UI: XForms and Web Forms 2.0. The main difference is that XForms starts over from square one with an XML structure, while Web Forms 2.0 extends HTML. W3C has been working on XForms for at least three years, while Web Forms 2.0 is the first major project from WHATWG, a collaboration between Mozilla, Opera, and Apple, makers of the three main “alternative” web browsers. Read the rest of this entry »

Bring It On

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.

Mage Guild

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!

Fallen Angel Returns – For the Moment

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.

Random Links

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.

And the junk kept rolling in

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.