24 varieties
| AboutRb - Archive - Most Recent - Stylize |
24 varieties
| AboutRb - Archive - Most Recent - Stylize |
| ITSA end to spam | July 23, 2004 |
A blog I maintain for a student group was getting an unbelievable amount of comment spam, especially since it's a realatively new site that doesn't have a high search engine ranking. According to Google, a grand total of three websites link to it, although two of them are blogs. I finally got around to upgrading Movable Type to stop the spam, which has only gotten worse as time goes on. Why, I remember the first comment spam bots, and how they would try to form coherent paragraphs of text from random Project Gutenberg books. Now a days, spam bot writers are just getting lazy, and have resorted to single sentence quotes. In memory of the great literary spambots of the past, I've composed one last spam haiku: For bots like me have no soul Buy Viagra now In other news, the Link Bar of Wonder will be up and running soon. | |
| Bad Booze Rots Our Young Guts... | July 9, 2004 |
... is the start of my favorite mnemonics for resistor color codes. You know, those little colored bands on the sides of resistors that encode the resistance and tolerance. I recently purchased a few (70) resistors along with some other components over the magical internet. The invoice says "220 ohms", as does the little baggie containing them. But the color codes tell a different story; a story of lies, deceit, and color blind minimum wage resistor-packaging workers. In short, I specifically ordered Rots-Rots-Booze-Gold, but got Rots-Rots-Young-Gold! Unacceptable! That's three orders of magnitude off, and I have no need for 70 220K ohm resistors. Perhaps if I had 930 more of them I could string them all together in parallel and make a single 220 ohm resistor that weighed several pounds, but I don't have the time for that. The most frustrating part is that the 70 resistors only cost $1.05, while shipping them back costs $3. Gah, I hope Gateway has plenty of 220 ohm resistors in stock. On a side note, it seems my headphone jack has developed a short that perfectly cancels out the lyrics on my music. Otherwise, the songs are fine. Weirdness. I guess it's time for karaoke. | |
| Bug Me Not | July 8, 2004 |
First, yes, I know the Link Bar of Wonder is broken right now. I appreciate people telling me about it, but now you know that I know, so it's not an issue anymore. It will be fixed soon (and more efficient and environmentally friendly). Secondly, I vaugly remember being introduced to BugMeNot by David. In short, a very cool site that has a free database of username/passwords to tons of stupid websites that insist that you register before you can read some halfway decent article. I don't remember David pointing out a BugMeNot Firefox plugin. Cool beans, as my high-school physics teacher used to say. | |
| G-Whiz! | June 21, 2004 |
Today I got a GMail invite from a total stranger. Well, not exactly a total stranger, but before today I didn't even know the guy's name. Sam, who I've only seen at a few CS happy hours, is apparently closer friends with Raquel and Charlie. Through some sort of GMail-invite-osmosis, I ended up with one. Thanks again Sam! Anyway, I don't want to waste my breath re-iterating all of GMail's features, so I'll sum it up: really really cool. It's like a mail client, only web-based, and without the suckiness usually associated with web mail clients. Also, GMail uses a lot of dynamic HTML and whatnot to put as much information into each page that you load. In other words, there are much fewer page loads, and the whole thing is a lot faster and polished than your typical web-mail client. Yahoo and the like are screwed. PS - I'm jtucek.... you can't get a user name shorter than 6 characters, thus foiling my efforts to be tucek@gmail.com. So far, that's the only thing Google has ever done to annoy me. That and forgetting to change their logo on St. Patrick's day one year. What is it that they have against the Irish (me)? | |
| Herbal Vi,agra 1337 | June 3, 2004 |
During lunch, Nik brought up Mount Sinai's ingenious and easy to use spam filtering solution (Tom Joseph, a former WU student, is going there). Of course, by "ingenious" and "easy to use" I mean "Bloody stupid" and "a pain in the neck." First, their mail server scans all incoming mail for spamitude. If a potential piece of spam is found, it holds it. Then it sends you an email alert about the potential spam, including an excerpt from the possible spam. If you decide that it is not spam, you have to "click on REPLY, and delete all the lines in the email except the one that begins with Message: then click on SEND." At this point, the spam filtering software will send you another email, telling you that it's about to let the original email through to you. Only then do you get the email that was blocked. In summary, for every piece of spam you get, you also get a warning email. For every false positive, you get three emails, and have to send one yourself after deleting the right lines. This system is clearly designed to make all of the users despise email so much that they go back to using carrier pigeons. This should happen within 2 to 3 days, at which point the school can replace the mail server with a soggy banana, thus solving the spam problem for good. (That is, until I invent carrier pigeon spam!) While most of the poor saps at Mount Sinai are just going to have to live with this horrible system, Nik thought that Tom might be able to find some workaround. Procmail sprung to mind, so I suggested that he could use procmail to 1) automatically reply to and delete all potential spam alerts 2) delete all about to unblock the spam messages 3) filter incoming messages through SpamAssassin. At the very least steps 1 and 2 would (in effect) turn off Mount Sinai's incredibly stupid email filtering. It also has the added bonus of taxing the mail server even more, and it serves their mail administrator right. | |
| Thirty Four, Plus or Minus Two | June 2, 2004 |
I have never really trusted Microsoft's built-in calculator, because it doesn't use a stack. Without a stack, it ends up ignoring the order of operations. Sometimes I forget this, and end up getting burned by the calculator's wrong answers. I was just ranting to someone in the lab about this, but they didn't believe me. Thus, I loaded up calculator, and typed in 2 + 10 * 3. Any good calculator would know that 10 * 3 takes priority over the 2 + ..., so the answer should be 32. At the time, I argued that the stupid Microsoft calculator wouldn't pay attention to the order of operations, and thus output (2 + 10) * 3, or 36. Lo, the calculator had to spite me and this is what it answered:  What?! Since when did Microsoft finally issue a patch to deal with this annoyance? It looked like I was wrong, and just didn't know how to use a calculator. But then the devious Computer Science TA part of me kicked in, and I tried the exact same operation after switching the calculator off "Scientific Mode." The answer? 56. That's because I really can't use a calculator. After typing 2 + 10 * 3 more carefully, I got this:  Aha! I was right. The stupid Microsoft calculator does get things wrong, when not in scientific mode. In fact, this is worse than if it had also gotten the wrong answer both times. Whoever was in charge of programming the stupid thing actually had to do more work so that the calculator gives the wrong answer, since they had to implement both a stack-based and a stupid-based calculator in the same program. Stupid calculator programmers. | |
| Avast, Ye Landlubbers | May 8, 2004 |
As everybody round these here parts should know, Wash U's tuition has finally broken the $40,000 mark (payable in cash, check, credit card, or first born). Yes, I know that's old news. I'm just reminded of it because of a new flag that I've seen flying over campus.. As my post title alludes to, it's a pirate flag. It's actually been there for a few weeks, and I've been meaning to get a picture, but haven't had the chance. Anyway, someone managed to climb the very tall smokestack behind the engineering school and hang a pirate flag between to topmost two rungs of the ladder built into the side. This couldn't have been an easy task, since said ladder starts over 30 feet off the ground. At first, one would suspect this to be the work of no-good-students. But since the DC hub got shut down, we have no more pirates of the musical variety on campus (of course). Through process of elimination, it must have been the school administration. They're finally admitting that what WU is charging is highway robbery. Either that or they're planning on sailing off in the smokestack to the Caribbean as soon as the summer starts. | |