jclark.org/weblog

Happy Halloween

This is my son’s pumpkin. He picked the design, prepared the pattern, and traced it. He also scooped out the guts. I did the carving.

For more halloween fun, check out the Great Pumpkin theme in the Style boxlet on the right.

Paypal Scam

Got a Paypal scam e-mail tonight. I have to admit, it was a nice effort. It included several warnings to check the URL in your browser’s address bar, and looked very authentic and believable, except for this bit (emphasis mine):

You will be guided through a series of steps which will require you to enter personal information, such as credit card number and/or bank details.

Of course, I’m always extremely skeptical and cautious about such things, and even without the very fishy line above, I was suspicious. By using Mail.app’s View Raw Headers option I was able to look at the HTML source. All of the images were linked from the real Paypal site, and all of the links (privacy policy, Paypal security center, update mail prefs) were valid Paypal links… except for the payload (”You MUST click the link below…”) URL, which used the %00 password-in-url hack that affects IE users who aren’t patched up to date.

At any rate, I poked around the Paypal site for a few minutes, and found an address where you can forward such emails to help Paypal research them. The address is spoof@paypal.com. If you get any of this crap, take a moment to forward it along, especially if it slips past your spam filter (as it did mine). I was impressed when five minutes later, I received and email from Paypal (probably auto-generated, but still) that included a quoted copy of what I’d sent them, along with thanks and an assurance that it was a spoof. My only suggestion is that they make this information more prominent, such as a homepage “Need to know if a Paypal email is authentic?” link.

Beat

I am beat. Even though I’ve been promising myself I’d write a real post one night this week, tonight just isn’t going to be the night. I’m only posting this because I challenged dugh to a month of solid blogging after he created the week-long October Blogging Challenge. Which makes this a lame cheat. The first rule of the Blogging Challenge is don’t blog about the Blogging Challenge, and all that rot.

I could sit here and write the rant I’d planned about the sad state of windows “freeware” (yes, those are air-quotes, please make exagerated hand motions when you read them), but that will have to wait until tommorow. Beat, I tell you.

And yes, the comments are still down (see prior post, I’m too lazy to link it tonight). I’ll try to install the blacklist plugin this weekend. If you’re really feeling sorry for me and my abused comment system, email me (link on the right somewhere).

For now, I’m going to fire up the TiVo and watch Smallville, even if they did write out the best character they’ve ever had last week.

Name that color

Sam Ruby has posted a version of one of my favorite brain twisters. If you have a large whiteboard in your office and a set of colored dry-erase markers, this can be great fun to perpetrate on your co-workers (I do, and I have). It’s amazing how strong the left brain compulsion is. I can successfully read the whole chart, but it takes an amazing amount of concentration… or unfocusing my eyes.

Two Hundred

Yesterday marked the official end of Dugh’s October Blogging Chalenge. I posted at least once per day from last Sunday through yesterday. I’ll let Dugh judge the other participants, but I hereby claim the offered “bragging rights”, since I actually did it. Dugh seems to be a day late with his Saturday entry, but he offered a lame excuse about his ISP being down so we’ll be nice ;) Kidding aside, this challenge was exactly the kick I needed to get more blogging done, so we’ve upped the ante to a month (30 days) of solid blogging, starting last Sunday as well. Thanks for the inspiration, Dugh. Keep an eye on the Calendar boxlet on the top right to see how I’m doing.

As exciting as post number 7 of the original Challenge was yesteray, this post is even better. This is the 200th post to my weblog. I made my 100th post on New Year’s Day, when I resolved to add 200 posts this year. October 10, and halfway there. Oops. Let’s not talk about the other resolutions.

Old

In Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson spends over 11,000 words describing the special cereal-eating ritutal of Randy, the hacker protagonist of the modern thread of the story. It aptly captures the extreme degree of thought a true geek can apply to any situation. An couple of excerpts:

The gold nuggets of Cap’n Crunch pelt the bottom of the bowl with a sound like glass rods being snapped in half Tiny fragments spall away from their corners and ricochet around on the white porcelain surface. World-class cereal-eating is a dance of fine compromises. The giant heaping bowl of sodden cereal, awash in milk, is the mark of the novice. Ideally one wants the bone-dry cereal nuggets and the cryogenic milk to enter the mouth with minimal contact and for the entire reaction between them to take place in the mouth. Randy has worked out a set of mental blueprints for a special cereal-eating spoon that will have a tube running down the handle and a little pump for the milk, so that you can spoon dry cereal up out of a bowl, hit a button with your thumb, and squirt milk into the bowl of the spoon even as you are introducing it into your mouth. The next best thing is to work in small increments, putting only a small amount of Cap’n Crunch in your bowl at a time and eating it all up before it becomes a pit of loathsome slime, which, in the case of Cap’n Crunch, takes about thirty seconds.

And:

Here is where a novice would lose his cool and simply chomp down. A few of the nuggets would explode between his molars, but then his jaw would snap shut and drive all of the unshattered nuggets straight up into his palate where their armor of razor-sharp dextrose crystals would inflict massive collateral damage, turning the rest of the meal into a sort of pain-hazed death march and rendering him Novocain mute for three days. But Randy has, over time, worked out a really fiendish Cap’n Crunch eating strategy that revolves around playing the nuggets’ most deadly features against each other.

It’s a nearly stream-of-concious peak inside Randy’s head; a summary of the analysis and energy possible when fixating. When I read the book (and when I re-read it), I identified immediately with the mindset being portrayed, although I had no cereal ritual of my own.

Lately however, I’ve developed a minor cereal fixation, a morning jumpstart as well as a power snack late in the afternoon. While I have yet to apply the fanatical levels of analysis exhibited by Randy, I’ve started drawing some mental parallels to this chapter of the book.

Then I considered the fact that while Randy is obsessed with Cap’n Crunch, my cereal of choice is Frosted Shredded Wheat. Yes, Shredded Wheat. How old am I suddenly feeling?

Kickbacks and Search Engines

I bought a book today from Amazon. At the end of checkout, I noticed a small discount had been applied- Somthing about A9.com and π/2%. Clicking the link, I found the following explanation:

Jason Clark, since you’ve been using A9.com recently, virtually everything at Amazon.com is automatically an additional π/2% (1.57%) off for you. Collecting this discount is zero effort on your part. It will be applied automatically at checkout (it will happen whether you use the shopping cart or our 1-Click Shopping®). You don’t need to do anything to get this discount except keep using A9.com as your regular search engine.

We don’t advertise this additional discount that we give in exchange for using A9.com, so if you want your friends to know about it, please tell them. It is probably the only way they’ll find out. All they have to do is use A9.com as their regular search engine. They should make sure they are signed in to A9.com (it should be recognizing them by name) so that we can be certain they get credit for their visit.

While the π/2% discount is a good additional reason to use A9.com it isn’t the best reason. A9.com licenses its web search results from the industry leader Google, and then supplements those results with Amazon’s Search Inside the Book™ results. The coolest feature is that A9.com keeps track of your search history for you on the server side. To see how this works, do some A9 searches from your computer at work and then sign in to A9.com from your computer at home.

How can we afford this additional π/2% discount?

Sponsored links revenue -from the small text-based ads on A9.com and Amazon.com search results pages -will help offset costs we incur through the Rewards promotion. With our automatic π/2% discount, we are effectively sharing with you some of the money we collect from sponsored links, i.e. sharing the pi.

Please use A9.com and tell your friends.

Thank you

So I’m being paid to use their search engine, but only when I make purchases at their store. What’s really interesting is that I don’t really use A9. I tried it some time ago. To me it really doesn’t add any value to a basic Google search, so I’ve ignored it since. I did use it a week or so ago by clicking through a link in someone’s weblog post, that must be why they think I’m a current user.

Something caught my eye in the message:

The coolest feature is that A9.com keeps track of your search history for you on the server side.

If by coolest you mean “creepiest”, then yeah, sure. It’s bad enough that Amazon knows every product I’ve ever browsed on Amazon; now they want to know everything I search for on the web? In fact, it’s worse than that… not only will they know what I searched for, they’ll know what search results I viewed, since every returned link is piped through an a9.com redirector. Remember, the π/2% discount (and “features” like server-side search caching) only work when you’re logged into a9 with your Amazon ID- and I don’t even remember doing that. Cookie abuse?

Maybe I’m too paranoid. But then, I don’t let Google read my e-mail, either. Time to make a spare tin-foil hat.

Developer Humor

Sometimes we get a little punchy around the office on a Friday afternoon. I came up with an idea in the middle of a debugging conversation, and had to run with it. If you’re not at least passingly familiar with C, it just isn’t funny; don’t waste your time.

user: what’s a handle?

hacker: No, *what’s a pointer.

user: I don’t know. What is a pointer?

hacker: Yes.

user: But where is the data?

hacker: No, &where is the address. The data is there.

user: where?

hacker: The address.

user: So where’s the pointer?

hacker: No, *what’s the pointer. &where's the address.

user: And the pointer?

hacker: *what.

user: The pointer?

hacker: *what.

user: THE POINTER?

hacker: *what!

user: Forget it.

hacker: No, you can’t forget(it), you need a handle for that

user: But what’s a handle?

hacker: No, *what’s a pointer.

user: I can’t handle this anymore.

hacker. That’s because this is an object. You have to use this->handle().

user: what handle?

hacker: No, *what’s a pointer.

user: I don’t know! I don’t understand it!

hacker: it’s just an integer, which is why you can’t forget(it)…

user: I need a handle for that?

hacker: No, that() returns a handle.

user: And what is that?

hacker: A function that returns a handle.

user: But what’s a handle?

hacker: No, *what’s…

user: A pointer! I got it. But what does it point to?

hacker: it’s not a pointer, it’s an integer.

user: Fine. what’s an integer?

hacker: No, it’s an integer. *what’s a pointer.

user: I quit.

hacker: Be sure you return an exit code.

user: But I didn’t take one!

hacker: What are you talking about?

user: !!

With apologies to Laurel and Hardy Abbot & Costello.

Avast, Landlubber!

Aaarrr! Today do be International Talk Like A Pirate Day! Raise a mug o’ grog in honor of Rob Hague, a scurvy bilge-rat if ever there was one, who created the blog-like-a-pirate plugin fer Blosxom! It do be makin’ me whole site seaworthy today! Shiver me timbers!

I extended his bit o’ magic with a spot o’ my own… I added support for a meta tag, ‘meta-aarg’. If it be present, and if it be ‘false’, no translation be done. This be so that I can write a post in pirate-speak without a double-dose of “Aaarr!”. That way this here post can remain pirate-friendly even after the rest o’ the blog do be back to normal.

Also, a mug fer me matey dugh, tho’ a rum swabby he do be. I near fergot, ’til an’ he reminded me! An’ if ye do be a landlubber, shove off!

I Still Remember

I originally posted this text on September 11, 2003. I reprint it here in its entirety. Because I still remember. And so we never forget.

I remember my pager going off during a meeting. “CALL HOME ASAP.” My wife never pages me. I left the meeting. It was a little past 9am.

I remember finding an empty office and calling home. I was in Manhattan only for the day, 52nd Street. My wife was upset. “Two planes just crashed into the World Trade Center. Are you there?” We live two hours away - she didn’t know anything about New York City, just that I was there. “I’m five miles away, hon. I’m fine.”

I remember getting off the phone after several minutes of assuring my wife I’d find out how to get home and call her back. The meeting was still in progress.

I remember wondering how I could go tell a room full of New Yorkers what had happened. I remember my relief when a moment later, the meeting room opened up and everyone poured out. Someone else had already told them.

I remember wandering down a few floors, looking for a television. I passed someone I didn’t know. “They blew up the Pentagon,” he said. My stomach turned to ice. How far would this go?

I remember talking to my wife again. I had to call someone back in my office, over a dedicated line, and get him to conference us. Long distance and cell phones were completely tied up. “I promise I’ll try to get home today,” I told her. She was trying not to be hysterical. So was I.

I remember leaving the building with four other people from my office, all visiting for the day. Someone had come up over the weekend, and had a car parked in Brooklyn. The 3:30 streets were empty. Subways, the ones that were running, were nearly empty. We walked a long time, away from the smoke. I looked over my shoulder at it so many times I lost count.

I remember riding out of Brooklyn over the Verazanno Narrows bridge several hours later. Looking back at the column of smoke, larger than belief. I will never forget that image as long as I live.

I remember arriving home. Hugging my children. Holding my wife. Calling friends and loved ones, assuring them I was home. Crying. Praying for the families of those who were lost.

On September 11, 2001, over three thousand people lost their lives. At the World Trade 2,972 people were lost. At the Pentagon, 184 people were lost. In a field in Pennsylvania, 40 people were lost. I was fortunate… I didn’t lose anyone. But I remember.

Also: Pwylla remembers. Joel replaced his site with a stirring memorial for the day.