Geek at Play

Scary as hell

I have two friends who are working for a security company building infrastructure for Iraq, so the new of recent attacks scared the hell out of me. It turned out to not be my friends, but the senselessness of the attacks is boggling. I don’t understand why someone would do this. These are civilians, trying to bring essential secure and reliable communications to a country without it. Why, why, why? It makes no sense.

Putty in my hands

Seriously. It’s torture. Sometimes there are products out there that have “geek” written all over them (even literally). But the availability of silly putty in 5-pound lots is downright cruel.

Dead zone

The log of a woman riding her motorcycle through the Chernobyl disaster area is about the most interesting and disturbing thing I’ve read on the internet in a while. A part of the USSR frozen in time. Pictures of lives interrupted and abandoned taken in recognizably modern cities turned into ghost towns. All in a region that will still silently and mercilously destroy the structure of your body. Amazing.

Indecipherable “news”

What do you get if you combine absurdist comedy with real news? Why, ScrappleFace, of course. As a fan and frequent user of sarcasm, absurdism, and hyperbole I’m happy to see this site exists.

Should I care?

I haven’t decided if the makers of moronic t-shirts should be held responsible for the idiots who wear them. My bro-in-law thinks so. I gotta say, as clothing goes, this is pretty irresponsible.

I am SciFi

Having just finished watching my DVD boxed set of one of the best SciFi TV shows ever made (which was, of course, cancelled after one season), I was pretty pumped to see that a company now actually uses communicator badges (just like Star Trek, which I’m less fond of). It’s really odd to see things from SciFi coming true. It’s a strange age to live in.

I’ll refrain from any comments about the Patriot Act, RFID tags, or any other technologies that might bring to mind 1984; it’s just too creepy.

Kids say the dumbest things

Kids can be amazingly dumb. They’ll even go so far as to search Google for a term like “instant messenger question answerer” instead of asking their actual question. Then they’ll chat-up a 30 year old Canadian geek, and be surprised when he’s a both strange and helpful. Oh, the crazy things kids do!

Welcome to your 15 minutes of internet fame, Stewart. Hope you get lots of interesting fodder for your fantastic blog before the traffic forces you to pick another screen name.

(Oh, mad props to jay-to-tha-izoel for the link, delivered via the ’stick.)

SPF, please

Alright, computer people (not to be confused with “party people”), it’s time to fix the internet. Or at least part of it. Implement SPF right now on your own domain, and start looking it up when you accept mail. I’m already so sick of getting joe-jobbed, it happens weekly to one of my older domains which I hardly use anymore for mail. I get to spend my mornings deleting bounced mail from random IP addresses of virus-infected machines and open relays.

Why has it taken until now to come up with a reasonable solution for domain forging? I don’t know. Everyone knows that SMTP is horribly broken, but it’s hard to fix something so entrenched.

There’s just no good reason not to at least publish a soft-fail SPF rule. Just do it. Right now. Well, unless a giant, slow-moving registrar is running your DNS, in which case you can’t add a TXT record to your domain. I’m sure they’re having meetings about that and you’ll see it in their web interface within the next 3 years.

Good old days

We were just reminiscing on IRC and someone brought up what has to be among the funniest things to ever happen when I worked in IT. A well-meaning marketing employee slated for a new laptop asked us to copy her files onto it. She claimed to have been faithfully backing up her files every day to floppy (we were amazed). We gladly said we could put her backups on her new laptop. She smiled and produced a single floppy for our use.

It contained a single item named “Shortcut to C:”.

Lost focus

Ok, Microsoft is just silly now. They’ve lost all perspective and are suffering from an RIAA-like obsession with piracy. It used to be that “Help” functions in software sucked: they helped generate a gigantic book industry (”Thank you for buying Office for $400, please enjoy the installation pamphlet we’ve included and hustle on over to the bookstore to drop another $60 on a book if you actually want to use it.”). Fine. Whatever. I’ve learned to accept books as a part of software cost.

But today I asked my Microsoft mail client the question “How do I change meeting reply to tentative?”, because something had changed and I didn’t know if I’d make the meeting. And, yes, I know my grammar was a little off; I typed it quickly. The first “common question” that came up in a reply was, “What should I do if I suspect I have unknowingly purchased illegal Microsoft software product(s)?”

Seriously, screw you guys.