Archive for October, 2006
It’s getting to be election time again so I thought I’d chime in with some timely advice. Bin Laden is expected to reccomend voting republican so that he can stay in business. Of course if you’re in Florida you’ll probably be voting republican anyway - even if you selected democrat thanks to faulty voting machines. Consipiracy anyone?
Speaking of voting machines I don’t know what’s worse: The fact that Hugo Chavez owns them or that they’re so easily hacked.
So remember, as you head to the polls: It’s not important who you vote for. It’s not even important that you vote. What’s important is that you actually believe your vote matters when selecting the oligarchy to rule over us.
October 30th, 2006
If you know me in real life you know that I’m big time anti-piracy and anti-file sharing. As a software developer and author I don’t want people taking my stuff without paying for it, so I don’t take theirs without paying for it. It’s the old do unto others.
Like all Geeks, I have an Ipod - an Ipod that has about 20 or 30 gigs of music on it. Unlike most geeks however, I actually have all the CD’s to back up the music. I estimate that I’ve probably spent over $5,000 on CDs over the years. Lately I just buy them used on Amazon for around $5 - sure somebody else has probably just ripped the songs, but at least my actions are legal. I believe that’s all a man can do, make sure what he does is correct. If everybody thought like that the world would be a better place.
Anyway, occasionally a song comes out that I like, but I still won’t justify paying $5 for the CD when I only want one song. I used to use ITunes for that. It was great for getting those one hit wonder songs. One of my favorite bands, Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers, even released a special CD only on ITunes. I had no choice but to buy that one. Seriously, if you like Country, Southern Rock, or Americana, Check them out on MySpace.
Alright, enough fluff. When my computer fried (power lines went down) I was forced to buy a new one, and transfer all my data to this new computer. That’s where the problem comes in. ITunes offers no way to re-download songs you’ve already paid for. It’s not $0.99 per song.. it’s $0.99 per download! I wish I’d have known that up front. As often as I change computers I’d have been better off buying the CD even for one song - and I wouldn’t have to deal with DRM either.
It’s time to step up to the plate Apple. You have a record of me buying songs, you have the songs.. Why can’t I re download them?
October 27th, 2006
Just when you think you’re doing an act of goodwill, the city of Chesapeake turns around and spits in your face. At least, that’s what happened recently when a Massachusets based software company finally handed the chesapeake.com domain name over to the city of Chesapeake - after 10 years of being bugged about it.
That’s right, the city of Chesapeake bugged this software company for 10 years to give them the domain for free… 10 years! Eventually the software company gave in and donated the name to the city.
So what did the city do with this generous gift? Why they sold it for $120,000, that’s what they did. And people wonder why more people don’t donate things. Here’s your answer.
The city of Chesapeake should be ashamed of themselves. At the very least, they should donate the $120,000 to the software company that donated them the domain. There’s a difference between being given a gift, and pestering somebody until they finally give in.
October 26th, 2006
Wow, I feel like an old man. I was watching TV last night waiting for FOX to tell us if the world series was going to be cancelled or not when I heard a noise outside.
Before I get to that though, what was up with FOX? Apparantley the rain was over 25 miles wide on the radar, and they strung us along anyway just so their crappy “war at home” show could get viewers. They could have made that decision within 30 min of the scheduled start time, not 2 hours.
Ok, so I hear this noise right.. and I look outside to see 3 kids kicking over all the trash cans on my street. WTF??
Since I’ve had my car broken into in my driveway 3 times so far, (prior to getting an alarm installed) I called the police on them. Man do I feel old.. I’d have never done that before. In fact, a few years ago I’d probably have had friends who’ve done that stuff before.
Speaking of criminals, This has to be one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long long time.
Anyway, I just wanted to rant a little bit to break that whole “newsy” type feel again.
October 26th, 2006
Just a quick note to any of my readers who live in Florida, the latest issue of Family Times Magazine features an article I wrote on page 20. It’s about internet slang and the top 25 terms parents should know.
I’ve been dabbling in freelance lately, so if you’re interested in a fresh new writer, drop me a line. it’s ryan at noslang dot com … but you probably already knew that.
October 26th, 2006
It seems like the MySpace stories in the news get stranger by the day, and this one is no exception. Police in Farmington, Conn have charged a 13 year old girl with criminal impersonation for creating a MySpace profile claiming to be her teacher. The article doesn’t say what the profile said, but we can probably assume that it wasn’t nice things.
Now, I’m not denying the school should do something about this issue - they should. The consequences could be bad if a student were to send a confidential message to the teacher, or if the blog said something referencing a student. Do I think they should have charged her with criminal impersonation? Hell no.
If we look at the legal defintion of criminal impersonation then we notice some nice red text there. (note: I know this is a colorado definition. I check the Conneticut law and it’s the same. I picked this page because it highlights what I want to talk about.)
It’s hard to see how creating a fake MySpace about a teacher gives this particular 13 year old any unlawful benefits, and it clearly doesn’t subject the teacher to any legal proceedings.
Hopefully this will all be handled without lawyers or prosecutors and the girl will learn an important lesson about what you can and can’t post on the internet (although legally I think she had this right).
While we’re on the lesson train, maybe schools will take note and learn that:
a.) Matters like this are better handled with sit down talks between teachers, students, and parents.
b.) They can’t control what students do on the internet outside of the classroom.
Update: I should probably add that IANAL, so don’t go creating fake myspace profiles because I said it should be legal.
October 25th, 2006
Ok, well not really. I’ve never once intentionally sent any spam emails before, and none of my websites collect emails or even send any out…. or so I thought that’s what they were doing.
Years ago (we’re talking 1999 here) I headed over to hotscripts and grabbed a generic form email script. This particular script was written by Dennis of DarkMix.net (which no longer exists anymore, so I assume Dennis had the same problem)
The problem was with the following lines of code that I just seemingly noticed:
$headers = "From: $Name <$Email> \n”;
$headers .= “Reply-To: $Email\n”;
$headers .= “X-Mailer: Darkmix Mail Sender\n”;
$headers .= “X-Mailer-Version: 1.1″;
I’m sure many of you can spot the problem. It’s very easy to add whatever I want to that header by entering a creative email address. Worse, this code didn’t use the $_POST or $_GET variables either. It relied on register globals.
Anyway, I caught this problem well over 6 months ago, and the site it was on isn’t even on the internet anymore. I was just reminded of it while perusing some old legacy code at my company and remembered that I’d forgotten to blog about this. All in all it only sent a few emails before I noticed something was funny. No harm no foul I suppose.
Let this be a lesson to those who release free code on hotscripts, as well as to those who blindly use code found from such repositories.
October 25th, 2006
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