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a nice explanation of why server-authenticated DRM is bad
In this case, the left hand knows exactly what the right hand is doing: they’re both giving you the finger. (link)And a lovely quote, too.
trendsetter, me
Actually, I can't claim to have originated this. Somewhere along the line I picked up the word "fishslap", as in whacking someone across the face with a fish, a notional punishment applied via IM or other online chat for bad jokes, etc. When I wrote the office IRC bot for the company I worked for before my current employment, I included the following in its configuration:
The reason I mention this is that I recently saw a hotmail email which ended with the following:
Which, translated from my hacky Perl to english, says "if someone says, "bot: slap waider", display a message reading, "bot slaps waider with a fish". (%b was replaced with the bot's name, allowing you to have a bot named whatever you liked; the rest is just a combination of Perl-like back-references to identify the target, and IRC shorthand to denote an action performed rather than a statement made.)# the classics [ '^%b: slap\s+(.+)', '/me slaps %1 with a fish.' ],
The reason I mention this is that I recently saw a hotmail email which ended with the following:
Get fish-slapping on Messenger
wait, aren't you guys the same company?
Feb 20th: Microsoft dings Amazon's S3. Actually, it's more of a puff piece promoting Small Business Server 2008, and the "ding" in question is a passing comment at the start, where the head guy for Small & Medium Business at Microsoft complained that it'd take weeks to upload all his data to the aforementioned online storage service.
Feb 22nd: Microsoft rolls out their online storage service. Er. Presumably it comes with some hyper-seekrit technology that mitigates the slow uploading mentioned in the other article, yes?
(disclaimer: I'm not exactly unaffiliated with S3, and have a long-running deep-seated dislike for all things Microsoft)
Feb 22nd: Microsoft rolls out their online storage service. Er. Presumably it comes with some hyper-seekrit technology that mitigates the slow uploading mentioned in the other article, yes?
(disclaimer: I'm not exactly unaffiliated with S3, and have a long-running deep-seated dislike for all things Microsoft)
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moment of gnee
Out of curiosity I just grepped my access log to see who (if anyone) had downloaded my freebie half-assed RVP server. Aside from bots, there was a 13. address, which I fed to whois, and got:
OrgName: Xerox Palo Alto Research Center OrgID: XPARC Address: 3333 Coyote Hill Road City: Palo Alto StateProv: CA PostalCode: 94304 Country: USGiggle Giggle Giggle. I've been PARC'd.
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my low-grade form of fame continues
I've been working on a plugin for Gaim to allow it to connect to Microsoft Exchange Instant Messaging. It's reached the point where it's actually usable and mostly doesn't destroy major cities when you run it. This morning someone emailed me to say he's pushed it for inclusion in Gentoo's package list. On one hand, yay, distribution; on the other hand, ew, Gentoo (mildly NSFW link; I like this one, too, and it's totally SFW).
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blatant self-promotion
So if you're working in a corporate environment where the in-house messaging of choice is Microsoft Exchange Instant Messenger, but you're not inclined to use a Windows machine, please to be availing of my RVP (Rendez-Vous Protocol?) plugin for Gaim 1.0.1 (and possibly upward) which will allow your Linux machine to talk to such a system. Also, quite possibly, your Mac. I'm still working on the latter. Actually, I lie. I'm fiddling with the file transfer code, and the Mac option is dependant on me hassling a cow orker for access to his machine during non-office hours.
XML question
So, to get the basics out of the way, I hate XML. I'm forced to deal with it for a hack I'm fiddling with right now, though. And having poked this with a stick for the last week, I've finally found the problem: I am sending data formatted as <foo><bar 1><bar 2><bar 3></foo> and the client wants <foo><bar 2><bar 1><bar 3></foo>, i.e. the order of the contained elements turns out to be important. Now, as far as I can tell, the contained elements are not order-dependant; they're essentially attributes of the container (foo) which can logically interact with each other unambiguously regardless of order (one's a default setting, one's a current setting, and one's a timeout value). While I'm happy to cast asparagus on Microsoft for this (for theirs is the client) I'm curious as to whether this is common behaviour or just short-sighted programming?
support your local media file format
The Dave Matthews Band says:
Please note an easier and more acceptable solution requires cooperation from Apple, who we have already reached out to in hopes of addressing this issue. To help speed this effort, we ask that you use the following link to contact Apple and ask them to provide a solution that would easily allow you to move content from protected CDs into iTunes or onto your iPod rather than having to go through the additional steps above.Hi Dave And His Band, how about y'all quit kowtowing to Microsoft media formats, instead of asking users of what is probably the dominant media player to do something awkward? Ideally, you know, by simply not using inane copy-protection schemes, but heck, by using Apple's DRM instead of Microsoft's? (yes this is all rhetorical, in particular since I pretty much gave up buying CDs several years ago)
my patent! no, MY patent! no, PRIOR ART! HAH!
This is funny. Engadget has a brief summary of the Apple iPod patent ruckus, the short, short version of which is that Apple's patent was refused because a Microsoft employee had previousy filed for a too-similar patent, but now it turns out that iPods were shipping before the Microsoft patent was filed. What I'm wondering is does this knot (which smacks of one of Milo's Catch-22 setups) mean that the iPod interface can't now be patented, because it has been cited as its own prior art? Or can the Patent Office dereference sufficiently to grant the patent to Apple on the grounds of them owning said prior art prior to the Microsoft application?
new and interesting abuses of software
Trawling jobsites this morning, I stumble across this gem in someone's list of job responsibilities:
use Microsoft Project as part of Project Management and in documentation of developed codeUrk. Microsoft Project as documentation of developed code?
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<xml>BLOB</xml>
The company will adopt "industry standard" XML as the file format for popular applications like Word in the next major release of Office, codenamed Office 12 and expected in 2006. The implementation is called Microsoft Office XML Open Format. (link)I have no joke here.
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mailer stupidity
How the hell are you supposed to *correctly* parse this sort of crap?
As you might expect, X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook, Build 10.0.6626.
www.multimap.com/map/browse.cgi?lat=3D51.9643I mean, if you've got a HTML-capable mail client, you shouldn't need to worry about long, unwrapped URLs; if you've got a non-HTML-capable client, the above is unusable without hand-massaging anyway.
<http://uk2.multimap.com/map/browse.cgi?lat=3D51.9643&lon=3D-7.8603&scale=
=3D100000
&icon=3Dx> &lon=3D-7.8603&scale=3D100000&icon=3Dx=20
As you might expect, X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook, Build 10.0.6626.
this just in from our irony department
Our favourite geek monopolist insists that more software research should be done, despite the fact that his company is busy reorienting itself to make more money from patented techonology, i.e. preventing people from using innovative things like "sorting images by date" as a basis for further research unless they license it first.
more from c|net
For a moment, I thought I'd be able to ditch my multi-network software in favour of a single IM client.
(no subject)
From Wired's RSS feed (with my emphasis):
Microsoft says the upcoming release of Windows XP Service Pack 2 will make it much harder to sneak deceptive software onto users' computers. Is it game over for spyware authors? By Amit Asaravala.Indeed. Because everyone knows that Microsoft always comes through on these promises, and that they've never preannounced something that subsequently didn't come to fruition. Remember when they announced Trustworthy Computing and then we had no more viruses?