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title: Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. |
descrip: One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001. |
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FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY!!!
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| Thursday, December 29, 2011 | |
We're sorry. You have exceeded the maximum number of requests to Register telephone numbers from the National Do Not Call Registry. As a result, we are unable to fulfill your request. Thanks guys. I especially like the way it doesn't tell me on the page, but only on the email reply. Or give me an option like removing a number. Well done, Uncle Sam. Email #2 coming right up... Labels: govt fail posted by ruffin at 12/29/2011 07:18:00 PM |
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Seriously, the Gmail spam/phishing filter is horribly broken. Delivered-To: MyEmailAddress@gmail.com I did some line wrapping, but that's about it. Perhaps Google should partner with IBM for a twenty year-old version of Watson (or attach Gmail to an iPhone and rewire Siri) to figure out that emails claiming to be from Gmail that they didn't send should probably be reviewed before they're released to the inboxes. Seriously, would holding suspicious emails for a few hours hurt anyone unduly? I mean seriously -- Account User confirm "Google mail" -- with a sig that includes "Google" and "Team" should be enough for someone to figure out something phishy is going on. How about ANY From line with "gmail" in the pre-ampersand portion? This isn't even close to rocket science. This should embarrass the Gmail team. It's hardly the first time phishing-as-Gmail has snuck through. EDIT: I thought there was another recently. Two days ago.
RLY? Have I started reporting not only as spam but as phishing scams? Yes. But if you're expecting human users to do the work of catching this stuff, you don't really understand 01s.  Fail. Labels: gmail fail posted by ruffin at 12/29/2011 09:43:00 AM |
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| Saturday, December 24, 2011 | |
 I'm playing around with Google's Music Manager a little, uploading a few hundred tracks just for fun and downloading a few I grabbed from a recent promotion. I'm not sure how I feel about cloud music, but it seems like a decent idea. Surprised Apple & Google don't care about the bandwidth. How much can a dollar a track really buy you? But the link to the OSS used in the Music Manager isn't quite enough. Many OSS apps that include or are themselves Free software display the GPL or LGPL in their entirety when you install, making you "accept" the GPL before using the software. I always thought that was the wrong terminology -- you're not really "accepting" it so much as the developers who made your software did. In retrospect, however, this in-your-face license makes a lot of sense. Many applications only have the required OSS licenses in their About boxes, and that just barely seems to meet the letter of the law for some OSS license requirements, imo, even though I'm guilty of doing the same thing. I think you're required to give the license to your user and a link to code, and hiding just the license in an obscure menu item isn't the way to do that. Google does even worse in the Music Manager. In the About, there's a link to a page (admittedly a page copied locally by the install, though it is an html page that requires a browser to view) that has more links to licensing realted to the software they've used in Music Manager. In some cases, like libmpg123, the link is directly to the LGPL. In others, like id3lib, the link is to that software's home page, not the license. That seems bogus. I will credit that page with an appropriate link to the tarball (http://dl.google.com/dl/androidjumper/src/current/music-manager-source.tar.bz2), which is nicely done. But the tab for About with a link to YA page of links, on which you may have to hunt to find the license, is closer to Kevin Bacon than the letter of the LGPL. EDIT: But it's hard to stay mad when Google Music handles FLAC with its Cloud player. Awesome. posted by ruffin at 12/24/2011 06:47:00 PM |
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| Tuesday, December 20, 2011 | |
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Really, how does this stuff get through?
Even worse, this suggests that some people might have experienced vandals coming their way via email. Quelle horror! Labels: gmail fail posted by ruffin at 12/20/2011 10:52:00 PM |
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| Monday, December 19, 2011 | |
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Classy name. alert(JSON.stringify(data)); Labels: noteToSelf posted by ruffin at 12/19/2011 05:11:00 PM |
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| Tuesday, December 13, 2011 | |
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RLZ to RLY? Yes, I went there. It was too low hanging a fruit. So I was about to include a search URL in some comments in some code I was writing and noted this RLZ value on the querystring. Interesting. It was clearly compressed data, and not human readable. Wth? ?rlz and privacy - Google Chrome Help: You may notice a RLZ parameter in the URL when you do a Google search from the Google Chrome address bar. The RLZ parameter contains some encoded information (like when you downloaded Google Chrome and where you got it from). The RLZ parameter does not uniquely identify you nor is it used to target advertising. Google uses this information in aggregate to find out whether groups of people are using Google Chrome actively. Yeah, but what if I start mailing out the URL? Doesn't that give someone an idea that it's mine? And if I use the search results to get to someone's page, isn't that RLZ on the referring page info? Maybe not. I can't recall. But if it is, that's bad. Don't personally tag my URLs, plz. Maybe you don't record my id with them, but someone else can. It's just A Bad Idea in general. posted by ruffin at 12/13/2011 04:23:00 PM |
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| Tuesday, December 06, 2011 | |
 I can fill out my order. I can put the stock in my "cart". I can click "Checkout". But nothing happens. (Preview doesn't work either.) Going to see if this is an IE-only app. Honestly, there's no way to screw this up. It's the simplest system. If it's not an overloaded server issue, the coders are cruddy. Update: Yep, appears to be an IE thing. That worked, no problem, other than your standard timeouts. Not even the certificate warning that I got on Firefox. Seriously, though, how a company that banks tens of millions of dollars in profit each year can let some yokel make an WinIE only sales cart for their fund raising makes me really wonder. How many thousands might be on the table if they don't sell out of stock? (Apparently they didn't sell it all last time, iirc.) Oh well, guess it doesn't matter when there are idiots like me who'll buy. That's the single most stupid purchase I've made since, well, let's not get into it. ;^D posted by ruffin at 12/06/2011 09:27:00 AM |
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| Friday, December 02, 2011 | |
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Google has finally figured out how to leverage their search dominance into a more successful social media ecosystem: Give Google+ Profile holders an unfair advantage with Google search results by putting images next to their hits!  How do you set things up? Start here. Enjoy. There's some fiddling with your Google Profile and the text of your blog page, but it's pretty easy. If you'll add G+ icons to your posts, you can do it on a by-post basis as well. With Gravitar and Google+, etc, it appears to be the Age of the Self-branding Headshot. posted by ruffin at 12/02/2011 10:40:00 AM |
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On Windows at least, Safari will apparently check some system-wide setting and see if there's a proxy it should be using. This would be taken from some wacky .pac file or some such. So when Safari pops open a window saying... "To view this page you must log in to the http proxy server", you're probably (?) supposed to be blocked from viewing that site by your [office?] proxy. I've noticed that I can type in real mature stuff like "doo doo" for the user name and password and still through, however, so I'm not sure what's going on there.  To fix this (at least for me), you can go to settings in Safari, click Advanced, click the Change Settings button next to Proxies, click the LAN settings button on the new dialog, then if "Use automatic configuration script" is checked, uncheck it. Profit. That was a pain. I wanted to use Safari as my "no Javascript" test browser, and it was initially just hanging, and then it did this proxy jive after reinstall. Fun times. Labels: problem solved, safari posted by ruffin at 12/02/2011 08:55:00 AM |
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| Thursday, December 01, 2011 | |
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Daring Fireball: Rootkit, Eh?: I canโt find a single word where I place blame anywhere other than in the hands of the carriers. (Which, as the story continues to unfold, looks to be exactly where the blame should be placed.) I didnโt even crack an โAndroid is openโ joke. Funny. posted by ruffin at 12/01/2011 09:06:00 PM |
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I've got a page with a save button that's to be enabled only after edits have been made (otherwise what are you saving, right?). So right now it's an asp:button, so I disable it with Enabled="false". <asp:Button runat="server" ID="cmdSavePrimaryClientEdits" Text="Save" Bad news. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why my OnClientClick function call wasn't in the html. Finally, a StackOverflow comment gave me the answer... asp.net - OnClientClick not working - Stack Overflow:
Hey, Ballmer, WHAT THE HECK GOOD IS IT TO REMOVE THE FREAKIN' ONCLIENTCLICK IF THE BUTTON'S DISABLED? IT'S NOT LIKE IT'LL ACCIDENTALLY GET CALLED, OKAY?!!! ARGH. What a pain. I can now either use jQuery to attach my click event to the button after it's rendered OR I can remove the Enabled attribute and use jQuery to disable it once the page is done loading. What a freakin' kludge o' freakin' rama. So here's the jQuery fix: $('#<%=cmdSavePrimaryClientEdits.ClientID %>').attr('disabled', 'disabled'); /sigh Labels: asp.net, jquery, problem solved posted by ruffin at 12/01/2011 04:17:00 PM |
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I've always liked using System.Beep in VB6 as a sort of audible debug. It's so much easier than msgbox or writing to some stupid debug textbox if you just want a very quick confirmation that you got here. Well, it looks like it's gone. But why was it there in the first place? From that same link: Thereโs something else that happened in the past 25 years. PCs became commodity systems. And that started exerting a huge amount of pressure on PC manufacturers to cut costs. They looked at the 8254 and asked โwhy canโt we remove this?โ Bottom line for the change? Money. Simon: You're right that there are other solutions. But we weren't trying to solve the console beep problem - we were solving a manufacturing cost problem. Strangely, even if your hardware has the internal hardware to Beep, in Win7 64 bit, you're out of luck. I don't see a slick way to grab the speaker, though, since It's All Just 0s and 1s (c) 1970, there's got to be a way, right? I also don't see exactly how this solves the ADA problem. If I buy a computer, there's no guarantee it has external speakers. With an internal speaker, the sound will be there [as long as the speaker works properly, etc]. And it'll be distinctive to boot. How does moving to the standard sound jive help? Save System.Beep! Anyhow, I'm awfully sad to see Beep go. It's fun. And a cool Easter Egg. EDIT: I couldn't help but play a little. In 32 bit Windows 7, I tried it out as explained here with Console.Beep(1000,1000); Interestingly, it most certainly did go through the headphones if they were plugged in, but more interestingly, this HP Compaq 6005 Pro MT PC made the sound through an excellent internal speaker (which it apparently does always have: "Integrated High Definition audio with internal speaker") when I unplugged the headphones -- though no other sounds have come out of this thing since I've used it. (Hrm, now I can't turn the danged thing back off. Maybe I just had it on low all this time?) I know Macs have had excellent internal speakers since forever (? -- my LC had one and everything through now has too), but perhaps I missed that standard hardware usually has one too? So perhaps this is a win-win, and using the "user mode system sounds agent" still routes to the internal speaker even when, for normal sounds, it's off. Perhaps the ADA simply mandates that you have an internal speaker of some sort, but Windows 7 allows that sound to move through the headphones if they're in? Still seems like the ADA would prefer these sounds not be mutable. /EDIT  Btw, has anyone noticed that logging in to blogger routes you through YouTube now? Wonder if YouTube is getting bundled with Blogger for a quick sale... posted by ruffin at 12/01/2011 08:39:00 AM |
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