Geek Drivel

Apparently computer virus, worm, and Trojan horse programs are scary. That seems to be the flimsy (but amusing) premise behind this offer, anyway.

Oh, and Happy Hallowe’en!

[UPDATE] Warning! When I tried to go to that site (not the LifeHacker one, but the eWeek one listed in the LifeHacker article above), I got a Firekeeper alert about a “[script] tags GET request cross site scripting attempt” from ad.doubleclick.net. I don’t know enough about it to say whether it’s a false alarm or not — visit at your own risk.

My mother sent me an e-mail recently. Yes, it’s a joke, but it’s humorous enough that I decided to post it here:

I rear-ended a car this morning.

The driver got out of the other car, and he was a DWARF!

He looked up at me and said “I am NOT HAPPY!”

So I said, “Well then, which one ARE you?”

That’s how the fight started…

Say it ain’t so, Mr. Jobs!

No, I’m not talking about blogs about cars. I’m talking about pseudo-blogs that are obviously completely automated, collecting entries about certain subjects from other blogs and linking to them. Geek Drivel has had three such hits so far; I’m letting them stay linked for now, while I try to figure out what their purpose is.

I’m certain it’s some form of link-spamming, and I suspect I know how it works too: one spammer or group of spammers has gotten wise to the fact that their link-spams aren’t getting through because it’s trivial for link-spam checkers to ensure that the link goes to an article that links back to it. So they’ve created these pseudo-blog sites to collect links, using actual blog software that’s automated to quote some piece of the article that seems sort of relevant to the title of the blog. That mollifies the automated link-spam checkers, and passes a cursory manual examination as well, getting the links in place. Then at some point, they’ll replace the pseudo-blogs with some penis-pill or stock-scam site, and have lots of ready-made links to it to boost it’s Google ranking.

We’ll see if I’m right.

Is it just me, or are many of the technology news sites doing nothing more than “reporting” press releases anymore?

I subscribe to several tech-news sites, and it’s rare that there’s a subject that is only reported by one of them. I see a headline about a new coupons-by-cell-phone service called Cellfire in the RSS feed for one site, and see it again on another within minutes. Some such stories are reported by five or more sites, near-simultaneously. To me, most of those have the distinctive odor of a press release, backed up with some superficial examination of a web site or two.

I suppose it’s not all bad. Even if you only read one half-decent site, you’re bound to get most of the tech-news that’s available. It’s just irritating, at least to me.

The only reason I bring this story to your attention is a little throw-away line near the bottom: “The group is experimenting with a device that uses cows to generate power to charge its battery.”

I’m just wondering how they’re planning to do that. If they wanted to use some kind of kinetic energy generator, they’d probably suggest using dogs. The only other bovine sources of electromechanical power are… well, let’s just say that no matter how green or how efficient a source of power they are, I wouldn’t volunteer to collect any of them.

I love this quote, half a dozen paragraphs from the bottom:

“Fundamentally, we are not rational,” said Schneier. “The brain is just barely functioning in the security community. It’s still in beta testing. There’s weird holes and shortcuts, and all sorts of patches and work-arounds.”

These guys know how to use their brains.

I’m not sure what happened last night, but when I got up this morning, my development system was showing the log-in screen. I leave it running overnight, so that it can do it’s daily backups, so the screen should have been in low-power mode, and once awakened it should have been on the system-locked screen, prompting me for just my password before letting me into the session that I had running last night. Furthermore, the log-in prompt had a bunch of garbage characters already entered into it. That and a few white cat-hairs suggest that whatever the problem was, it was caused by one of our feline “children,” who has taken to sleeping on the desk next to the heat exhaust on this system — a practice we’ll have to discourage now, I think.

When I logged in and tried to start up the Eclipse framework (which, as mentioned previously on this blog, I use for all of my software development under Linux), I was told that it couldn’t start. After a lot of trial and error, I managed to get it up and running, but I’d lost the Cusp extension that I use for Lisp development, and nothing I did would bring it back.
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It’s almost impossible to surprise GoddessJ with anything. She usually manages to ferret out whatever you were planning to surprise her with long before you’d planned for her to know. The day I proposed to her, she knew ahead of time that I had the ring and was planning to do it that evening, and so did her parents and the dozen or so other family members that had been invited over for dinner and celebrations. I’m sure she expected me to get down on one knee the moment I saw her, but I was determined to surprise her one way or another, and to do it in front of everyone present.

She was quite crusty by the time dinner rolled around, and I know that everyone was wondering when I was going to get around to it. Just then, I saw that her family’s cat had taken up residence on the dining room floor, and had an ah-ha moment. I got down on my knees to pet him, let a worried expression cross my face, and urgently called her over. When she arrived, I popped one leg up so that I was on one knee, raised and opened the box with the ring (which I had concealed in my palm when I got the idea), and said, “would you marry me?”

She stood there in shock, staring at the ring for a good thirty seconds (while everyone else slowly realized what was happening in their midst), before she could crank her jaw back into place to say yes.

I was reminded of this by contrast to an article I saw the other day, because this has to be the least romantic way of proposing marriage that I’ve ever heard of. If you can’t work up the courage to ask the girl to her face, can you really expect her to say yes?