Wed, 29 August, 2001
Posted in General
at 10 pm
So I’m sitting at my machine at work, and software begins crashing left and right. I’ve got 6 or so windows open and by time I have to reboot entirely they’re all fozen and the machine won’t respond at all. I start the arduous reboot process when my phone rings.
“Hello, is this Ross?”
“Yes…”
“Did you just loose your network connectivity?”
“I think so. My apps started crashing and I just now rebooted.”
“Okay. This is Greg from DTS. We shut down your port. We’ll be coming upstairs to your machine.”
“Can I ask why you why you shut down my network connection?”
“Well… We think you’ve got the Code Red virus.”
The internal networks here had gotten hit, twice with the Code Red virus. Once on the outside machines, and the second time on the inside. The whole IT department is pretty skittish these days about this stuff. But there’s just one problem. The Code Red virus attacks the Index Server component of Microsoft’s IIS web server, running on WinNT.
Item the first: I’m not running the Index Server.
Item the second: I’m not running IIS or any other web server.
Item the third: I’m not even running WinNT, my laptop has Win98!
Apparently some piece of software somewhere had decided that it found a Code Red packet coming from my machine and started setting off bells and alarms in …Houston! (AKA location of the parent company) Houston told the Portland people to shut me down quicker than you can say ASAP.
They did, and the techs came up to my cube. One said, “Huh. That’s weird.”
That last line, by the way, is a direct quote.
They said, if they could figure out what was going on, they’d let me know. Otherwise they’d just turn the port back on.
Gave me a good reason to take a lunch break.
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Sun, 26 August, 2001
Posted in Transport
at 2 am
I attended the NEDRA Woodburn Electric Drags on Saturday. I got a lot of pictures and a lot of sun. I wrote everything up in an article that’s got lot of pictures.
I stole Amy’s Cannon digital camera and took it with me. I’m glad I did, because it made this write up a lot more interesting. Of course an event that’s all about the silence of an electric motor that is moving over a period of time would be far more interesting with a digital video camera… Hmmmm.
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Thu, 23 August, 2001
Posted in General
at 11 pm
From Private Eye’s (http://www.private-eye.co.uk/) current Funny Old World column …
“It all started with an enquiry from a nurse,” Dr Karl Kruszelnicki told listeners to his science phone-in show on the Triple J radio station in Brisbane. “She wanted to know whether she was contaminating the operating theatre she worked in by quietly farting in the sterile environment during operations, and I realised that I didn’t know. But I was determined to find out.”
Dr Kruszelnicki then described the method by which he had established whether human flatus was germ-laden, or merely malodorous. “I contacted Luke Tennent, a microbiologist in Canberra, and together we devised an experiment. He asked a colleague to break wind directly onto two Petri dishes from a distance of five centimetres, first fully clothed, then with his trousers down. Then he observed what happened. Overnight, the second Petri dish sprouted visible lumps of two types of bacteria that are usually only found in the gut and on the skin. But the flatus which had passed through clothing caused no bacteria to sprout, which suggests that clothing acts as a filter.
“Our deduction is that the enteric zone in the second Petri dish was caused by the flatus itself, and the splatter ring around that was caused by the sheer velocity of the fart, which blew skin bacteria from the cheeks and blasted it onto the dish. It seems, therefore, that flatus can cause infection if the emitter is naked, but not if he or she is clothed. But the results of the experiment should not be considered alarming, because neither type of bacterium is harmful. In fact, they’re similar to the ‘friendly’ bacteria found in yoghurt.
“Our final conclusion? Don’t fart naked near food. Alright, it’s not rocket science. But then again, maybe it is?”
(Canberra Times, 17/7/01. Spotter: Michael Doyle)
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Posted in General
at 11 am
I’ve decided that I’m going to start collecting Development Process outlines. I certainly have my own, and have seen others. I think it would be great to have a collection of them to look at.
Here’s the first one, which I’ll call FP Delivery:
Requirements Deliverables
- Success Definition
- Process Definition
- Data Definition
- System Definition
- Requirements Plan
Implementation Deliverables
- Functions Definition
- Services Definition
- Interface Definition
- Overall Application Definition
- Authentication Definition
- Implementation Plan
Delivery
- Component Build-out
- Service Build-out
- Interface Build-out
- Application Build-out
- Delivery
I’ll add more later as I come across them. Once I have three or four, I’ll start a Gallery over at
my WebDev Articles section.
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Wed, 22 August, 2001
Posted in General
at 9 am
Yesterday I helped a co-worker remove a Trojan Horse from his Win98 machine. It seems that an MP3 encoder program that he had installed also brought along a friend or three that started adding advertisments to his web browser and his machine in general.
It was scary stuff. His machine needed to be cleaned up anyway, but there were a ton of things that he said was software he wasn’t using, so we Uninstalled a bunch of packages. One of them was SaveNow, which sounds like a utility I would use to save the work I’m doing in Word or something. But it turns out that it’s a Trojan horse and causes most of the unauthorized activity that was going on.
Sometimes it’s nice to be in the minority where it’s not as cost effective to build stuff like that.
ObWinComplaint: Does HomeSite really have to be this unstable?
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Tue, 21 August, 2001
Posted in General
at 11 pm
I hadn’t actually taken a look at the Macromedia Daze site. (Skip the intro.) You’d think that if I was going to give a presentation that I would have put a little more effort into looking at the materials of the conference.
It’s kinda fun to see my name up along side people who actually know what they’re doing. Feels like I’m sneaking in and riding the coat tails. And I was the only one who decided to write a tongue-in-cheek bio. Oops.
However, I’m still working on an article regarding the topic I talked on. If anyone would like to help me, what I really need is for someone with a high-speed line to go through http://www.adcritic.com and find one or two examples of commercials that look like they were done in Flash. Had I a T1 at home, I might try this myself, but I seem to be missing a giant utility closet and a bank account to pay for it…
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Mon, 20 August, 2001
Posted in General
at 11 pm
After seeing the results of the Coudal.com Photoshop Tennis matches, Amy had the great idea for us to play each other. I’ve served up the first image: a 640×480 canvas with a round gradient purple to black, and a layer of green fuzzy rectangles with drop shadows over it.
We’ll see how she returns the hand. :)
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Sat, 18 August, 2001
Posted in General
at 11 pm
Wow, what an article. Now I actually want to see Fight Club.
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Posted in General
at 10 am
I had this ad forwarded to me. It goes to show just how far the tech sector has fallen.
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Posted in General
at 9 am
It seems that in order to put a filter on what I read on the web I will only start reading articles that are linked to by at least two different web sites.
Now all we have to do is build a script that polls various web logs and then read only the articles that have reached a certain level of linked-ness. Anyone up for the challenge?
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