F*cking spam!
25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: Privacy | 0 Comments
Today I checked the referer logs of this page and I found that there was a link from John Kerry's Blog. Basically, a referer means that somebody arrived to this page via some other page. This is carried out by the browser, since it sends the originating page as part of the request to the web server to retrieve the new page. But it is also a form of spam to "inject" false referers that will show up when browsing the statistics. I wasn't expecting anything like this from the persons running the page of a candidate for president of the United States (I doubt he's got anything to do with it) The blog page looks like the official one but I'm not sure, and the whole thing could've done by somebody completely unrelated to campaign, but it still doesn't really surprise me now that they're going to spam the mailboxes of their voters
First consequences of the Windows source code leak
25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: Geeky | 0 Comments
The first one, is that there has already been found a security bug in IE 5. It didn't take long to find anything!
The second one is that people have had a look at the code and while that would make you unable to work in certain open-source projects, we can still have some fun and have a look at the sometimes funny and sometimes bad-mouthed comments that Microsft developers wrote
Other interesting things to look at is that the code has a few hacks, and that inside the very same kernel-level code there are plenty of work-arounds for buggy applications (Microsoft and non-Microsoft apps alike) I don't agree with that because it's not a task for the kernel to make buggy applications work well, but I think that this guy may have a point. This other link is also a very nice example of a hack upon a hack upon a hack. And then we wonder why it took MS so long to release anything barely stable...
Who remembers DOS?
25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: Geeky | 0 Comments
Slacking off a little today I found a very nice page called DOS Abandonware. My first computer was running MS-DOS 3.30, so I found very nice because it lists many old software that was released for DOS, divided in categories, and made me remember those good ole' days... Who remembers WordPerfect 5.1? And the Norton Commander? How about Stacker and DoubleDisk, when we were trying to make the best of our tiny (by today's standards) 30Mb disks? dBase III+, anyone?
Grey Tuesday
25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: News | 0 Comments
Yesterday it was the "Grey Tuesday". The story has something to do with DJ Danger Mouse remixing the "Black Album" from Jay-Z with samples from the "White Album" from The Beatles. The issue has gathered quite a lot of attention, and even Lawerence Lessig has written about it in his blog (he knows what he's talking about, he's a professor of Law at Stanford Law School)One reason why I left Linux
25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: Geeky | 0 Comments
Many of you don't know this guy, but he's called Eric S. Raymond and he was one of the initiators of the Open Source movement in the early days, and being one of the most fervent supporters and evangelizers still today (perhaps, not as much as Saint Richard Stallman of the GNU Church - that picture is true!! It's actually him!
) Anyway, he knows what he's doing and he was trying to configure a networked printer at home and he had quite a hard time, so he wrote an eassy about it: The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story. He has a few good points in there...To those of you not very familiar with open source, this will perhaps be somewhat less interesting but it tells two things: 1) Why OSS is not quite "there" yet, in terms of quality of software and 2) Why I stopped using Linux, sick of fighting with countless configuration files. And you know what the funny thing is? Apple is using the very same printing framework (called CUPS), same tools, same config files, same everything in Mac OS X but with a different graphic tool to configure, and the difference in ease of use is just incredible.
First race of the season, and Alonso 3rd
25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: Formula-1 | 0 Comments
The first race of the season was last weekend in Melbourne and in case anybody still had doubts, the Ferraris kicked everybody's ass. The controlled the race from beginning to end, because nobody comes close to the power that these two cars have. And without news of Raikkonen, Montoya, Coulthard or Ralf Schumacher, future Spanish F-1 champion Fernando Alonso didn't need to take his skills to the limit to reach the end of the race in a fantastic 3rd position, if you keep in mind the difference in power between the Ferrari and the Renault. He didn't leave the 3rd position that he reached right after the start, when overtook the two cars that were in front of him immediately after the traffic light turned red... even if he needed to leave the track and drive on the grass for a few meters.
I don't personally think that this year he can do much again the Ferrari but who knows, maybe in one or two years he'll be given the chance to drive a Ferrari (many people see him as the natural successor of Michael Schumacher), and then we'll have for the first time a Spanish Formula-1 champion!