Play a very loud annoying sound for 10 seconds. Then play the exact same 10 seconds, but add on 5 seconds of the sound growing softer and more pleasant. Then ask someone which sound they prefer. They’ll pick the second sound, even though it’s annoying for longer — it includes the exact 10 seconds of annoying, plus some. Continue reading »
Here are the Royal National Institute of Blind People’s “Clear Print Guidelines.” Wouldn’t surprise me a bit if within the next ten years the average font size increases, until everything feels like a Reader’s Digest large print.
My recent reading, primarily on cognitive topics. Continue reading »
Sacrilege!!!
Here are good sources of free TrueType/OpenType fonts. Continue reading »
My favorite music, running on decades now, has been instrumental music — electric guitar by Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Yngwie Malmsteen, etc., — or at least vocal music in non-English like hippy hare krishna music by Rasa, or new age music by Kevin Wood. I’d prefer to listen to the music without being distracted by the words. However, I have an eMusic subscription and decided to check out the alternative world, with real live English lyrics. Continue reading »
I spend a good deal of time now working on effective, efficient communication. It is a sin to waste someone’s time. If you have to produce documentation, investigate sparklines (“Intense, Simple, Word-Sized Graphics”). Edward Tufte‘s writing should be required reading for almost any profession I can think of.
Sun: 4137237 patchadd 106300-01 results in rm -rf / as root (That’s bad)
Microsoft: Computer Hangs While Booting with HP 6L Printer out of Paper (paper-powered pc’s ??? FEED ME!!!)
And I can’t find it now, but back around 12 years ago or so, uninstalling Norton Antivirus resulted in deleting all files not in use. That amuses me.
Visual Basic implementation of Double Metaphone. I posted it to Planet Source Code several years back, but I want a local copy…..
Here’s the free (it doesn’t cost money) Windows software I use. Continue reading »
Here’s a quick script to figger out [sub]totals of a list of IP ranges. Easy, but handy.
Continue reading »
Leaving Las Vegas is a movie about what would happen if someone hired Nicolas Cage to pretend to be a drunk. Elisabeth Shue half redeems the movie.
This is a strange Subtitle Goof — it’s not a goof. The goof is with the caption, an English translation from the Latvian pimp patrol. The subtitle actually corrects the caption.
Sometimes you’ll see a movie or read a book, and you’ll think, “Man! I wish I had written that!” This is one of ‘em. The key to a good movie is to be able to empathize with the protagonist. Have you seen “Basic Instinct 2?” What a spiteful piece of crap. You don’t care if Sharon Stone’s character kills them, or if she gets killed, or if everyone dies. JUST EVERYONE DIE AND GET THE MOVIE OVER WITH!
Now, really good movies let you empathize with more than the protagonist. Like A Simple Plan. You don’t have to like the character, but you have to care about what happens to them.
All of the major characters in The Lives of Others are sympathetic. Even the scummiest of them I could understand. This is the best movie I’ve seen this year.
Should be “Looks like a 50th.”
Dear Home Depot,
If I wanted to check out items at your store, here’s what would happen. Continue reading »
He’s actually saying [from "The Raven"]: “And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon that is dreaming….”
OpenBSD 4.1′s spamd(8) now includes default support for trapping SMTP clients using an envelope to: not listed in /etc/mail/spamd.alloweddomains. If you only accept mail for example.com and example.org, put them in spamd.alloweddomains, and mail to: all other domains (relay attempts) are rejected and the host trapped. Clean and effective. Good job, Bob!
Parsing my logs, though, shows a lot of spam attempts using the envelope from: of my domains. Email clients should use other acceptable means of submission/SMTP injection, including connecting with internal servers via VPN, where they’d never hit spamd. If someone were using SMTP-after-POP, for example, they’d presumably get whitelisted and bypass spamd.
This patch against 4.1-STABLE is a quick copy-and-paste job (I’m not a C programmer), but it works for me.
So, if someone tries to send mail via my external spamd firewall, claiming to have an envelope from: of one of my domains, then I’m not going to accept the message and will trap the host. It’s a virtual certainty you’re a spammer — if it’s from an actual user, then s/he needs to use another connectivity method.
