Geek Stuff category archive

. . . you see an automobile commercial talking about RPMs and you think of “Redhat Package Management.”

I’ve been working on a website for a friend of mine and, as I have tried to clean up the last couple of things so I can invoice so it can go live, I haven’t had a lot of luck.

Then I found Opera Developer Tools. They come with Opera. I just never stumbled over them before.

It shows the css, the rendered page code, and the scripts, as well as lists page errors and all sorts of other neat stuff.

Click the image for a larger picture.

Afterthought: I’m hardly a web developer. But I’m a pretty good editor.

Twitter passes My Space in the UKofGBandNI.

I logged into my bank tonight and was informed that it wants me to use a new browser.

What a list.

Internet Explorer, which has never met a back door it didn’t leave open; Safari, the walled-garden Mac thingee that rivals IE for security; Firefox, which is okay except for the clunkiness; and AOL (there’s still an AOL browser?).

Since I use the current version of one of the most consistently secure browsers available, I must assume that they are promoting insecurity.

And that they wish to lose a customer.

(Yes, I would change banks over this. Not because of the browser. Because of the stupid.)

Afterthought:

Browser upgrade, my anatomy.

Afterafterthought:

I tried clicking the “Feedback” link at the website. It didn’t work in Opera or in (drumroll) Firefox.

Words fail me.

Afterafterafterthought:

If you are a competent webdesigner, the browser doesn’t matter. What matters is what your website serves up to the browser.

If spamming is so lucrative, why can’t spammers hire competent translators?

Received in my spam trap account:

Geeky ramble follows

I was looking for a defunct website at the Internet Archive and stumbled across a place that had squatted on the name of the site.

That page redirected to one of those fraudulent sites that pretends to scan your computer for malware so it can trick you into buying their anti-malware product. Most of the time, their product is actually more malware.

I clicked “Cancel” scan and it pretended to scan anyway while popups cascaded. One give away was that the phony scan’s progess bar moved faster than a scan from a local disk would have allowed, let alone a scan over the net (and I have used internet AV scans from reputable vendors such as Trend Micro and Symantec. It then told me that I had oodles of trojans, viruses, and other assorted baddies on my C:\ and D:\ drives.

This box runs Ubuntu Linux with Fluxbox. I don’t have C:\ and D:\ drives; I have sda1* (a very small boot drive) and sda3* (everything else). I don’t have a “My Documents” folder.

Here’s what it claimed to see:

Here’s what’s actually there:

__________________

*sda1 means “SCSI (or SATA) Disk A, Partition One.” sda3 means “SCSI (or SATA) Disk A, Partition Three.” There is no sda2. You’ll have to ask Ubuntu about that.

Twitter fails to trademark “tweet.”

Several months ago, I noticed that my bank’s ATMs were inhaling and exhaling cards much more slowly than previously.

Thinking something was screwy, I reported it to the information clerk at the branch. She told me that they had slowed down the feeder motors to defend against skimmers. I guess it’s related to the same thing that causes you to have to swipe the card again if you swipe it too slowly.

What a ATM skimmer looks like:

Not very noticeable, is it?

Click the picture to see more and to read the article.

Via the Network Security Podcast.

Who’s trying to take over the internet?

Follow the links to learn more.

Scroll down here and click the “Off” switch.

As a professional presenter, amongst other things, I loathe PowerPoint, amongst other things.

This article explains why.

Be sure to read the comments.

Ya know, there might be an upside to Twitting after all:

At least that’s the buzz on Twitter, where airlines are discovering that fuming passengers who have been stranded, delayed or just plain piqued are increasingly letting their undiluted rage fly around the Internet, often from the confines of their cramped airplane seat.

Via the Coyote’s Byte.

The Rubyologist investigates “beer goggles”:

Incorrectly estimate the difference in attractiveness between individuals
The term beer goggles suggests a mechanism that alters one’s perception. There are two mechanisms by which H could be incorrectly estimated. First, one could underestimate one’s own attractiveness (V) when intoxicated, thus reducing H. Empirical evidence suggests that this mechanism (i.e., drunks underestimating themselves) is implausible.

Second, one could overestimate the other individual’s attractiveness (B) when intoxicated, thus reducing H. Back in the good old days when they tested myths that did not involve explosions, the MythBustersTM[5] tested this one. Unfortunately, due a flawed experimental design[6], wide variation in results, and a small sample size, the results were inconclusive. Other research from the University of Leicester[7] is claimed to suggest that the estimations made by men are not affected while those of women are. The actual study (PDF) shows that the gender differences exist for age estimation, not estimation of attractiveness.

Details here.

It looks like Apple and AT&T might have shot themselves in the foot by blocking Google Voice. Michael Arrington abandons the iPhone:

What finally put me over the edge? It wasn’t the routinely dropped calls, something you can only truly understand once you have owned an iPhone (and which drove my friend Om Malik to bail). I’ve lived with that for two years. It’s not the lack of AT&T coverage at home. I’ve lived with that for two years, too. It certainly isn’t the lack of a physical keyboard, that has never bothered me. No, what finally put me over the edge is the Google Voice debacle.

Most of you won’t know what I’m talking about, so I’ll explain.

One reason I refuse to Apple is their walled garden.

H/T Karen for the link.

WebMonkey Microsoft’s attempts to portray Internet Explorer as better than the competition:

Here’s a nugget:

More troubling are the claims that IE8 is on par with Firefox and Chrome when it comes to support for web standards and performance.

The fact that both Firefox 3 and Google Chrome are both leaps and bounds ahead of IE8 when it comes to support for both established and emerging web standards, like HTML 5 and CSS 3, is no mystery to anyone who’s developed websites using anything beyond CSS 2.1, the latest CSS standard Microsoft IE8 supports, or to those developing user experiences with open video players or offline data storage features. Furthermore, for users of Ajax-heavy websites like Gmail and Netflix, IE8 performs just fine, but it’s not nearly as fast as Google Chrome.

Follow the link for more MicroSpinCycle.

Via the Cranks.

Why are the persons who write WordPress plugins so lax about uploading screenshots of what they look like on the front page of your blog?

I really don’t care what it looks like on the backend.

We leave tracks.

Here’s where I’ve been, courtesy of web2.0collage dot com (pretty boring, ain’t it).

Dorkazine explains.

500@ekiga.net works.

520@ekiga.com does not.

Damn computers. Expect you to be able to read and rite.