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Airline gate agents for international flights tend to have command of multiple languages. I am impressed by the way they can reel off their announcements about schedules and procedures in two (or more) languages — but then I have to laugh when they stumble over passenger names, so that Carmichael comes out Carmickley, and someone else is called Souptits. What kind of a name is “Soup-tits”?
A few years back, at an airport that was otherwise forgettable, a female voice came over the PA and announced, “Paging Mr. Hertz, Mr. Di— … ahh, Richard Hertz!” Heh. An old joke lives on. (No, I’m not the one who called in that page.)
In the International terminal of the San Francisco airport, a woman’s voice came on the PA to announce a list of passengers that must check in or risk missing their flight to Shanghai. The voice demonstrated enunciatory prowess found only in professional speakers, and so the roster of passenger names sounded like a Chinese “Ur Sonata:” a collection of random, mouth-twisting syllables recited with 48 KHz, 96-bit digital precision, repeating in groups and phrases, to take on a musical, poetic tone punctuated by occasional glottal explosions. (Bgiff!)
Updates will be sporadic over the coming days, while I contemplate the pending holidays, and the fact that the local grocery is running radio ads for turduckens.
Another day, another Windows exploit… This one inspires me to play a game called “Which of these things does not belong here?” Just select the statement that sticks out like a tattoo in a convent.
Ding ding ding, we have a winner! How is it that the “most secure version of Windows” is so badly broken that someone on the other side of the world can take over your computer and wipe out your hard drive? How is it that this “secure” software allows entire networks of computers to be compromised by “transmit[ting] an attack to a single Internet address?”
Scott Culp, manager of Microsoft’s security response center, may be telling the truth when he claims that XP is “the most secure version of Windows we have ever released” — but only if Win95, 98, NT, and 2000 were a lot more broken than has been reported to date.
I find it especially deceitful that he claims that complex software “will always fall short of perfection,” as if only perfect software is secure. Sure, security is difficult, but many applications and operating systems have excellent records: the MacOS, qmail, OpenBSD, Apache, djbdns…
Microsoft’s track record is lousy, in spite of their loud and frequent announcements about security. Their software is dangerous. Remember that it has been exactly one week since Microsoft announced the patch for a “critical” IE6 vulnerability, which allows third parties to run programs on your computer without your consent.
Here is the Chronicle article from which the XP exploit quotes were taken: Latest Windows versions vulnerable to unusually serious hacker attacks
How much difference does a cable make?
I assembled my new server’s disk subsystem — 2 Ultra-160 LVD SCSI drives and an Adaptec 29160 Ultra-160 LVD SCSI controller — with a nice Teflon-insulated LVD SCSI cable and active terminator that I paid $75 for a year or two ago. When I powered it up, I was disappointed to see the SCSI card’s BIOS report that the maximum negotiated speed for the chain was 40 MB/sec, just one-quarter of what I was expecting. The drives worked fine, but the speed was low.
As you might have surmised, I am completely fed up with hardware problems, so I opted for a quick, certain, but expensive fix: a new cable and terminator from Granite Digital. The packaging wasn’t much… there was not one word of documentation… but I wired them up and rebooted, and now my drives are 4x faster.
I love it when a plan comes together!
CamWorld offers a good list of tips for reducing spam by keeping your main email address hidden.
On this website, I use a tool that creates a new email address daily. This gives readers means to contact me, without requiring me to publish an address that is useful to spammers. (Even if spammers were to harvest this daily address, it would have expired by the time they try to send spam there.)
In the year that I’ve used this approach, I have received 0 spam messages as a result. If you run a public website and have the need to publish a disposable address, you can use this software too; I’ve GPL’d it as part of the Monaural Jerk distribution.
I have plans to enhance this tool. I envision the result as an “address maintenance” system, which gives users the power to easily create throwaway email addresses for every online transaction. The system will track address usage so users can see at a glance whether an address has received any spam. This is targeted for release (free) in the unspecified future.
If you don’t run your own mail server, this sounds like a good solution to the problem. My only gripe about expireit.com is the banner on the front page that reads, “We guarantee you will stop spammers in their tracks in under 60 seconds.” This is terribly misleading. An honest description of their service can be found on the “Long Winded Nutshell” page.
(Thanks to Paul Fatula for the tip on Expireit.)
