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Doug 8:48 pm on January 31, 2002 | 0 | # |
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Someone just sent me an Outlook e-mail virus. Of course, it couldn’t do anything on any of the systems I run, and I recognized it right away. Mail.app even obligingly added the “.com” file extension to the attachment so I could tell it was a Windows executable right off.

The weird thing was, I didn’t recognize the sender’s address at all. That made me suspicious, because I wondered how I might have ended up in this person’s address book. A quick check of the domain name revealed that the originating address was from a recruiting firm in California…meaning this had to have been someone I had contact with during a job search over eighteen months ago.

So, I called the place. This is where it really got weird. Turns out the sender doesn’t work there and hadn’t for quite some time. The receptionist claimed that the virus outbreak started yesterday, and they were trying to get rid of it.

Right. So, what we now know is a)the original sender didn’t clean out his e-mail account prior to leaving, b)the system admin hasn’t closed out the account, even though the individual in question hasn’t been on staff in “quite some time,” and c)they know they have an Outlook virus floating around their mail system, but they haven’t taken it off-line to get it cleaned up.

I don’t think much for their chances, do you? This is how this crap continues to spread, folks.
Doug 4:11 am on January 31, 2002 | 0 | # |
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I hereby resolve to get a good book on SQL programming. In one five-minute phone conversation on my drive home with my friend Marty, I learned how I could have saved myself, oh, thirty hours or so of programming/kludging I’ve done on the Notebook over the past year.

Lesson for the day: use the right tool for the job. Don’t try and use PHP when you should be using SQL, for example.
Doug 12:26 am on January 31, 2002 | 0 | # |
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It’s so incredibly refreshing to see at least one Congress Critter that actually gets it. Representative Boucher is rapidly making a name for himself among geeks as being clued in. The folks in his district are lucky to have him.

Unfortunately, where I live, all I have access to are fascists, sell-outs, and fools. I say that, of course, with all the respect these esteemed gentlemen are due.
Doug 5:50 pm on January 30, 2002 | 0 | # |
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Thanks, Al for the lyrics to Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. I love this song, but had no idea of who originally wrote it.
Doug 1:26 pm on January 30, 2002 | 0 | # |
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Okay, staying up until 2:30 AM to hack on database code was probably not the wisest idea I’ve ever had. It was bugging me though!

Yes, the change in posting styles is the prelude to a re-design. I’m just not entirely sure what sort of re-design yet, however…
Doug 4:55 am on January 30, 2002 | 0 | # |
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I had thoughts on commenting on Bush’s speech, but I’m beat. A long, stress-filled day, and I chose not to finish it off by elevating my blood-pressure more.

On a totally unrelated note, does anyone know how to input extended ASCII characters under OS X? The Keycaps app kinda sucks. I’m used to apps that show all the characters in a font and let you chose. I didn’t see how to do that in Keycaps.
Doug 9:44 pm on January 29, 2002 | 0 | # |
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Obviously, I’m a grump today.

One of the petty irritations of working with manufacturing companies is that their IT support is poor to non-existent. In two cases this week, with two different customers, we’ve been reduced to either over-nighting disks or sending faxes, because people at these companies couldn’t open e-mail attachments. Note that these weren’t some sort of esoteric files, but very standard, easily opened stuff. Like PDF, for example.

In one case we tracked the problem down to the fact that the system administrator at the recipient had mucked with his firewall, so that it was corrupting all file attachments. Of course, he didn’t believe us, so we had to spend half a day tracking the problem down for him and convincing him it was something he did. Something like six hours was wasted on an already time-critical project. Then, when he still couldn’t get it sorted out, we had to resort to repeatedly sending files on disk, which of course means you can only get feedback at best once a day.

The icing on the cake is that the packages containing the disks sometimes end up sitting in the recipient’s Receiving area for the entire day, rather than being delivered to the people who need them. Wasting even more time.

Frustrating
Doug 1:32 pm on January 29, 2002 | 0 | # |
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Just after 8 AM and I know it’s going to be one of those days.

I don’t know why yet, I can just tell it will be…
Doug 5:05 am on January 29, 2002 | 0 | # |
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The experiments with OmniWeb have thus far been a resounding success. This is about as near Galeon as I think I’m going to get in a native OS X browser. There are a few niggling issues, but nothing worse than some of the stuff I’ve dealt with over the past year or so as the *nix browsers have been in development. It certainly does a lovely job of rendering!

In the process of playing with OmniWeb, I’ve discovered the other applications Omni Group has developed. There’s some very nice stuff here. I’ve already downloaded and registered some of them. I particularly like the fact that they’re all Cocoa-based apps.
Doug 1:14 am on January 29, 2002 | 0 | # |
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Doc has a great article at Linux Journal concerning where the primary adoption of Linux seems to be happening:

The bottom line: Linux is going into a lot of vertical applications, and it’s being adopted by a lot of big, old companies with customers who are not sexy enough to show up on the what’s-hip radar but who move a huge part of the economy.

I suspect he’s right on. I fully expect to see a big “breakout” of Linux in the industrial computing market in the next year or so, in applications similar, but more shop-floor-oriented than what Doc talks about.

I also see Linux beginning to make inroads in smaller IT shops, particularly those concerned about the over-the-top costs of licensing from Microsoft as well as the growing virus/security issues endemic to MS software. We’re currently testing a set up using remote X terminals based on the excellent Linux Terminal Server Project. I had a visit the other day from a local consultant, historically solely concerned with Microsoft solutions, who wanted to learn more about our Linux deployment. He specifically told me that “everybody is starting to ask about Linux,” mostly as a result of the new MS licensing schemes and the recent Business Software Alliance campaign here in our fair city. No telling if this will actually result in an increase in Linux installs in small companies, of course, but the situation is getting interesting.