Geek Drivel is suddenly ridiculously popular with would-be blog spammers. I’m told that my primary defenses have blocked more than 400 automated spam messages in the last week, and maybe a dozen have gotten past them — all caught by my secondary defenses, I’m happy to say. I’m not sure what prompted this sudden surge [...]
Archive of entries posted on February 2010
Taming MSVC’s Intellisense
Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 (i.e. v8) is a decent compiler, with a decent IDE. But there’s one “feature” that I dislike passionately: Intellisense. The idea behind it is a good one: that the IDE scans your source code every so often and figures out how certain things will be compiled so that it can tell [...]
“The Smarter You Are, The Less You Click”
If that translates to TV and radio too, it might explain why idiot talk-shows are so popular with advertisers (and broadcasters).
Amusing Spam
Spam messages are rarely amusing enough for me to post anymore, but this one takes the cake: Subject: Hegihten the qulaity of your ereictons with Soft (ialis. Biggest_bIowout_sale of \/aIium in our onIine pharmacy Sorry guys, but SpamBayes wasn’t fooled. You’ll have to do better than misspelled words and ASCII art to get past it.
Busy, Busy, Busy…
There was no entry yesterday because I was deep in a programming project. Very deep… I was up and at it at 8am, and other than a few very short breaks, kept going until 3am this morning. And that’s on top of about six hours on it the day before. Around 1995, I started writing [...]
Microsoft Finally Got The Memo
I’ve dealt a lot with software piracy issues, primarily with Project Badger (detecting and preventing piracy is one of its primary purposes). And I didn’t have to learn the hard way that you have to be very careful before calling any user a pirate, or allowing your software to do so — paying customers don’t [...]
Decisions, Decisions…
One of the repeating items on my to-do list is cleaning off my office desk. It’s something I committed to recently, to try to keep my working area tidy; so long as I keep on top of it every few days, it only takes a few minutes each time. But I’d found myself putting it [...]
The Terrorists Are Winning
Want proof? Read this. Every time the US government reacts in fear, doing a little more damage to the Constitutional rights of the people, the terrorists have won another battle. If they manage to get another Bush Jr into office, the erosion will pick up its pace again. Destination: Fascist America. And if you think [...]
“Electrosensitives tortured by a radio tower that had been switched off for six weeks”
I try to keep an open mind on most subjects, but I’ve been skeptical of “electrosensitives” ever since I heard of them. While it’s possible that some people can sense some forms of electromagnetic radiation that most of us can’t, the only way I can see that such an ability could cause the problems that [...]
“Space Cannon”
An interesting idea for getting cargo into space. Oddly enough, it’s not something that I’ve heard about in science fiction, so maybe it’s not as obvious as it looks in hindsight.