Category: Geekery

That doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence…

In my continuing efforts to someday fly a deHavilland Beaver, I was having a look at the Murphy Aircraft site. They make a kit built plane that is very similar to the deHavilland Beaver, called the Murphy Moose. It’s smaller than the Beaver, but it’s got a big round engine, and they have a float kit for it. It would almost be perfect for me.

The problem is their web site. It sucks. The very first page has an announcement that they hired their first full time webmaster, and either this webmaster is an idiot, or they haven’t had time to fix the crap. Part of the problem is that there are a lot of broken links. Part of the problem is that some of those links are the classic “thinks they’re a web master because they stole a copy of FrontPage” mistake of a href="file:///S|/Kelly%20Eros/Order%20Info.htm".

But the worst mistake is I went to their order info page (no thanks to that link) to order an information package and DVD. And whoever wrote that page is a moron. First mistake – after you enter your name, you get a pop up telling you that you haven’t put in all the other required fields. No shit Sherlock, that’s why I haven’t hit Submit yet. But then the real problem: you put in your information and your credit card data, and click “Submit”, and instead of getting any sort of confirmation that your information was received, you get two Thunderbird “Compose Mail” windows popping up with an empty mail to “secretary@murphyair.com”. Because for some bizarre reason, the Submit button, as well as being a real form submit button, it’s also a mailto: link. WTF?

Examining the web source, you can also see the biggest newbie mistake ever: the web form has the email recipient coded as a hidden field in the form itself (which means that a spammer could use their server to send spam by changing the email address), and the form action is _vti_bin/shtml.exe/Order%20Info.htm. Looking at my web logs, I can see that _vti_bin/shtml.exe is a known open mail relay program searched for and used by spammers.

This company’s web presence is done by amateurs, and not very competent amateurs. That doesn’t give me a lot of confidence about giving them $50,000 (or however much a kit costs) of my money.

Targetted spam or a referral from somebody who knows me?

Normally, spammers hit millions of email addresses in hopes of finding one match. But today I got one that was so precisely targetted I can only think it was directed specifically at me.

Our client designs and manfactures various products which are used in
navigation and security applications. Much of their technology’s purpose
is to turn visual information (such as vehicle and people positions and
landscape features) into usably displayed visuals in a real time
process.

As they build their advanced, next generation platform that integrates
moving map and sensor functions, an opportunity has opened up for a
high-energy, self-motivated senior software engineer to join their
growing team in Falls Church Virginia.

This is a technology leadership position for a software professional who
has developed complex applications. Experience in intelligence,
surveillance and reconnaissance would be a major plus, but are not
required.

Required skills include:

Strong database background
C
open GL
at least some exposure to Python scripting
Oracle
The individual must have a strong knowledge of display technology.
GIS (geographical information systems) expertise would be a big plus.
Vector engine Technology
Attention to details and documentation.
Strong communications skills in both spoken and written English.
Proven success in a developmental environment.

Education:
University degree in Electrical, Software or Systems Engineering, or
comparable, is required. An advanced degree is preferred.
All successful applicants must be eligible to meet requirements for U.S.
government security clearance and substance screening.

MPEG4, JPEG2000 experience would be a big plus.

US Citizens only.

Qualified candidates will please submit their MS Word resume, and cover
letter (which includes salary and citizenship details) for immediate and
confidential consideration.

Company offers an excellent salary and superior benefits.

Well, aside from the fact that I can’t move to Falls Church VA and I’m not a US citizen, this job would be perfect for me. Some of the best job satisfaction I ever had was working at GeoVision, a GIS company working in C and Oracle. From the location and the security requirements, it’s definitely government, and probably either military or NRO.

If I were free to move and a US citizen, I’d be on this job like speeding tickets on a JRH.

The comment spam scourge

A while back I was revelling in the fact that the comment spammers appeared to still be targetting my blog through the old Moveable Type comment URLS (which don’t work) instead of the new WordPress comment URLs. Up until a few weeks ago, it seemed that I’d get a spate of 7 or 8 comment spams over a weekend, and then nothing for weeks or months at a time. But then they found me, and I’ve been cleaning stuff out of my SpamKarma 2 interface daily. But the volume is going up and up and up – last night I cleaned out all the spam before bed-time, and woke up this morning to find 217 new comment spams to clean up.

Because of this volume, I’ve activated the “auto cleanup” function on SpamKarma 2, and I will no longer be examing the comments that it flags as spam to see if they were mis-characterized. So if your comment got flagged as spam, and you failed the capcha check, I’m sorry, but it’s gone. I hate to take this step, but by the same token I haven’t seen any false positives in a while.

Bummer

When you or I advertise a piece of used equipment for sale, it means “I have a piece of used equipment, and I want to sell it”. On the other hand, when Aircraft Spruce and Specialty advertises a piece of used equipment for sale, it means “I might get some used equipment some day, and when I do, I’ll sell it to you”. They sent me an email today to say that they don’t have the advertised unit, and don’t know when they’re going to get it, but if I want I can cancel my order.

What’s the point?

Oh well, back to eBay.

It’s the worst day since yesterday

(Apologies to Flogging Molly)

Spent the whole frigging day dealing with the problems I was having with my computer at work. I tried reinstalling the OS (CentOS 4.2) again. I tried replacing the hard drive that was giving errors. I tried installing it on a Dell 700 I had on my desk for testing purposes. Every time I got the same problem – I’d set up a Thunderbird or Evolution account, exit the program and come back in, and the program couldn’t find the Inbox file any more. Rob suggested the problem might be due to me having SELinux enabled, so I installed it without it enabled. Mike suggested that CentOS 4.3 just came out this weekend, so I tried that. Still no luck.

After a few attempts, I was looking for the Evolution configuration, but I got a weird error when I tried a “find . -type f -print” on my home directory. I didn’t get these errors on a local file system, or when doing it on my home directory on the NFS server. After a bit of messing around, we realized that the problem might be that CentOS is now using NFS v4, and might have obsoleted NFS v2. The server that has our home directories on them is an old SGI running IRIX 6.4 – it’s possible that it only does NFS v2. Tomorrow, Rob is going to look at moving our home directories to a machine running Solaris 9. Hopefully that will fix it.