Everything I used to bore people on newsgroups and mailing lists with, now in one inconvenient place.
Brian Scearce wrote this on a mailing list I’m on. It’s too good not to share.
To the tune of “My Favourite Things” from “The Sound Of Music”:
Steam-run computers with shiny brass fittings
Read-only memory: Jacquard-type pittings
Ethernet using just tin cans and string
These are a few of my favorite things!LCDs lit up with shuttered white candles
Objects with actual ivory handles
Striking a bell for the part that goes “ping”
These are a few of my favorite things!
Today I got three identical notices saying that my “recent order/payment” for Make Magazine couldn’t be “completed because the credit card you supplied was not accepted by the credit card company”. Only one problem with that – I decided some time ago not to renew because I never read it. Well, if their business practice is to fraudulently charge credit cards, I’m pretty glad I didn’t renew. Fuckers.
Maybe it isn’t them. The customer support email is customerservice@espcomp.com, which is not an address that I immediately associate with the magazine. On the other hand, they did have a the credit card number of an old card, the one I probably did use for that subscription.
I wonder if the Attorney General’s Office is interested in fraudulent credit card charges?
Every now and then I have an idea that I think would probably be valuable, but rather than running with it I just chicken out and document it. Sometimes it turns out to be a decently good idea (such as when I thought that there might be money to be made going around to homes and offices and running anti-virus and anti-spyware software on a regular basis, since most people can’t seem to be bothered to do it for themselves), and other times it turns out that somebody is already doing it (like when I had the idea of combining small/fast/expensive disk storage with bigger/slower/cheaper disk storage with even bigger/slower/cheaper tape storage, and software to stage data between the different levels of storage depending on usage patterns).
Continue reading “My latest million dollar idea”
Any time I’m feeling that my job sucks, I just have to watch a few episodes of “Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe”, and suddenly I don’t feel so bad. There are some pretty horrible and thankless jobs out there, and the people who do these smelly, disgusting, dirty, dangerous and/or back-breaking jobs make civilized life possible for the rest of us.
For years now, my employer has not allowed ssh out their firewall. But they do have a telnet relay where you telnet to a particular server in the DMZ, and then telnet from there outside. Yeah, believe it or not, they think ssh isn’t secure (or more likely, have never heard of it because it’s not part of a default Windows installation) but telnet is ok. Of course, imap, pop and nntp aren’t allowed either. Heck, even DNS isn’t allowed – you can’t resolve any external domain names from internal machines.
And because I don’t run a telnet server on my home server, I have to telnet to their relay, then telnet to a friend’s server, and then ssh from there. But that’s what I go through in order to access my home email, Usenet, check files on my home server, and do a million other things.
Today I got the word – no more telnet access unless you can make a business case for it. The smarmy email from corporate IT says “please try to find a more secure means of communication”. Well, sure, I’d happily switch to a more secure means of communication IF YOU HADN’T FUCKING BLOCKED THEM ALL AT THE FIREWALL.