B10[mg]

Spam is annoying enough, but luckily I filter a lot of that out of all the incoming emails by using RBLs and SpamAssassin. Another plague of late seem to be the Nigeria scams.

The never ending stream of these s[c|p]am mails was enough for me to finally start looking into Mail::Box and the Nigeria Scam Archive was born. Just a quick hack to test out the Perl module mentioned above.

AdBlock is a fine FireFox extension. The only small downside is that, if you install it on a new machine, you will have to copy your settings again. Now wouldn't it be nice if there was some central database with AdBlock settings that you could import with a single click? Maybe I should start looking into writing FireFox extensions...

After a recent crash of one of the old Win98 machines that are still around at work, the user in question (let's call him Mike) was pushed to install WinXP. After the installation, usage of "LanTalk" (yeah, it's horrible, but at least it works with LinPopUp ;) seemed "different". Instead of the regular username as sender, now it said "Administrator".

I don't know much about WinXP, but I was fairly sure this behaviour was caused by ... duh ... loging in as "Administrator". Luckilly the "experienced WinXP user" (let's call him John) explained those hard-to-understand-words to Mike.

John: "Ah yes, of course! You are logged in as Administrator. You will have to rename that user to 'Mike'."

Mike: "Uh ok, how do I do that?"

At this moment I just had to jump in

Me: "Ermm, guys. What about creating a new user, called 'mike'?"

John: "Oh yeah, and when you want to install anything, get the annoying 'You lack permissions to do such and such', right? No way!"

Me: *sigh*

Mike: "Oh no, don't need that!"

Me: "AARRGHHH! Ok, ok. I bet you love to delegate some of those powers to cute worms too..."

Then I wondered. Why-oh-why is it so hard to understand that using a simple user account is (close to always) better? Is it a scriptkiddy feeling, that more admin powers is more 1337? Bill, good luck educating your l-users. Thanks to them (and your team of highly educated programmers) virii and worms annoy my mailbox.

Anyways, I wonder how long it will take before this virgin WinXP system is gonna crash.

The Netherlands has -like every other half civilized country- postcodes, and these can be really useful to a lot of applications. The small downside to this is that a list of all postcodes will cost you € 2650. Too much for the average joe (or small business). That's why I'm pondering the thought to compile my own postcode database. If a lot of people donate their knowledge, a nice list should be able to evolve.

To be continued...

Why is it that website seem to annoy people more and more instead of helping them? Here's a small list of things that really bug me.

• Captcha
• useless accounts
• dynamic content
• pointless Javascripts

Captcha

Captcha is a technique used too much right now. The word is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. It's a test to find out whether you're dealing with a non-blind human or a computer/blind person. Quite annoying.

Useless accounts

Close to every website offers/requires you to sign up for no apparent reason nowadays. Thank god there are ways to counter this annoyances with BugMeNot, Mailinator, DodgeIt and more.

Dynamic content

Is it cool or 1337 to use PHP? Why is everybody using it to generate their content on the fly? Cool, pull your data from a MySQL database. I'm willing to bet that the majority of the PHP sites could function without problems if they used static HTML files. (And no, I don't care at all to not be able to see your server's localtime on your website).

So why waste CPU time and the wonderful Last-Modified HTTP header?

Pointless Javascripts

I've come to understand that Javascript can be handy. If you have a slow connection, it's nice to see client side form validation before the server will respond to you again with errors. But what's this This function has been disabled message when I right click on a page? Does that prevent me from looking at the horribly generated Frontpage source code? Or does it prevent me from looking at stolen Javascripts? Stop it, it's annoying.

Also don't break my back button's function. I do use it, yes, quite often.

I could probably rant on on more topics like useless use of Flash and what not, but I'll save that for later (and for you, so feel free to dump your comments).

I always notice new stuff way too late, but also know some people are even worse than me, so this is to them ;-)

Yesterday I've seen some parts of Ghostrider. (yes, you can download parts here and there too). It's about an insane guy with a death wish, or so it seems. On a bike (motorcycle, not bicycle) he's racing throughout Europe, doing the most crazy maneuvers thinkable. Going around Paris in 12 minutes? No problem ... Often the speed goes past 300km/h. And yes, it's hard for cops to cope with that speed.

Anyways, the two cameras on the bike (front and back) are fun, but after a while, it gets pretty boring.