After all the hype about the evils of video games you just knew that there would be some people some people are trying to reverse the trend.

From the article:

N'Lightning Software CEO Ralph Bagley believes half of the video game crowd is Christian. His company was the first of about 100 Christian game developers to invest in the creation of PC games. Its first title, "Catechumen," cost $830,000 to develop and has sold about 80,000 copies worldwide since its 2001 release, according to the company. The second game, "Ominous Horizons," cost $1 million to create and has sold more than 50,000 copies, he said.

"Fifteen years ago, the Christian music world looked like Christian games today," Bagley said. "It wasn't until the Christian music companies came together as a group and focused on quality that they were able to achieve success."

Sportsdot has the scoop on the Northern League reneging on it's earlier commitment to replace 2 Innings of a real baseball game with 2 innings played on an X-box. The Kansas City T-Bones were going to play first two innings of the July 16th game against the Schaumburg Flyers virtually. Now however Northern League Commisioner Mike Stone has ended the "Fantasy Baseball" dreams of two Xboxers, by reversing himself, and declaring that the stunt would "not be in the best interest of the league."

For the past three weeks a panel of "celebrity" judges (including Joy Giovanni and Jake Bromstein) has been reviewing the "babes of video games" for G4's new special, Videogame Vixens. Users also got to pick their favorites using the Vixenrater--a photogallery, interactive poll and blog all rolled into one site. The top performers in each category are now moving on to the final round, shown today on G4 at 10:30 pm ET / 7:30 pm PT, when the "2005 Videogame Vixen of the Year" will be crowned. I'm looking forward to the interview stage myself.

The Chicago Tribune is running a story about a study that the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania is releasing a today that shows that "sixty-four percent of American adults do not know that it is legal for online stores to charge different people different prices at the same time of day for the same product."

From the article:

"Amazon.com outraged some customers in September 2000 after one buyer deleted the electronic tags on his computer that identified him as a regular customer and noticed the price of a DVD changed from $26.24 to $22.74. The company said it was the result of a random price test and offered to refund buyers who paid the higher prices."

As reported over on Sportsdot, the 2005 RoboCup US Open wrapped up today in Atlanta, Georgia. The American entry from the University of Texas fell 2-0 in robot soccer to the powerhouse German squad, the MicroSoft HellHounds.

After the match, the German robot dogs were programmed to flex their metal biceps. With the time to devote to development and the financial backing of a company like Microsoft, the German entries are much more polished then their American counterparts at the moment. Last month at the RoboCup German Open, the Germans dominated nearly every category.

Slashdot has covered Robocup in previous years too

I've been watching with interest the rise of Sportsdot on Stumbleupon. Go baby go! Although I do think the system is ripe for abuse.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=140806&cid=11796303

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=139641&cid=11687813

I have a feeling someone is pissed off that I'm not a party loving lemming, but instead have some free will about my politics.

Yahoo is running a story about the handover of sovreignty to the which VERY slyly reveals the true reason for the war in Iraq:

As Iraq's highest authority, Bremer had issued more than 100 orders and regulations, many of them Western-style laws governing everything from bankruptcy and traffic, to restrictions on child labor and copying movies.

So it's true. The MPAA, desperate for action movie stories and to prevent Iraq from becoming a hotbed of piracy (at least movie-wise, I'm sure they don't care about the real pirates there), fabricated this movie plot, sold the story, and BOOM, now Paul Bremmer makes it illegal to copy DVD's in Iraq. I'm pretty sure it's going to be revealed that that's why those interogations were so rough in Abu Ghrabi -- those guys were using DeCSS

Who I am--developer/architect..did the dot/com, did the successful Hardware company, currently working for a huge health care company writing educational software--though I must admit once a week I get asked to change the printer toner. I usually respond with "No Hablo Anglais!"

1) Be able to DEMONSTRATE that you can build industrial strength software.

Industrial Strength means that the software should NEVER fail because of it's own issues. BUT when it fails because of external issues it should have very good thorough logging and alerting procedures so that it is part of solving whatever went wrong. I hate working with developers who deliver products that don't produce readable logs and aren't configurable through a text file. Also you HAVE to incorporate unit testing. If you can't build the tests you shouldn't be building the product. You must be able to describe the process by which fail proof software gets created. From architecture to pseudocode/UML to planning the unit testing to planning scalability testing. It means that if you have a QA dept you know how to integrate them into the planning stage. A great buzz word to toss around is "multi-disciplinary." But even better than using the word is being able to proove in an interview that you understand that EVERYONE has an equal part in software creation, from user to DBA to QA to you the developer.

2) Love the code!

If you don't love the code, you should get out...the stuff you build will not be worthwhile. I don't mean that you have to love all the code you write, but you DO have to love refactoring, the well tuned application and that small little optimization gain you get by using the right data structure. If you don't love those things (or don't know what I mean!!) it will show up eventually, and you'll be found out...don't set up yourself for dissapointment by trying to last in a field where you don't belong.

3)Be able to sell yourself to the right people

If you can't sell yourself to ANYONE no one will hire you. If you want to be an architect, you have to be able to sell yourself to a suit. If you want to be a coder, you have to be able to sell yourself to an architect. I know this guy who is a damn fine coder, he does the work of any 2 other developers. But two years ago he could only sell himself to other developers who had seen his work. He got his first break by being hired by a company that was run by his cousin....Then his second job he got hired because the developers he worked with previously knew how good he was...during these years he tried to ge better positions, but other than being promoted internally, his quest for a better job outside the company was always thwarted by his lack of social skills. But now, he's out interviewing and getting offers...and it's not because his already exceptional coding skills have increased, but but becuase his previously deficient people skills are starting to catch up. If you can't realize that software development is a customer service industry, and you HAVE to make the customer/consumer happy, then you are not going to stay employed. And again, be able to sell yourself to the right person. If you can't sell yourself to another developer, you're in the wrong line of work If you don't have friends who were developers and would hire you if they could, then you're probably not in the right line of work.

4) Embrace new technology

I'm a Java guy, but I learned C# (well, what there was of it that was new) when it came out. All you C developers who never bothered to learn Java...For shame. One of my standard questions when I interview people is "How many languages can you write 'Hello World' in?" If the number doesn't look right for the persons age, (you should have at least 4) the interview will go down hill from there. (I usually will let them count C++ and C as different languages because I'm generous). I'm not saying you have to be a pro...but please be able to write Hello World in Java, C and one scripting language. And show me that you've picked up a new language/skill in the last year. And of course you have to read to keep your skills up!

When I was working for a PDA company (call us Lamp), I had the opportunity to go to our big user/developer conference in 2000. One of the fascinating things there was to see how much a certain other competing company (call them Costformi) felt threatened by Lamp then. Lamp has gone on to become mostly irrelevant as a player in the consumer electronic space, but in 2000 things looked bright.

Costformi hired CS thugs to disrupt the conference. These guys were very bright, sat through conferences and then asked very tough, good technical questions, to which the answers always were "You can't do that yet on a Lamp device" and to which they always responded "I can do it right now on my *(PDA running another OS)*!" All the geeks were kinda stunned that someone would be such a jerk, and noone really said anything. 3 days into the conference, Costformi had a "traitor's party" where they invited talented developers to a local party, and wooed them to develop for the Costformi platform.

3 months later, in relating this story to a product manager who used to work at Flower123, I found out that it used to happen at their conventions too. These random developers would come in and disrupt the meetings, spread wild info, and ask if the latest FlowerSuite could do this that and the other, and then compare it to Costformi products

I don't think people realize that this is clearly happening on /. too. Think how many people who read /. make IT purchasing decisions for companies. Now think about how much Costformi (and other companies) bashing goes on here.

Costformi, and other large companies would be crazy to NOT hire a few people whose only jobs are to read /. and post stories and comments that portray their products in a better light. You couldn't ask for a better targetted advertising group, and it would be pretty cheap!

I'm not saying that there aren't some overboard comments (Costformi products for example do not actually curdle all milk within 25' when installed on a computer), but does anyone else think that as sales have gotten tighter in the last year, we've seen more "apologists" posting and replying. Does anyone know of any other incidences of a company like Costformi or someone else trying to influence a bulletin board? Maybe my perception is off? Does anyone else see this?

Boston.com and Cnet are running stories about how vulnerable windows passwords are. I hope this will end the incessant "windows is as secure as every other OS" nonsense. I especially find this amusing considering the earlier article on /. about MSFT and the Department of Home Security

A caveat -- I am a developer, not an admin, so my feeble attempts at doing admin things are admittedly pathetic, and probably should not be copied by anyone

I have a fairly typical set up at home: 233pII running rh7.3 in front of my hub, and a buncha machines behind it, including my web server. I got tired of looking in my log files and seeing

"GET /MSADC/root.exe?/c+dir HTTP/1.0"

from people/machines who are STILL infected with Nimbda or

GET /default.ida?XXXXXXXXXXXXXX[etc etc etc]"

from all the morons still infected by Code Red.

So, I wrote a program that runs on the web server, that scans the web logs for IPAddresses that have sent bad requests (for my definition, any request to my web server that contains "winnt", "root", or "default.ida" is bad). It then contacts another program on the firewall machine, via TCP (don't hassle me about that, the firewall machine only accepts on that port on the internal interface). The firewall machine program then executes a "/sbin/iptables -A INPUT -s "+badIPAddress+" -j DROP", which prevents any further traffic from that ip address from reaching the web server. (I've posted the code for these programs to my journal, though there is nothing there likely to be of any interest to the sophsticate)

The thing that I find nutty is that after turning this on, I found that there were about 1100 machines sending crap like this to my machine over the last 15 days. I have no idea if traffic like this to my home machines is typical, but I would suspect that it's actually much less than what is out in the world (though perhaps it's more because I am on a cable modem subdomain).

My questions to /. are:

• How much crap do you still see from nimbda/code red
• Are you doing anything about it? I must confess that knowing that these machines are vulnerable to these exploits makes it difficult to retain my white hat all the time. Must we just endure these slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? Contacting the machine admins is essentially impossible because most of these machines are on a cable providers network. IS there something better that I can do besides filtering out the requests via IPTables?

import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
import java.net.*;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;

public class AccessMonitor {

  public static void main(String argv[]){
    try{
      File localLog=new File ("AccessMonitor.log");
      if(localLog.length()>100000L){
        SimpleDateFormat sdf=new SimpleDateFormat("yyyyMMdd");
        localLog.renameTo(new File(sdf.format(new Date())+"_AccessMonitor.log"));
      }
      FileWriter fw=new FileWriter("AccessMonitor.log",true);
      PrintWriter log=new PrintWriter(fw);
      Properties props=new Properties();
      props.load(new FileInputStream("AccessMonitor.cf"));
      System.out.println("Props loaded");
      FileReader reader=new FileReader(props.getProperty("LOGFILE"));
      BufferedReader in=new BufferedReader(reader);
      String bannedWords=props.getProperty("BANNED");
      StringTokenizer st=new StringTokenizer(bannedWords,",");
      Vector words=new Vector();
      while(st.hasMoreTokens()){
        words.addElement(st.nextToken());
      }
      Hashtable banned=new Hashtable();
      String line;
      //System.out.println("READ:"+line);
      while((line=in.readLine())!=null){
        for(int x=0;x<words.size();x++){
          if(line.indexOf((String)words.elementAt(x))>0){
            StringTokenizer str=new StringTokenizer(line," ");
            String iAddress=str.nextToken();
            try{
                InetAddress inet=InetAddress.getByName(iAddress);
                String ip=inet.getHostAddress().trim();

                if(banned.containsKey(ip)){
                    Integer count=(Integer)banned.get(ip);
                    count=new Integer(count.intValue()+1);
                    banned.put(ip,count);
                }
                else{
                    banned.put(ip,new Integer(1));
                }
            }
            catch(Exception e){
                System.out.println("Choked on "+line);
            }

            break;
          }
        }
      }
      ban(banned,props);

    }
    catch(Exception e){
      e.printStackTrace();
    }

  }
  public static void ban(Hashtable banned,Properties props){
    try{
      Socket s=new Socket(props.getProperty("FIREWALL"), 7328);
      PrintWriter pw=new PrintWriter(s.getOutputStream());
      Enumeration e=banned.keys();
      while(e.hasMoreElements()){
        String add=(String)e.nextElement();
        System.out.println("BADDY at "+add+" accessed "+((Integer)banned.get(add)).toString());
        pw.println(add);
        pw.flush();
      }

    }
    catch(Exception e){
      e.printStackTrace();
    }
  }

}

import java.io.*;
import java.net.*;
import java.util.*;

public class FirewallUpdater {
  static Hashtable banned=new Hashtable();
  static PrintWriter pw;
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    System.out.println("Starting");
    try{
      FileWriter fw = new FileWriter("fu.log",true);
      pw = new PrintWriter(fw);
      ServerSocket sSock=null;
      System.out.println("Trying to listen on port 7328");
      sSock=new ServerSocket(7328);
      System.out.println("Listening on port 7328");
      for(;;){
        Socket sock=sSock.accept();
        System.out.println("Accepted a new connection");
        processConnection(sock);
      }

    }
    catch(Exception e){
      e.printStackTrace();
    }
  }
  public static void processConnection(Socket sock){
    try{
      if(sock.getInetAddress().getHostAddress().startsWith("192.168")){
        DataInputStream in = new DataInputStream(sock.getInputStream());
        String line;
        while((line=in.readLine())!=null){
          if(banned.containsKey(line)){
          }
          else{
            Process p=Runtime.getRuntime().exec("/sbin/iptables -A INPUT -s "+line+" -j DROP");
            banned.put(line,line);
            pw.println(new Date()+" banning "+line);
          }
        }
      }
    }
    catch(Exception e){
      e.printStackTrace();
    }
  }
}

I've been playing around with the newest version of firebird (so good!). Migrating my bookmarks was no problem, and I LOVE how easy it is to set up the toolbar and add in the full time tabbed browsing! that I've missed since migrating from Opera

The one thing that was painful in redoing was reblocking ads, using mozilla's "block images from this server" functionality.

I have been studiously trying to only block ads I find offensive, and to view/allow ads I deem as a "fair price" for the content I am viewing. This very rarely means I block images because I find the content of the ad offensive, but most likely means I find the way the ad is presented is overly irritating or deceitful.

But for sites whose content I truly enjoy, like The Onion, or boston.com I try to leave the ads unblocked, because I do want to contribute and support them. I currently have a cyclical nature of seeing a bad ad, blocking images from that server, then maybe a week later, letting them back in. If that server gives me another offensive ad, I'll block them again. There is no "method" to how long I'll block images from a place. For example, hotmail is out of control. I will never unblock hotmail because their ads are way to aggressive for me. I try to answer all the surveys on ads when they appear on myyahoo to let them know what I like and don't like. I don't know if it's working or not, but I find that I don't have to block ads on Yahoo as much as I used to.

I've already removed flash from my browsers (or refused to install it). My question to /.ers is how much are you trying to screen out ads, and are you rewarding companies that show "responsible" ads? Do you feel obligated to accept some ads with your browsing?