Holy freakin' crap! Posting on a legendary website!!!

/.?

tor?por? [tawr-per] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
-noun
1. sluggish inactivity or inertia.
2. lethargic indifference; apathy.
3. a state of suspended physical powers and activities.
4. dormancy, as of a hibernating animal.
[Origin: 1600-10; L: numbness, equiv. to torp(?re) to be stiff or numb + -or -or1]

--Synonyms 2. stolidity, listlessness, lethargy. 4. sleepiness, slumber, drowsiness.

Like most people, I have several email accounts that I keep track of, and I've noticed a disturbing trend. I have used the paypal service to do online billing and to make purchases over the internet for a variety of goods and services (nothing exotic; we're talking online games, web hosting, real's superpass service.). So far, nothing unusual there.

What's truly bizarre, in my mind, is that over the course of the last year I have consistently been targetted for phishing emails in the email account that I use with paypal. On a slow month I'll get four letters to that account, on approximate average, however, I get no less than 10 emails a week (all of which I forward to spoof@paypal.com).

In my other email accounts, including one that I have used in articles I've had published? Na-da. Zip.

That's right, I get none. Not a single attempt.

On my other email accounts I regularly get spam, particularly the drive-by type spam where they're going down a list alphabetically of email addresses, and sometimes I just get random spam.

I have never once gotten a phishing email in any of my other email addresses. This leads me to one conclusion; somehow the phishers have access to a widely-available (the fact my mailbox is hit so frequently makes me suspect that) list of paypal users and their email addresses.

Where would they get that list?
Who would give out the email addresses of their paypal using clients?

I'm throwing this out there to the slashdot audience to see wether or not I'm alone in getting deluged by phishers on a regular basis and also to see what insights Slashdotters would have on why this is happening only (or at least predominantly) to people who use Paypal.

If this is happening as widespreadly as I suspect, isn't it time we geeks started asking some questions and figure why this is happening?

Why do I keep coming back? Apart from habit it's the fact that amidst the stupidity you occasionally get (genuinely) insightful comments and still learn how to do shit here. Like this comment for example.

I had no idea of how to do the windows equivalent of chmod -x; now I do.

If my prior comments on wikipedia are any guide, after the post drops off the front page, a wikipedia editor with mod points will mod-bomb all my (currently 5,5,5,4) comments in the Wikipedia story.

The wikipedia administration, for whatever reason, is extraordinarily defensive and hates to see criticism remain un-suppressed. If this is reminiscent of a cult, well, if the show fits....

Get-Rich Links:

How to Almost Live on Blogging

How Much Do I Earn From Blogging

Placing Adsense Between Posts (are you listening, Taco?)
 
Blogging For Profit Using Adsense

Blogging For Dollars (dated, 2003)

Given the combination of outsourcing, and the fact that modern languages such as perl and java are too advanced to offer hand holding for, I have to ask: is there room for ameteurs or self-taught hobbyists in the programming field?

At first glance, one would think 'no'. As stated; the languages are too complex to learn without a CS degree and also the economic realities are such that if you aren't making your living coding you need to GFTO and make room for someone who is.

This makes recent industry moves a bit inexplicable, however. While it's natural that companies such as IBM and Novell would take over hobbyist projects such as Linux, and that the 'desktop battle' would be fought by the corporate sponsors of GNOME, that's not exclusively what is going on. There are major sites which offer no-cost hosting and support services for hobbyist projects (freshmeat and sourceforge are two such sites) and there is also an upswing in development tools which are distributed free to encourage hobbyist development (the GNU compiler for one, there's also Microsoft's latest Visual Studio offerings).

Given the conflicting nature of the facts as they are one has to look deeper for an explaination. A proliferation of freely available development tools encourages the formation of a gift culture which the industry can turn to who will work for little more than food-stamps. Currently, IT professionals are a financial liability, but by courting the hobbyists market, corporate america has a built-in development force which is second to none in the first world for cost.

So, the next time that you fire up that "free" copy of Visual Studio or run GCC on your "Free" OS, remember this - you're using tools designed and written to put honest, hard-working Professionals out of a job.

Ask yourself how you can manage to sleep at night knowing whose paying the price of your tools.

Yahoo News has an interesting story on the latest findings on the ice ball discovered last year, that some people are calling our 10th planet (which was previously reported here on slashdot). The article states that according to Hubble, the diameter of UB313 measures 1,490 miles; making it marginally larger than Pluto (which is about 1,422 miles across.). This, in part, is refueling the debate as to what should or should not be considered a planet.

The article also mentions that Michael Brown (a California Institute of technology researcher who happens to be studying UB313) has nicknamed the planet "Xena".

Over the years I've found myself using the GUI (usually GNOME) a lot more. Even so, there are a few apps I prefer to use the CLI versions of; mostly ftp, irc (bitchx) and ...bittorrent.

However, typing out "btdownloadcurses blah" gets to be tedious; so I thought about shortening it to just 'bt', through an alias or something. Then I realised this would be a perfect thing to break out my (amazingly) meager porgramming skills for.

So, I figured it shouldn't be too hard to write a simple program which checks to see if there's at least two arguments (the name of the program, and an additional argument) and if there is, start an instance of btdownloadcurses out on the argument.

It took me 3 hours to figure out which exec to use (execl, execvp, execlp, etc), including discovering that I need to set a path and figuring out how to set one. I was finally able to spawn an instance of btdownloadcurses with the following code:

#include stdio.h>
#include unistd.h>
#include string.h> //slashcode freaks out on the includes, so I deliberately typo'd for readability

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
char torr[4096];
int lenny;
const char *p_envp[] = {"PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin","TERM=vt220",0};
lenny=strlen(argv[1]+1); //room for NULL
                if(argc > 1)
                {
                                memcpy(torr,argv[1],lenny);
                                printf("%s\n",torr); //debugging, lol
                                execle("/usr/bin/btdownloadcurses", "btdownloadcurses ",torr,0,p_envp);
                }
                return 0;
}

However, though it would run the bittorrent client, it would still crash for reasons which are largely unknown to me.

So, in the end I said "fuck it" and went with a shell script:

#!/bin/sh
btdownloadcurses $1

lol C.

On the uphand, I think I've just popped my struct cherry on this program, even though the p_envp struct is a direct ripoff of a program on page 354 of Linux Programming 2nd Edition.

Bookmarks, "from the nice in theory suck in practice department"

I like the bookmarks idea (as you can see from the journal below this one); but having just tried to use it...it doesn't work!

Since I can't save these to my bookmarks, I guess I'll save them to my journal instead. This is basically just stuff I'm reading ATM and I'll want to look back at after I've ripped my computer apart again (and lost my bookmarks).

A NetBSD kernel documentation overview (circa 2002)

C, Assembly, Perl, Lisp, Python, & PHP Programming Links

NetBSD Device Driver Writing Guide
  I wish I was that 1337!

Porting device drivers to the 2.6 kernel

Way back in the days of yore, you could make a PIF file for windows 3.x with a "?" in a certain place (memory fails me on where, probably "command arguments", under the advanced part of the pif editor) and this would throw up a neat little dialog box where you could type in a line to use as the arguments to a command.

I know there's an easy way to do that with XUL/java; fuck if I can be bothered to figure out what it is, though. Which is a shame because then I could add bookmarks right from my firefox bookmark bar (yes, I can add the url and then fill out the information on /.; it's not the same).

Anyway, I like the /. bookmarks idea, now when I half-read a news item and think "wow, /. would love this" I no longer have to stop to read the article; just ^v&^c the url and submit.

Actually, this is neat, simply because I regularly see stories and articles on here I would like to go back to later. I can see myself amassing a collection of links on this thing. I wonder what the limit is?

It's a neat feature (unlike the tagging, which is wtf?), it's a shame that Taco, et al have waited so long to revisit the slashcode and add interesting feature and inter-activity (shit, k5 beat them by 6 years on that one!). Think for a minute what /. would be like if we had this in 2000.

Sorry for the wank and lack of substance, but at least I didn't post any dogdy links!

Funny how my next entry here after such a long time would be about Opera once again. :-)

Just writing to say that Opera 9 will now start coming out in weekly betas!

Great news for those of us who like Opera, and like cutting edge stuff. :-)

This is the URL to memorize: http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/

The first weekly has actually already been released for Windows and Mac.
They say not *nix this week, so I assume it'll normally be planned.

Some 25 million years ago, humans and vervet monkeys diverged from a common ancestor. In very rough terms, perhaps one and a quarter million human generations, or five million vervet generations, have been brought forth upon the Earth since that common ancestor lived. Of course, many differences have evolved between humans and vervets in those 25 million years: among other things, human parents choose toys for their children; vervet parents do not.

But after all that time and genetic change, and despite studies attributing human children's toy preferences to adult stereotypes, a new study by Dr. Gerianne Alexander finds that vervet males, like human boys, prefer toy trucks and balls, while vervet females and human girls prefer dolls and toy cooking pots. What's more, the vervets play with the toys much as human children do: males roll trucks on the ground, females inspect dolls (apparently) for genitalia. Previously on Slashdot: Harvard president Larry Summers and his daughter's "baby truck", Gender and gaming.

[Submitted and, of course, rejected.]

I've got a number of fans, and I've never asked for anything other than that you appreciate my comments here.

But now I need your help.

A spark jumped from my finger and now my Touchstream LP keyboard is dead. Like the parrot in the Python skit. Dead.

Windows plug-and-play doesn't recognize it at all.

So I need your help.

Can anyone either

• suggest possible repairs
• or, tell me where I can get a replacement?

Neither of these are easy: the keyboard uses capacitance to track fingers, so the spark may have burnt those out, or -- since it doesn't respond at all -- the main circuit board may be fried.

And the manufacturer of the Touchstream has been bought up, and Touchstream keyboards are no longer manufactured.

Please, Obi-Wan, ^HHHH er, Slashdot fans, you're my only hope.