Posts with this logo use 
Low-functioning pinhead...
December 30, 2003
Feedback for Urs
One of the things about a new medium is that it will almost inevitably find new, unanticipated, uses. I’m excited about the MathML-enabled weblog as a medium for physics research. How exactly that will pan out remains to be seen, but over at the String Coffee Table, Urs Schreiber is trying an experiment.
Back in medieval times, when you were preparing a paper, you might mail paper copies of a draft version to your friends to get some comments. In modern times, you might email those same friends a PDF file. Whichever the medium, the distribution-list is necessarily limited.
Urs is working on a paper. Hoping for feedback from a wider audience than he could get by (e)mailing around a draft, he has posted parts I and II to the weblog. So head on over, read his draft, and give him some feedback.
(Posted via WiFi from San Jose International Airport, using a beta version of Ecto, the successor to Kung-Log.)
December 27, 2003
Happy Holidays to all!
Greetings from Fort Funston, CA.
December 26, 2003
Snap, Crack and Spam
A quite frightening story about the increasing sophistication of spammer/crackers [tip 'o the hat to Gary F]. It’s been clear for a while that spammers have crossed the line into computer cracking — using hijacked Windoze boxes to distribute spam and mount DDoS attacks on anti-spam sites. What’s new here is the sophistication of the attack, and the target — a linux system running GeekLog, a popular PHP-based weblogging program.
Cracking into a Windoze box carries very little risk of detection, much less of being tracked down. Windoze users are inured to the thought of their machine being compromised by viruses, spyware, etc. and they have relatively few forensic tools available for tracking down their attacker. Linux users are, by and large, a more sophisticated bunch, raising the stakes for a potential attacker.
I guess this is all the more reason to keep your software up to date, which includes upgrading MovableType to 2.65, plugging a hole in lib/MT/XMLRPCServer.pm.
December 20, 2003
Acronym Patch Update
Yet another update to Henrik Gemal’s acronym plugin for MovableType, meaning yet another update to my patch, which offers improved handling of acronyms and abbreviations.
Update (12/28/2003): I’ve posted a new version of the patch, fixing a few things which seem to have been broken by the new logic in version 0.6 of Gemal’s plugin. This should fully restore the functionality to that of previous version of my patched plugin.
Update (2/13/2004):Yet another update to my patch to bring it into line with version 0.7 of Gemal’s plugin. (Mercifully, my patch get shorter and shorter, as Gemal incorporates more of my changes with each iteration of his plugin.)
Update (5/28/2004):Yet another update to my patch to bring it into line with version 1.0 of Gemal’s plugin. (Which, actually, is functionally identical to 0.7.)
December 19, 2003
Black Box Voting
If you’ve been trying to follow the continuing saga of electronic voting machines, as I have, it’s pretty hard to keep track. The scandalous revelations about the operations of the leading manufacturers, like Diebold just keep coming and coming and coming.
Finally, there’s a site dedicated to keeping tabs on the whole affair. It won’t be joining my blogroll any time soon (it’s just too painful to read regularly), but it’s good to know that it’s there…
December 17, 2003
Don’t Bitch and Moan!
File a bug report, you dork.
That’s what I shoulda done. I’ve grumbled about the bugs in the rendering of MathML in recent version of Mozilla/MacOSX. Daniel Jamous actually did the legwork, tracked down when the breakage occurred (between 1.3a and 1.3b) and filed a proper bug report. Hopefully, now it will get fixed.
