Several voters in Sweden attempted to embed Trojan Horses in their hand-written ballots in a recent election. One tried SQL injection in the manner of this famous XKCD comic and another tried cross-site scripting. The attacks failed to cause any damage, but succeeded in amusing me. Hat tip, Bruce Schneier.
Tag Archives: funny
How programmers see each other
Ruby Inside’s Holiday Fun: How Programming Language Fanboys See Each Others’ Languages is legitimately funny and dead on accurate.
Bug of the year
I thought for sure the date bug that prevented the Motorola Droid’s camera from focusing properly in 24.5 day cycles (24.5 days of proper focus, followed by 24.5 days of focusing problems) would go down as the bug of the year, but then I learned about the face tracking software from HP that doesn’t work for black people.
Improving Google Mail Goggles
I think the world is crying out for a mashup of Google Mail Goggles and StupidFilter. Google Mail Goggles is an optional feature for Gmail that will present you with math problems to make sure you think before sending an email when you’re inebriated. StupidFilter analyzes text for “stupidity.”
Wouldn’t it be great if Web browsers and email clients had a tool that could assess the stupidity of text to be posted and then present math problems scaled in difficulty to the degree of stupidity. Thoughtful comment on the status of a project at work? You get 2 + 2. Forwarding an email your crazy uncle sent you about Barack Obama being a Muslim? You get this.
Links for April 2nd
- Washington Post: Memo: Laws Didn’t Apply to Interrogators. The White House has finally released the John Yoo memo that dismantled the rule of law to Congress.
- Philadelphia Daily News: NFL Films is taking shots. It’s sad but not surprising that NFL Films is falling out of favor with the NFL. This is one of those decisions that everyone will look back on a decade from now and marvel at its stupidity.
- Making Light: The photograph that terrorized London. Did I ever tell you about the time that I thought that it would be a good idea to take pictures of the border crossing facility between China and Hong Kong?
- FP Passport: Saudi father shoots daughter after catching her on Facebook. So sad and pointless.
- The Register: Get your German interior minister’s fingerprint here. I couldn’t agree more that if we’re going to collect biometric information on everyone, we should start with the people who propose these laws.
- Andrew Leonard: Paulson’s bogus plan to regulate the markets.
- Wired Compiler: Watch Your Database Threads. Cool tool for monitoring MySQL performance.
- Wired Compiler: Microsoft’s Office Doc Format Wins ISO Approval. Ask Andrew Shebanow why making this format the standard is a bad idea.
- Jessamyn West’s new blog template is hilarious.
- Datawocky: More data usually beats better algorithms. He’s giving away the keys to the castle here.
Links from March 14th
- Sports metaphors for Clinton vs. Obama. – Excellent top to bottom. I still contend that the rules of Quidditch prove that JK Rowling was never a sports fan.
- jQuery creator John Resig demonstrates some cool JavaScript programming tricks in Search and Don’t Replace.
- Fred Clark explains how rising land prices can put mobile home owners in a horrible position. They own depreciating mobile homes and rent appreciating land to put them on. The fundamental problem here is that mobile homes aren’t really mobile.
- Andrew Leonard reports on home equity loan defaults. Homeowners who are behind on their loans have figured out that they can’t take your house away for not paying your HELOC.
- The Great Daylight Saving Time Conspiracy – Lobbyists are busy people.
- Anil Dash creates embeddable versions of his blog posts. Step aside,
blockquote. I’m still trying to puzzle out the implications. - John Gruber analyzes why Apple’s iPhone SDK allows only one app to run at a time. He later posted the counter-argument.
- The Obama campaign circulated a point-by-point takedown of talking points that the Clinton campaign circulated to journalists. Life imitates blogging.
- kottke.org is ten years old today – An incredible milestone and an interesting design retrospective. The rc3.org ten year anniversary celebration arrives latter this year.
Are you a Mac user at heart?
Mindset Media has created a profile of the typical Mac user. As a Mac user, the question isn’t whether you exhibit these qualities (of course you do), but which of your friends who aren’t yet using Macs are the best targets for conversion based on these criteria. Your eMusic-subscribing, Prius-driving, organically-farmed-broccoli-eating, microbrew-drinking, Kucinich-loving, crappy-Acer-laptop-using, know-it-all buddy really needs your help.
