Posts

Could Eliot Spitzer be our future President? I’m willing to bet he’ll be New York state’s next governor.

As Paul Krugman points out today in his column, there is no financial crisis facing Social Security. Readers of this site already know that since I hashed it out awhile back. On the other hand, Medicare, like all health care programs, is in trouble. Nobody seems to be doing much about that.

You know, there ought to be a principle of software engineering that says something like “Every one-off turns into an application.” I started working on some simple reports that were just going to basically dump the contents of a database table onto a Web page. Simple enough. Then I started adding features – splitting results onto multiple pages, letting the user sort based on columns, letting them adjust the time frame for the report and filter the results based on various fields. I showed it to other people. Soon you could customize the report to only show the columns that you wanted. Now I’m working on custom reports that let you specify the filter conditions for each report and which columns belong on that report. Next thing you know, you have a full blown reporting application and you’ve been working for two weeks on that project you planned to originally whip up over a weekend. Why do I always forget that that will happen? ...

So there’s this show on ABC that I like to watch. It’s a reality show called Wife Swap, which sounds really stupid, but is actually hilarious and sometimes even educational. Fox has a really crummy show that’s a knockoff called “Meet Your New Mommy” or something stupid like that – it has actually been on longer but the truth is that Fox stole the idea when they heard about it and rushed their show onto the air. Anyway, the catch is that you have to watch this show this season. These shows were all recorded before any of them aired, and they carefully selected the participants for maximum entertainment value. Now they’re asking people to sign up for the show, and everyone who’s on it in the future will have seen the show and adjust their behavior accordingly. The only way reality shows really work well (unless there’s a compelling competition) is if the fish bowl is really a fish bowl. If the fish know they’re in an aquarium, the entertainment value isn’t there. Right now it’s great TV. Don’t miss it. ...

I have a CSS question for the web design gurus who read this site. I have an example page with a navigation bar across the top, which you can see here. When you mouse over the links in the navigation bar, the background and foreground colors change. What I’m wondering is how to make the background highlighting extend so that it occupies the entire height of the grey bar across the top of the page. I’ve tried setting the height of the grey bar, which is a div using line-height and padding, but neither approach includes the background in the link. Any ideas? If so, post to the QuickTopic. ...

Am I the only person who’s shocked to learn that IBM is looking to exit the PC business? Granted their desktop computers are no great shakes, but when it comes to laptops, IBM is the industry leader. The idea that there won’t be an IBM ThinkPad any longer blows me away.

About a month ago, my buddies over at worldchanging posted an item about the Java Log fire log. It’s a manmade piece of firewood made of recycled coffee grounds. The logs cost about as much as any other fire log (Duraflame being the most famous), but are a whole lot better for the environment. Anyway, I happened to be at Target a couple of days later and picked up a case of them, and am completely sold. I used to buy regular old firewood when I lived in a house, but I don’t have room for firewood at my apartment, so I had to buy those expensive little bundles of wood at the grocery store. The Java Log is cheaper, infinitely easier to ignite, and leaves nearly no mess. Oh, and it’s much better for the environment than a wood fire or a Duraflame fire as well. Amazing product. ...

For all of the horror stories we hear about genetic engineering, it’s worth keeping in mind the good things it can bring us as well. A Danish company has created a plant that changes colors when the roots detect chemicals released by land mines in the soil. So in countries around the world like Angola and Cambodia where thousands of people are killed or injured by land mines every year, they’ll be able to plant fields of this stuff and locate the mines. ...

The latest trend in 419 scams is to attempt to defeat spam filters by pasting the scammer’s message after a message that looks like it was generated by a virus scanner. So the body of the message says something like, “Your mail has been returned because it contained a virus,” and then below that there’s a message from someone who has illegally acquired millions of dollars and needs your help in moving it out of his or her country. I don’t have to explain to you that the 419 scam is the classic confidence game – the scammer has to make you believe that he has some reason to trust you to care for his ill gotten gains. That’s the hook. So who falls for that when the message is not only obviously a mass mailing, but is a mass mailing designed to sneak past spam filters? Is the victim supposed to believe that someone with millions of dollars is willing to trust literally anyone to help them sneak a fortune out of another country illegally? Since 419 scams are illegal already, the only way this makes sense is that the spammers are using compromised home PCs to send this mail. That’s the only way the economics work. But I still have to wonder what kind of person is stupid enough to fall for it. ...

So how do I tell SpamAssassin that every email I receive that’s in a Kanji, Hebrew, or Cyrillic character set is definitely spam? Update: there’s an actual answer to this question. The answer is here.