Socialist Sushi

Wednesday night Amber purchased and downloaded a song from American Idol. It was in WMA format, and required an activation code. No problem — the code was on the download page. Just copy and paste.

Only it didn’t work. It kept giving her scripting errors. I played with it a bit, and on about the third try the little browser window gave that warning, the “Do you really want to run this ActiveX control?” warning. I clicked yes, and everything worked.

Is this how easy all DRM will be now? Where a competent computer user like my wife will be stumped? Where Internet Explorer will only give you the actual error after several tries?

It’s so nice to spend money and then be treated like a thief.

This is hysterical.

Certainly shows the problem with automatic content.

I’ve been working on a map of Tor nodes. You can find it here.

It’s still a work in progress, but you can get an idea of where it’s headed.

where, oh where have I heard this story before?

Amazingly, once the “Windows conversion” project was over, their software actually worked in Windows. It looked terrible and ran incredibly slow, but it worked. The company was able to keep its entire floor of COBOL programmers working on the System/3-COBOL-translated-to-C-rendered-in-Windows application and things have remained the same ever since. After all, they found a formula that worked and there was no need to change it.

Back in the day it wasn’t unusual to find folks using javascript for webpage security. And by “using” I mean “using it and failing miserably” since it was pretty trivial to get around.

Today I got an email pointing me to a site where I could download an album for free. Yay spiffy. But they wanted me to give em email addresses to 5 friends. That sucks

Fortunately for me, they used ajax for to check it all. So, view source, redefine their validation function in firebug to always return true, then call the function and voila, they’re thanking me for giving them the email addresses.

Couple of points here:

1. It’s not free if I have to give something in exchange
2. Friends don’t spam friends
3. If your uses can redefine the freakin validation routines, it’s probably best not to rely on them for security.

This is why we check form inputs in javascript and on the server. Javascript makes it nicer for the user; the server check makes it safer for us.

Adrian Holovaty has announced the washingtonpost.com mashup projects. Some nifty stuff. I even got something in.

Actually, I did a tag cloud, too, but someone did a much cooler one.

I’ve posted portaPuTTY, which will run cleanly on a USB drive.

This is why open source rocks. I had an idea for some changes, downloaded the code and off we go.

The link made it onto Boing Boing, and it truly is a wonderful thing: Waffle-making robot a hit

Funnily enough, I read this article after reading the latest installment of Cory Doctorow’s story Themepunks, which is about people doing odd things with junk technology.

I’m loving the story. The first real linux box I built was a 486/100 with 16 megs o’ RAM. It served as a web proxy for 4 of us in my dad’s office, giving us all ‘net access over the screaming fast 56K connection. And it worked flawlessly. A year or two later I would use another 486 scrounged out of a box of parts shoved in a closet to run an anonymous remailer.

I’ve never done anything astoundingly cool with old, discarded parts, but I have been able to use older computers to do useful things. The latest is taking “obsolete” computers donated by my employer and setup linux boxen at Amber’s clinic.

Besides… the robot makes waffles. What else is there to say, really?

Oh, and go read Themepunks.

So I finally got around to playing the the Google Maps API. Very nifty.

As a first hack, I made a hurricane tracking map for Dennis. It works cool in Firefox, but not in IE; getting weird errors. I’ll try to figure it out later on. For now, if you’re in a non-IE browser check it out.

I have a few other ideas to work on this, but it’ll be later before I get around to it.

–B

Track your package

So 3 days ago someone, somewhere in the USA, was told I have a package to pick up. And that’s the last update.