23rd Post

asterisk* modified the Page 23 idea a bit and came up with this:

  1. Go into your blog’s archives.
  2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to).
  3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
  4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.

Well… my 23rd post was about Apples X-Server and the fifth sentence (not counting one-word thingies) was:

It launches in about half a second on Richard’s Mac and launching Eterm or nedit just happens instantly without any remarkable delay.

(links added in this quote. I should have made them back then)

A programmers Editor…

… doesn’t have to take that much care of usability. And the installation routine of EditPlus certainly doesn’t.

edp.png

Besides the fact that this dialog appears when it’s already too late (after the installation has completed) and that it contains redundancy (the “Send To” entry and the additional context menu entry do practically the same), the marked wording is very ridiculous or can you imagine a mouse button with an attached (?) editor?

As usability would not matter (remember: programmer’s editor) that much, a more useful and less ridiculous wording would be “Add EditPlus to the Context Menu of Explorer”.

The wording is one of the things that are very often very wrong in software by semi-professional companies (not excluding my own software) and this usually gets even worse in the installers as they are often not very well tested (or not at all). Those InstallShield things are the worst as many developers just click together the installation, then click through the dialogs and put the thing on the web.

This is the reason why my parents still have not succeeded in installing software on their own while nearly everything else went quite well the last year.

Apocalypse 12

It seems like Larry Wall has done it again and released Apocalypse 12 (linked to the print view as you definitely want to print it out). The Apocalypses are nothing religious, but Larry Walls ideas and definitions about the next version of Perl (although I am inclined to call it something else as it’s going to be quite different – if it’s ever released).

The Appocalypses are quite nice to read. They are not only great from a technological standpoint but from a linguistic and humorous one too. If you have no problems reading 72 pages of technical definitions on quite a high level, go for it and read it. It’s a real pleasure and I looked forward to this for over a year now

Page 23

Asterisk* got me the idea to

  1. Grab the nearest book.
  2. Open the book to page 23.
  3. Find the fifth sentence.
  4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Now the book happens to be Security Warrior by Cyrus Peikari and Anton Chuvakin, O’Reilly. The quote is:

Before beginning your practical journey, there is one final issue to note.

So: nothing fancy. But the book is great. It reads lika a criminal novel, despite being a tech-book (I don’t read much else these days).

Back from vacation

I was away during the easter-days and now that I’m back, I had to see that my blog somehow got recognized by the various spammers around here: I’ve just deleted 10 spam entries from the comments.

Those entries are primarely made to get a better PageRank at Google, but since I’ve upgraded to MovablaType 2.665 which uses a redirector for all links, this does not get the spammer anything, so it’s just annoying and does not even bring profit to those f***ing spammers.

Why is there always someone to destroy something good?

Speed up

Maybe you have noticed that this page loads faster than before – especially faster than it did the last two weeks or so. Maybe you wonder too, why there was this downtime at the end of march.

I won’t go into many details, but gnegg.ch (and a whole lot of other stuff) is now running on a brand new server (slightly faster machine) with Gentoo Linux using a 2.6.4 Kernel.

This due to some sucker hacking into the older machine last march, installing a quite destabilizing rootkit (thanks for that… this lead me to notice the crack quite fast…), modifying a lot of html-files and php.ini so that nearly every page served contained a IFRAME utilizing a IE exploit to install some kind of dialer (the IFRAME linked to forced-action.com). The wonderful and gratifying work of this unknown and soooo cool guy caused me to return home from vacation to do some rescuing work.

This is not the usual stinking phpNuke-Exploit (we were not running any phpNuke anyway) as this would not lead to a rootkit getting installed.

Again: Many thanks for your “hard work”, dear anonymous hacker. You got me the much needed opportunity to finally install Gentoo. And not only that: You even got me a faster Server to work on (to prevent any further downtime during reinstallation of the new OS). Now that this episode finally has come to an end, I will have a look at those disk-images I took from the compromised machine. Let’s see what I find out.

All this fuss about Gmail

When reading the news on the web, one thing is in all mouths: Googles email service gmail. What I cannot understand is the fuss about gmails privacy policy. The following two points are what everyone seems to be so upset about:

Residual copies of email may remain on our systems, even after you have deleted them from your mailbox or after the termination of your account.

I ask you: So what? Just imagine how this service is going to work: Google has thousands of computers running – that’s their philosophy. For me it’s jsut clear that the whole concept would not work if there where just one copy of each email message available. Think of it: Every message that enters the system surely is replicated among the many cluster nodes at google. This is a going-on process. And it’s just the same with a deletion: Once you delete the message, this process must be replicated among the cluster nodes. It’s just not feasible to instantly remove a message on 100’000 computers. And: While receiving and displaying a message to the user must have absolute priority, processor time and network usage can be saved if deletion requests in the cluster are handeled with lower priority.

For me, this clause does not mean: “We will keep your mail forever because we want to know everything you do and you are”, but “to provide the optimal service for you, there may be some technical limitations that prevent a message from being immediately deleted from 100’000 computers at the same time”. It’s great that google tells us about this. What about hotmail? Can they guarantee instant deletion? Don’t they run a cluster?

Google’s computers process the information in your email for various purposes, including formatting and displaying the information to you, delivering targeted related information (such as advertisements and related links), preventing unsolicited bulk email (spam), backing up your email, and other purposes relating to offering you Gmail.

This is so plain simple. Tell me of one webbased email service that does not to the very same thing. The thing everyone is concerned about is the “delivering related information”-thing. But this does not mean that the computer or anyone else really “reads” your email. It just tells you that the content that is displayed on your webbrowser is analyzed and that targeted advertising is added. Tell me about any other webbased email service that does not do that.

So for me this is a whole lot of hot air and really injust: Where the privacy policies on other services just don’t tell you those (obvious) things, google’s is and everyone complains about. I hate the press.