Category: Uncategorized

Blockgineer is a simple game, in theory. You just have to get the ball to the box. But as you get more into the game, it gets more complicated and a load of fun.

Can’t say that I saw this coming, but considering all the off-field issues the Ducks have had this off-season (which resulted in full-season suspensions for key players), plus he just had to fire Ernie Kent, I guess it shouldn’t be that big of a surprise that he’d want to get out.

I’d never consider myself a professional web designer, as I really don’t think I’m as good as I could/should be to have that title (though there are many folks who suck at it that still have that title), but I’ve had jobs where I totally feel like this:

Thanks Dave for this, but if anybody knows the original source, please share.

Out of all the things they could send down a small hole to trapped miners, why an iPod?

BEACONSFIELD, Australia — Two Australian miners trapped for more than a week in a tiny cage more than a half mile underground were given iPods Wednesday to help them while away the hours as rescuers prepared to start drilling them an escape tunnel.

Did they send down a network cable so they could sync up with iTunes? Hopefully they sent headphones. Thanks Barn for the link.

This is so dang cool. These students managed to modify an etch a sketch so you can draw on it with a simple mouse. Electrical engineering at its finest.

Even if you’re still running 2.6x, you need to get this patch installed. It fixes an ugly vulnerability that allows your MT installation to be used by spammers to send out mail (similar to a formmail script hole).

I actually noticed this about nine months ago but nobody seemed to notice or care. Glad to hear SixApart is finally listening to folks and has the right kinds of folks there to make sure this kind of crap doesn’t ever happen again.

In case you needed yet another reason to start using another browser, click here (only works if you’re running Internet Explorer). If you’re using MSIE, clicking on that link will get you a Notepad window, with a bit of text already there.

How does this work? First off, let me credit the site that I saw that described this. The view-source protocol is used by MSIE to view the source of files. So, for example, my link above linked to view-source:http://www.utterlyboring.com/images/msieisbad.txt in the href of the link. While that’s not really that evil, it can be used to do some nasty things. On his example page, he shows how it can be loaded upon the page’s loading. And the thing is that the protocol doesn’t know if it’s trying to view the source of an actual HTML file — you can send a graphic through it as well. And you can also link to local files. For example:

view-source:file:///c:\windows\win.ini

view-source:http://www.google.com

Or via an IMG SRC tag:

<img src=view-source:http://www.utterlyboring.com/images/oregon.gif>

It’s a scary little thing. To quote the site about its major problems:

* A Notepad window will pop up automatically in an HTML email message even when scripting is turned off.

* Most popup blocker software packages do not block Notepad popups.

* A simple email HTML message or Web page can easily open thousands of windows causing system stability problems. For example, a single <IMG> tag can tell Notepad to editted the system file c:\windows\system32\shell32.dll and 20 megabytes of virtual memory is consumed. A 100 <IMG> tags would consume 2 gigabytes of virtual memory.

* A Windows system could become corrupted if a user accidentally changes the contents of a system file which appears in Notepad popup window and then saves these changes because they don’t know any better.

Thanks, Microsoft, but I’m running Firebird, thank you, very much.

As a side note, I was going to post this over on Bits & Bytes, but it appears they changed the location of their mt.cgi script. Neil, if you’re reading this, are you still posting over there? Did I miss something? Did they kick a bunch of off or something?

Jake is no longer unemployed! I start my new job on Monday. I’ll update the site with more detail later, as well as some great links/posts.

Couldn’t resist putting this one up here:

One day, after a man had his annual physical, the doctor came out and said, “You had a great check-up. Is there anything that you’d like to talk about or ask me?”

“Well,” he said, “I was thinking about getting a vasectomy.”

“That’s a big decision! Have you talked it over with your family?”

“Yeah, we took a vote… and they’re in favor of it 15 to 2.”

…but apparently somebody decided to hide $8-million of cocaine in one.