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Interesting thoughts from the Sophos blog
Niall from SophosLabs UK asks: why does spam work? and gives an interesting answer: In his opinion, although we think that claims made by spam is very “out there” and wonder why people keep falling for it, in fact it is no worse that what we see in other media (like TV commercials). On some…
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Modulo implies division!
When programming, if you write foo / bar, where foo and bar are variables, you usually instinctively thing “can bar be zero? do I need to add a check that bar is zero?”. However how many of you apply the same line of thinking to the modulo operator? I didn’t (until now – when it…
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WordPressDirect reponds (in a spammy fashion :-))
I received the following comment on my post about WordPressDirect by “Marty Rozmanith”: Hello, I am the creator of WordPressDirect. I want to set the record straight, since your blog is contributing to the disinformation about our service. Forget the content publishing for a second…We save people time and frustration in setting up a a…
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Installing Avira (AntiVir)
After a tutorial on installing Avast and one for AVG 8 I decided to write up a tutorial on installing Avira (the former AntiVir). Download the install kit from their website (warning! there is some upselling going on) Install the software Done! Unfortunately there aren’t any options to make the program more silent or transparent…
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Actively working against security…
Not only isn’t security the first priority for people, some make a selling point of being able to defeat it! Does the following type of phrase sound familiar to you? Our product uses HTTP, so there will be no problem traversing those pesky firewalls. The solution is of course in the middle (making admins realize…
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How to interpolate a string in Perl?
Perl (and some other languages which came after it :-)) have a feature called interpolation, whereby the names of the variables in strings are replaced by their actual values. This is both useful and dangerous (it can easily result in problems like command injection / SQL injection / HTML injection (aka XSS) – as with…
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How to make sure that your webserver isn’t blocket by the ISP?
First of all, if it says in your contract that you can’t run servers, doing so may result in your connection being cut, so do this on your own risk! Second of all, I don’t advocate running websites on a home machine. Get a VPS! All this said, if you do run a webserver on…
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A word about splogs
I was listening to the WordPress podcast and they mentioned a service called WordPressDirect (don’t worry, that links is a nofollow one). From their marketing material: Create SEO-Optimized, Content-Stuffed Websites Instantly With WordPressDirect Basically they are an other method to “reuse” other people’s writing. Some thoughts: People feel instantly defensive and start pondering solutions like…
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A great analogy for programmers
I found the the following great blogpost which extends the “rockstar programmer” analogy: Musical Analogy. Very insightful. I too like “jazz” programmers more than “rockstarts”, because they probably won’t have any problems with SDLC :-).