Hilarious SPAM

by andrew 9. September 2009 07:30

The following spam made it through the filters to my gmail inbox.

I'm actually glad it did as "it is of vastness hilarious of nature"

from Shunji Roddie
to metafedora@gmail.com
date 9 September 2009 14:57
subject Job opportunity USA!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hello competitor,
We are glad to report you that in our stable company, the vacancy of transaction manager is opened. The world is smashed by a crisis, people lose their workplaces, and many companies are being closed. Our company offers a product in the field of services; therefore the demand on our suggestions remains even in so difficult period for the world economy.
The followings factors are required from you:
- industriousness;
- efficiency;
- to be the habitant of the USA;
- command aspiring to success;
- to have sure vital position;
- to have initial PC skills
- you must be more senior than 21.
O INVESTMENTS FROM YOU ARE REQUIRED, you will be fully acquainted and trained for discharging of your duties. We need valuable staff. We will teach even a janitor to be a businessman!
Do not lose the chance of fully legal earnings with a dynamically developing company. We will help you to build a career which you always dreamed about. Your chance is waiting for you.
We wait for your resumes to the address of our department of personnel.

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Software Engineering Tips

by andrew 23. August 2009 17:52

I'm working my way through these pearls of wisdom, which I found randomly on delicious.  I'm also listening intently to the stack overflow podcast - Joel and Jeff are really entertaining, and its a good way to hear what really great programmers are thinking about.

I am still working on my briscola implementation in wcf/rest, and I've made some great strides, but I've still yet to get to a final version that I would be confident publishing.  I'm anxious to blog about some of the things I've learned, especially how I got the membership provider to work with wcf security model - its something that I found no complete example of online.  I'm even more anxious to get the SOA done so I can implement and iPhone app finally.

I also seriously need to find time to hack away at the todo list for this site, including getting the backend converted to SQL from XML.

All the time needed for the above has now officially been reduced as I've accepted enrollment in the Graduate Certificate program in Geographic Information Systems at the University of Texas at Dallas.  I'm carrying two courses this fall, one is a required introductory course to GIS, and one elective which I chose to be Geo-spatial Data Analysis.  There was much debate about this whole going back to school thing, with time and money being the main factors.  What exactly will completing this get me? Personal fulfillment? More money (probably not)? Opening of doors (hopefully)?

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Amazon Buys Zappos

by andrew 22. July 2009 09:17

Jenni sent me this link today, and it made me happy because lately I've seen a lot of examples of unfairness - people getting things that they don't deserve - that have caused me to be discouraged.

I have ordered shoes from Zappos and it was a really great experience, so I'm happy to hear that another company that I order things from, amazon, bought them.

I also like hearing from Jeff Bezos because I really respect him as an entrepeneur - anyone who could get out of the dotcom bust with a website-only business gets cred, but in the

Now for my prediction: Etsy is next. 

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Windows 7 on Mac OS X

by andrew 16. July 2009 03:46

Last night I got Windows 7 Release Candidate up and running in VMWare on my Macbook Pro.  So far so good, I have Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 Express installed and they seem to working fine.

I used Disk Utility to delete my existing FAT32 partition where I was running Windows XP, and then create a new partition. I then ran Boot Camp to create a new FAT32 partition (32GB), but once the Windows 7 installer kicked in it informed me that Windows 7 only runs on NTFS.  At that point you can just format and continue.  Once Windows 7 is installed, Boot Camp kicks in (Windows 7 warns you that it doesn't think the software is compatible - I ignored the warning).  All the Boot Camp drivers installed without incident.

I then attempted to connect VMWare to my new Windows 7 partition, but I found I had to first delete the /Library/Application Support/VMWare Fusion/Virtual Machines/%2Fdev%2Fdisk0/Boot Camp partition.vmwarevm and then create a new virtual Machine .

I found these instructions to be helpful.

Tania Kaufmann new work Magnolia Theatre Gallery

by andrew 7. June 2009 17:14

Artist Tania Kaufmann is showing new work at the Magnolia Theatre Gallery on Thursday, June 11.

Aside from TK being an amazing artist, the Magnolia has a great little bar and you can catch a movie while you're there.

 

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Netflix Custom Control

by andrew 26. May 2009 19:30

Everybody who has an account wtih neflix has access to some Personalized RSS feeds.  They are available here, once you have logged in.

I wanted to consume these feeds, and show what movies I'm watching so I went looking for an ASP.NET control which could do this but didn't find any.  I could have just used RSSDataSource for this, but I decided to write my own control to follow the DotNetBlogEngine convention of creating custom controls. I used SyndicationFeed class to load the XML from the WebResponse (as opposed to parsing the raw XML), then I just iterate over each of the SyndicationItem -- nothing fancy.  Althought I will consider turning this into a templated control, and parsing out the arbitrary HTML that appears in the Description field of each item at some point, if that is helpful to anyone.

I also discovered a helpful addon called FeedProxy, which works around Firefox's feed preview. You use FeedProxy as your Application Action for Web Feeds, and you get the actual XML in our browser window.

You can see the result below my Twitter updates.  The current code for this control is here.

Interesting problem: Detecting random input into free-form fields

by andrew 18. May 2009 07:38

I had an interesting requirement for a website: Prevent a user from entering random text/garbage into a web form. They even provided a list of data that had got through (ex. "XXF", "djfhfhfhf", "asdf", "John Doe", etc).

So I thought about this problem for a while. I did a bit of research to see which direction to look in. There is a lot of material on generating randomness, but most of the focus on detecting randomness is on repeatable processes like random number generators that can be run over and over again to produce a sample set. In our case, we only get one sample, which is simply what the user enters when they submit the form.

In then end, I looked at the samples of random garbage I was given, and though about what the person probably did when they entered it into our form. I came up with the following rules, taken in combination, to flag a word as random garbage.

 

  1. Ratio of vowels-to-consonants and its inverse cannot exceed 0.16. This rule catches words that have too many vowels and consonants in them to be phonically useful (ex. "akdjfsa", "aeiouux")
  2. Obviously, edge cases involving words which are all vowels or consonants are also caught (ex. "aaaaaa", "bbb") The idea behind this rule was that people tend to use just a few keys on the keyboard to generate a random word.
  3. Ratio of unique-letters-to-total-word-size cannot exceed 0.4. (ex. "dfffdf" would fail because there are 2 unique characters used, 'd' and 'f', to make a word of size 6. 2/6 < 0.4) This rule tests to see if the word was created using the same keys in combination. In some ways this is an extension of rule 1, to catch cases where an acceptable mix of vowels and consonants was used (ex. "akkkakkaa") but the word doesn't have enough "variety" of letters to make phonic sense.
  4. All the characters in the word are positioned beside each other on the keyboard. This was the hardest of the rules to implement, since keys on a keyboard don't line up top to bottom. The goal was to catch words generated when a person just mashes their keyboard with one hand. I think this is also the rule carrying the least weight, since lots of valid words would violate it (ex. "fred").
  5.  

    I chose to combine rules 2 and 3 together, for a total score out of 2, where any word scoring less than 2 was considered to be valid (not random).

    Obviously these rules are limited at catching all cases of randomness, and are especially ineffective if the adversary explicitly tries to defeat it by entering an actual name (ex. "Curious George", "Darth Vader"); However, their false acceptance rate seemed like it should be fairly low (so as not to penalize people with slightly obscure names). In my tests, only about 20% of random input provided to the tests was caught. When I ran the tests against first and last names of people in our database, a very small number (< 0.001%) were caught, and upon visual inspection, all of these were random garbage, not actual people's names.

    I'm interested in seeing how other people have tackled this problem.

Click here to try some input into the test.

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Where are they now?

by andrew 23. April 2009 04:46

I enjoy the articles put out by pcworld.ca.

Many of them are history lessons on technology, which I think are important to know where we're going.

Here are 25 computer products that refuse to die.

MS DOS still around and kicking

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Stop Motion Mandala

by andrew 25. March 2009 05:27

Last year I attended a really fantastic event in Austin called MakerFaire.  Me and Jenni camped in our new REI tent, and spent two days playing around with electronics, crafts, games and robots.

At one booth we created a stop motion video using found objects, which was recently posted at Anda Mandala.

Apple II Crack Screens

by andrew 21. March 2009 19:25

I came across this set of splash screens from hacked computer games of the early 1980's.

I played a few of these games growing up, on an Apple II+, and these were a nice throwback to those days.

 

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