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Perhaps October 17 th should come to be known as Reality Day . We might use the occasion to reflect upon the importance of reality in our daily lives, and to acknowledge that, like Mother Nature, reality can't be fooled. Why October 17 th ? On this day just three years ago, many of us settled down to read an article by Ron Suskind entitled "Without a Doubt: Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush," and came upon a passage that caused us to spray breakfast beverage on the pages of the Sunday New York Times Magazine section. Here it is: In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency. The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call Read More...
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"Here in Guilford Country, N.C. [teacher] turnover has become so severe ... recruiters have been advertising nationwide, organizing teacher fairs and offering one of the nation's most generous recruitment bonuses, $10,000 to instructors who sign up to teach Algebra I." — The New York Times , August 27, 2007, page A1 "More than 90 percent of the Army's new recruits since late July have accepted a $20,000 'quick ship' bonus to leave for basic combat training by the end of September, putting thousands of Americans into uniform almost immediately." — The Washington Post , August 26, 2007, via MSNBC Read More...
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They were careless people... — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby Read More...
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Mary Cheney's baby will have two mommies, and that is just fine with President Bush When People magazine asked him what he thought of the news that Vice President *** Cheney's daughter, who is a ***, was pregnant with a child whom she will raise with her longtime partner, Heather Poe, Mr. Bush said: "I think Mary is going to be a loving soul to her child. And I'm happy for her." — NY Times, Dec. 16, 2006, p. A15, (available online here ) Read More...
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"Clearly, what U.S. forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough." — Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, classified memo of Nov. 6, 2006, reported in the N.Y. Times , Dec. 3, 2006. Read More...
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Yes, it's Yet Another Posting About Spam. After my previous two postings this week, I promised myself "¡No más!" Nobody wants to read this stuff. Let me instead try to write something that actually hasn't been said a thousand times before. But this morning when booting up my machine, instead of the hundred-and-something emails I normally expect, I got several thousand. Here's why: Almost all spam is intended to persuade the recipient to visit a web site. For that reason, the From and (optionally) Return-Path headers are really irrelevant. To make the email appear more authentic, however, often these headers contain email address fabricated from an existing domain name, for example, MisterMxyzptlk@charlespetzold.com . That appears to be a valid email address because the domain name exists, but in reality the only person who works here is me, and that's not my name. At about 1:45 this morning, somebody sent out a bunch of spam with From and Return-Path headers containing email addresses based Read More...
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"Say you're writing a program and you discover you've done something wrong, like every time you try to use the program, a button pops up. Most programmers go in, analyze their program, find out what causes the button to pop up and cure it so it doesn't do that. [John] Draper [aka Captain Crunch] would go in and code around the button so when the bug occurs, the program knows it's made an error and fixes it, rather than avoiding the error in the first place. The joke is, if Draper were writing math routines for addition and he came up with the answer 2 + 2 = 5, he would put a clause in the program, if 2 + 2 = 5, then the answer is 4." — Chris Espinosa as quoted in Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984), ch. 13 This type of solution is commonly called a "kludge." The kludge doesn't address the actual problem. The kludge addresses a symptom of the problem and hopes nobody will notice the difference. Another example: When Deirdre first bought her house in the Read More...
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Many of us in the computer industry have parents or grandparents who have gotten their first computers after retirement, and who enjoy exchanging email with their friends. For me, I think it will be just the reverse — I'm looking forward to old age and "retirement" so I can get rid of email. I currently receive a steady barrage of about one email every three minutes. That's about 20 an hour, and about 480 per day. All but a handful (well under 1%) are spam and scams of various sorts. About 11:00 AM on Thursday morning Deirdre and I headed out to my mother's house in Jersey, and then to my brother's house for Thanksgiving dinner. We stayed overnight there, and the following day we drove up to visit Deirdre's mother and sister in Utica. We stayed overnight in Utica and got back to NYC about 5:00 PM today . We were gone about 54 hours. I knew before booting up that I'd be dealing with over 1,000 junk emails. Among those thousand emails were a half dozen important ones, including one Read More...
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