Month: September 2002

this scam keeps working, I guess


I am the Chairman of the contract Advisory Committee
(CAC) of the Nigerian Federal Ministry of Works and
Housing (FMWH). I am seeking your assistance to enable
me transfer the sum of US$16,500,000.00 (Sixteen
Million, Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars)
into your private/company account.

The fund came about as a result of a contract awarded
and executed on behalf of my Ministry the Federal
Ministry of Works and Housing.The contract was supposed
to be awarded to two foreign contractors to the tune of
US$60,000,000.00 (Sixty Million United States Dollars).
But in the course of negotiation, the contract was
awarded to a Bulgarian contractor at the cost of
US$43,500,000.00 (Forty-Three Million, Five Hundred
Thousand United States Dollars) to my benefit unknown
to the contractor. This contract has been
satisfactorily executed and inspected as the Bulgarian
firm is presently securing payment from my Ministry,
where I am the Executive Director in-charge of all
foreign contract payment approval.

So let me get this straight: you have US$16.5 million, skimmed from an overfunded contract and you want me to help you spirit out of the country illegally.

Wow, how much trouble can I get into in one swell foop . . . .

what’s wrong with this picture?

It’s a bit frustrating to follow the rules while other flout them. If this guy is bringing in $2,000 a month and not reporting it, what’s my incentive to play fair?

The Seattle Times: Life after layoff: Dales to sell the house

It also meant taking on a double-sized Seattle Post-Intelligencer motor route — technically an independent business — and putting it in Karen’s name in case Rodney ever needed to collect unemployment compensation. [emphasis mine]

Rodney has been collecting $496 a week in unemployment benefits, and extensions could carry that into next year.

The Seattle Times: Layoff family sells home, adjusts to apartment life

And he continues to drive a double-size Seattle Post-Intelligencer route, an independent business held in Karen’s name. The route takes about 5 hours a night and brings in $2,000 a month. Together, the jobs and unemployment checks add up to $5,000 a month.

It sounds a lot to me like he’s taking some trouble to adhere to the letter of the law without paying much attention to the spirit of it.

The last question asked in the weekly benefits certification process is “Did you work for any employer?” and I would say he is working for his wife’s independently held business. I wonder how he answers that question every Sunday?

annoyances

  • apache2: there seems to be no easy way to migrate from apache’s httpd v.1 to version 2. I have tried a couple of times now and failed. The config file isn’t read properly and little things like SSI don’t work, cgi-bin isn’t active, and logging goes wrong. It sounds like the wrong config file is being read, but try as I might, I can’t get the one I want to be used. The apachectl script, for all its virtures, could benefit from either explicitly defining the file to be used or a path/directory in which to find it, like say /usr/local/apache2/conf.
  • Those online docs for the automounter are worse than bad, they’re dangerous. I found the one machine on which I had made those changes all but unusable. The only command I could run without getting an error that the system was unable to fork a process was echo which being shell built-in didn’t need any resources. I rebooted and messages had a whole lot of messages from the NFS process used by amd, so it seems to have just taken over the system. Needless to say, I have de-activated amd at boot time until I figure out if it’s worth documenting and then doing so.

browser standard compliance

I am in Windows 2000 right now and have looked at this weblog in IE 5.00.2920.0000 and Mozilla 1.0. IE manages to trash the layout of the page if the window is narrowed to squeeze the right column, while Mozilla just squeezes it all proportionally.

I suppose IE 6 fixes that, but this is IE 5, not 1 or 2.

my struggle with digital images

LED Casio QV Software

Arcgh. I needed to extract some images from a digital camera we used today (first day of kindergarten for my son and heir, so photos were required, the APS camera film hid from us, we took our old Casio QV-11 as well as my Nikon 8008).

So how to get the pictures out? Hmm, no modern Macs have serial ports, and this camera predates USB, so that’s out. I have used gPhoto before, but for some reason it failed to establish a serial connection. OK, I’ll see what I can do in Windows.

Hmm, the software that came with the ^*&^(*&)() camera doesn’t work: issues with the serial port. Now I’m getting annoyed. Windows says it can see the camera in its troubleshooting mode, so I Google up a freeware application from a UK software design consultancy, and by gum, it works. No serial issues, no whinging, just images, 78 of them (over a serial line, that takes a while).

Now, obviously the serial port is fine, so what happened? Why did two guys who did this just as proof of concept succeed where Casio and the gPhoto team were stymied? It’s especially annoying that gPhoto worked in the past and doesn’t now.

Hmm, so now I tried the Casio software and it worked. So once again, I have to wonder how these other guys managed to make this work, such that it works with other applications now. I did some power-cycling that presumably cleaned up any lingering connections, yet it failed until I tried QV (the freeware thing I found).

Interesting, in a frustrating sort of way.

clarification: emulation vs syscall mapping

Martin Cracauer’s FreeBSD Page

[ . . . . ] in the FreeBSD/Linux case the base OS is very similar and the emulation layer doesn’t provide a full emulated system, but is a very thin layer to map the difference of the Linux and FreeBSD API. Since both are UNIX derivates, these differences are very small. No hardware emulation is required.

I was trolling through my referrals and found this page: very interesting overview of FreeBSD, both relative to Linux and in its own right.

According to this, calling FreeBSD’s Linux ABI an emulation layer is not accurate.

It clarifies some of what I have already learned, and supplies more detail (the stuff on how the ports collection works is interesting), and in general praises the FreeBSD team and their methods. Using the ftp archive at cdrom.com as a proving ground is interesting but I had no idea it was a single box. That’s walking the walk . . .

The bottomline is that FreeBSD is a complete system and through either a Net connection or media, you can update and support your system(s) without the headaches of any of the other packaging systems. NetBSD’s pkgsrc collection is similar: I thought it was joy to work with as well.