Category: obscure pursuits

my bad

Safari
Available for: Mac OS X v10.3.8, Mac OS X Server v10.3.8
CVE-ID: CAN-2005-0234
Impact: Maliciously registered International Domain Names (IDN) can make URLs visually appear as legitimate sites.
Description: Support for Unicode characters within domain names (International Domain Name support) can allow maliciously registered domain names to visually appear as legitimate sites. Safari has been modified so that it consults a user-customizable list of scripts that are allowed to be displayed natively. Characters based on scripts that are not in the allowed list are displayed in their Punycode equivalent. The default list of allowed scripts does not include Roman look-alike scripts. Credit to Eric Johanson (ericj@shmoo.com) for reporting this issue to us. More information is available here (9).

OK, it took 6 weeks.

the new new new thing

stevenberlinjohnson.com: On Second Thought:

It occurs to me that Jason’s put entirely the wrong spin on this whole pledge drive thing. He’s not asking for donations. He’s selling PageRank! A link from Kottke.org has got to have enough cred with Google to make any blogger want to shell out $30 bucks for a Kottke link to his or her front door. Now — that’s a real “A-List blogger” business

What an idea . . . do I want to gamble $30, given my precarious income (ie, not unlike Kottke’s but without the global reach)?

day trip

We were invited to spend some time up on the Stillaguamish today, so off we went. It was cold and clear, still some snow on the ground.
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One of the highlights was one of the children in the party finding a steelhead redd, filled with fry but buried under mud and too high above the waterline to find their way. We gently dug out 30 or so of them, moving them to the North Fork of the Stilly or depositing them in a still eddy in the French Creek nearby.
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Still wrestling with my new camera to get better images: this one of White Horse Mountain should be a lot better.
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And now I’m too tired to offer anything else.

Continue reading “day trip”

iSync without BlueTooth and extortionate eBay shipping fees

I got a new phone a couple of weeks back — a Motorola V265 flip phone — that seems to be working just fine. It’s a big step from the V120c I have been carrying for the past couple of years, what with the color screen, camera, and all.

Today, the nice USPS driver brought me a cable to hook up it to my iBook so I could use iSync. It was a bit of a gamble, since I didn’t know for sure if it would work. Once I got the cable connected — fiddly little connection that it is — it works. I can put all the listings in my Address Book into the phone, after having merged them.

So I paid $.97 for the cable (with the attendant mini-CD that I can’t use since I have a slot loading system) and the package shows $.98 paid for shipping. So the $10 or so for shipping and handling went where, exactly? <grumble: the joys of eBay . . . >

Anyway, it seems to work as far as getting data back and forth, and as a bonus the cable will charge the phone as well. I’m not sure the two address databases match, though since I seem to have multiple records for people with different contact methods (one for home phone, for cell phone, for email . . . ) rather than a single record with multiple ways to contact the person.

More as I explore this.

Is it better to be lucky or good?

Couple Build Become Blogging Trailblazers:

Husband-And-Wife Team Build Startup Into Blogging Trailblazer, Making Them Easier to Setup

So the Trotts made $11.5 million with the initial investment from Joi Ito, and now they report 7 million users between MovableType, TypePad, and LiveJournal.

Not bad. I don’t know how many are paying $4.95/month for TypePad, but that seems like a pretty nice revenue stream.

MT is a great way to start. Shame I couldn’t keep using it (and a shame so many other sites still do).

non-drug sore throat remedy

My Son and Heir is being treated for strep, and I have had a sore throat for a few days: draw your own conclusions.

So I went into to get it checked out and while it didn’t register a positive culture on the spot, I was sent away with some things to try. One of this is a throat coating mixture of Benadryl®™ and Maalox®™ 1 tsp each. Interestingly, it works quite well at soothing the throat, and doesn’t taste quite as vile as expected. My secret might be due to the use of a small irrigation syringe left over from the days of medicating smaller patients. Mix the concoction in that, shake it, and squirt it up and past the tongue for best effect.

The LPA said my throat and roof of my mouth looked “viral”, ie red and inflamed, so we’ll see if the longer term culture registers anything. My guess is this is already on the ebb: swabbing the nastiness actually brought relief, rather than a more intense pain.

Now playing: If Not For You by George Harrison from the album “All Things Must Pass (Disc 1)” | Get it

Brad Delong on Chuq Van Rospach on Comment Spam

Chuq’s comment make sense, but Brad takes the next step: I think Google would do well to try that.

Chuq Van Rospach on Comment Spam:

If I were google, I would have taken a different approach. I would not have said, “if you make sure links have a ‘nofollow’ tag we won’t include them in our index.” Instead, I would have said, “Links that are created by somebody other than the page author — i.e., links inside blocks labeled as comments — will *not* be included in our index unless they have a ‘follow’ tag inside them.” Given where we are now, I think the second approach would have done more good and also improved the quality of google’s indexes.