It was such a small potato that it didn’t need a nail and, somehow, didn’t get punctured before going into the oven. When it came out, the first touch of the fork detonated the thing:
Memo to self: always puncture potatoes before baking!
Category: Oddities
Who’d’a thunk it?
-
Website Pwnage
Despite the fact that nobody bothers to crack your web passwords, as it’s easier for them to crack the entire server and scoop out everyone’s personally sensitive bits like so much caviar, all websites remind / require you to pick strong passwords. So, when I registered myself on a high-value website, I did what I always do: ask my password-generation program for a dollop of entropy.
It came up with something along the lines of:
Gmaz78fb'd]
You can see where this is going, right?
Pressing Submit (which always makes me whisper Inshallah with a bad accent) produced:
The mumble.com website is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.
Little Bobby Tables rides again!
[Yes, pwnage.]
-
Calculator Set, Nuclear, M28 — FSN 6665-897-8697
Found this relic while I was looking for something else.
The M1 Radiac calculator, which produces your expected radiation dose, given the reading from a Geiger counter or one of those, the elapsed time since the bang, and how long you’ll be exposed:
ABC-M1 Radiac Calculator If you’re a belt-and-suspenders type, you might carry a dosimeter, too, which calls for a homebrew charger or, better, an official one.
The M4 Nuclear Yield Calculator which, according to those Official Instructions [Update: dead link], gives incorrect answers and has been replaced by the M4A1:
M4 Nuclear Yield Calculator They’re basically circular nomographs, made from stacked plastic disks, with various index lines and notations. You could use the flat nomographs with a ruler, but what’s the fun in that?
All inside a vintage plastic pouch:
M28 Pouch Some of the stuff around here, well, I hope I never have a need for…
[Update: That comment there has a link to a DIY version. Go for it!]
-
Female Cardinal With One Foot
A female cardinal missing her right tarsus has been part of the mixed flock visiting our feeder this winter:
Female cardinal with one leg She looks a bit frowsy; it’s hard for a bird to groom herself with just one leg.
I managed to get eight seconds of video that look significantly better after applying Youtube’s video stabilization:
It’s a quality of life issue, but making do with one foot is probably better than starring in a window strike:
Female cardinal – window strike All the pix were hand-held through two panes of 1955-era window glass with the lens set for maximum telephoto.
-
Rant: Software Testing
I admit to having expectations, perhaps unreasonable expectations, about what should transpire after filing a bug report with a software project large enough to have a bug tracking system.
- Acknowledge the report right away, lest it appear nobody cares.
- Figure out what else you need to know; I give good bug report, but if you need more, ask now.
- Triage, set, and meet a due date, lest your development process appear shambolic.
- When we outsiders become the software testers, keep us in the loop.
My experience shows that the larger and better-funded the organization, the less productive will be any given report: individual problems get lost in the noise. Firefox, Ubuntu, and the late OpenOffice serve as cautionary tales; their forums may help, but submitting a problem report doesn’t increase the likelihood of getting a timely fix.
I cut one-horse open-source operations considerable slack, although they rarely need any. For example, a recent OpenSCAD problem produced turnaround time measured in hours, including a completely new source file cooked up by a bystander and the lead developer polishing it off a sleep cycle later. That was on Christmas Eve, from on vacation, in a low-bandwidth zone, evidently through an iDingus.
Perhaps I’m more sensitive to software quality assurance than most folks, but for good reason.
Quite some years ago, my esteemed wife earned an IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award for testing a major component of a major OS. They don’t hand those tchotchkes out lightly and rarely for anything other than development. She had skip-leveled(*) to her umpteenth-level manager: “IBM must not ship this product. It does not work. It is an embarrassment. I will not concur with any decision to ship.”
The thing eventually shipped, half a year behind schedule, after the developers produced code that passed her test suite and she signed off on the results. Word has it that blood ran ankle-deep in the corridors toward the end.
If you should ever encounter someone in need of a software-testing team leader who doesn’t take crap from anybody, let me know. She’ll definitely require considerable inducement to drag her back into the field, away from her gardens and quilting…
So, anyway, we know a bit about software testing and verification and QC in these parts.
(*) Old-school IBM jargon for walking around several levels of obstructive management to meet with a Big Shot in the corner office. Might not happen in the New IBM, alas.
-
Comment Spam: Industrial Sabotoge?
A new trend in the comment spam load that you don’t see involves a concerted attempt to post irrelevant comments with links to obviously junk websites. The URLs vary, but each site’s links cross-connect it with its peers in weird ways that recycle the few real pages of content (such as it is). However, every page of every website included a specific company’s contact information at the bottom, which is truly weird; usually junk websites have no identifying marks.
Generally I ignore such crap, but after discarding several dozen such comments over the course of a week, I called the company’s phone number and, amazingly, spoke to an actual person. It’s impossible to determine honesty over the phone, but he certainly sounded like a real human who’s busy running a small company and who has no idea what’s going down.
Perhaps his internet marketing company has gone mad?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, that series of spam comments stopped immediately after I hung up the phone. I’ll never know the end of the story, even though we all know the motivation: money changes everything.
The last time this sort of thing happened, I also talked to a pleasant voice who observed that it could well be an unscrupulous competitor (or a hired “internet marketing” company) trying to smear their good name. There’s no way to confirm or deny such a claim, of course.
For what it’s worth, Akismet reports these statistics since Day Zero of this blog, back in December 2008:
- 42,143 total spam
- 1,982 total ham
- 225 missed spam
- 10 false positives
- 99.47% accuracy rate
It’s currently killing over 150 spam comments every day, leaving only a dozen or so for me to flush. The lure of easy money seems irresistible, so there’s no hope of a letup.
-
Credit Card Services: More Details
Just fielded a call from Credit Card Services that got all the way to 6:35 before the final disconnection!
Based on the conversation, we have a few more details:
The slimeball outfit identifying itself as Credit Card Services turns out to be a wholesale demon-dialing operation, which leads one to wonder why the FTC can’t figure this out and take some action. I mean, sheesh, CCS must represent a substantial fraction of the total voice phone call traffic; a few honeytrap numbers should be productive.
Anyhow, when you answer the phone and “press 1 to speak with an associate”, CCS farms the call out to a variety of back-end operations that evidently pay for live prospects (i.e., suckers). In this case, I was talking with someone working for “Client Services”; she was remarkably friendly and patient, which suggests she’s very new to this game.
The minimum balance they’re interested in has dropped to $3k. Used to be $4k; must be a sign of the times.
She wasn’t representing a loan operation, but was quite hazy about the details of how her organization would reduce my loan rates, other than that they “worked with the lenders” to that end. I pointed out that, while I wasn’t mad at her, she should understand that I’m reluctant to discuss my financial affairs with someone who really couldn’t describe the proposition in any detail.
She said that she could “do her best” to get me off the Client Services calling list, but that would have no effect on further calls from Credit Card Services, as other companies would be paying for those calls. She had no idea why “pressing 3 to discontinue further calls” didn’t work, of course.
So I asked if she had a supervisor that might be able to explain how the whole operation worked, she said she’d try to find one, and the next minute produced the usual clunks and tinks that presage a dropped call.
Perhaps the pleasant voices are “make money at home” suckers fronting for the loan sharks?
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 