False Positives: 08/01/2003

This Guy REALLY Doesn't like using a Mac

The Spiders Part 3 - alternate history of the Afghan War by Patrick Farley

at http://www.e-sheep.com/spiders/ Amazing Web based graphic novel. Love the mesh net, internet driven RPV spider bots.

Mr Farley's blog is Patrick Farley Exposes His Ignorance.

Another favorite at e-sheep inculdes : Delta thrives > the blog of delta aziza nguyen / kepler sphere / equatorial necklace / earth

WTF! Since When did Books get Trailers?

From SlashDork : Doug Chiang's studio has released a trailer for his upcoming book. The book is a collaboration with Sci-Fi author Orson Scott Card of Ender's Game fame, and will include 75 pieces of Chiang's artwork. Chiang is the Concept Art Director at Industrial Light and Magic (and thus the concept art guy for the Star Wars prequels).

The Second teaser is very vivid and compelling. Also, is this the furture of book marketing?

Blackout of '03, a delayed Y2K experience

Around 4:15 Thursday afternoon in Toronto, the power abruptly went out. Okay, what did I do? I hadn't turned on anything. The air con wasn't running. Wasn't me. Must be a local outage. Called Elicia, and they were down at her office too. I still figured it was local and we would be back in a couple of hours, worst-case scenario. I was about to run a errand, so I told Elicia that and I'd call her on my cell phone later. Elicia and her co-workers walked downstairs to the Bymark bar to relax before the power came back and they could wrap up (Thursday was an important date for bond numbers or such).

I popped into the car, turned on the radio (CBC 99.1 FM) and headed out. By the time I hit the first intersection it was obvious this was going to be a long day. First a large minority of drivers were NOT treating the out of commission signal as a four way stop but as an excess to ram ahead (Out of my Way! Very Important Person coming though....", assholes!), and the radio started to report just how large an area was effected. All of Toronto, London, Ottawa then reports of New York, Boston. OH MY GOD. Thankfully not as a result of terrorism, just an ordinary, extraordinary, cascading outage. By the time I made it to the next major intersection (Jane & Dundas) I saw my first voluntary traffic warden (Thank You!), which helped. Shortly after I decided my trip was non-essential (and pointless) so I turned around. By the time I got home it was half an hour later, a trip that would usually only talk 5 minutes there and back.

The radio at home had no batteries, so I bought what I needed at the corner store, and now I was able to continue listening to the reassuring sound of the radio broadcast. Cell phones didn't work so I couldn't get in tough with Elicia. Decided to eat an perishable food item. Got out flashlights. Upstairs phone ran, not the answer machine phone! Strange? It was Stella, Elicia's sister, at her mothers. Confirmed that Mom-in-law was okay and told Stella what I knew of the scope and circumstances. Later our neighbors called offering tea (they have a gas stove). I thanked them but instead fired up the BBQ and had a hamburger (another perishable food item). Then Elicia called. I had been worried (silly me). She'd been enjoying herself and wondered what was going on. We made plans to meet at her sister Tam's place (Kensington Market), and I got back into my chariot.

It was now after eight. Driving down the streets in the setting sun was very strange. Less traffic than before, more volunteer traffic warden's, a few official ones. Elicia, Tam and Ted were eating by candle light in the back. I had brought my portable radio and brought them up to speed. After a couple of hours we drove back home in the now pitch back streets. If you didn't know where the lights were supposed to be, it was easy to find yourself driving though them.

Shouldn't lights be painted with reflective paint, like stop signs? That would make it safer.

So we got home safely, and looked at all the stars that you only see in the countryside, before going to bed. Light came back to our area around 3:30.
People were very well behaved and patience. Thank you to all those brave volunteer traffic warden's who stepped in and made the road safer. Thank you to all our Emergency Services Personal (I've heard that the Fire Crews normally respond to 200 call in a night, went out on 1200 calls). 50 Million people had a delayed Y2K experience, and handled it very well.

It was shocking to learn how dependent we are on the electricity flowing: bank machines and debit cards were down, it was a cash and carry economy; we had water but some people didn't; Gas stations with no power to pump, oh the irony; No TV or Internet, but radio; Fancy phones did not work but the old ones did.

It was like going back to the 19th century for a few hours. I wonder if we can learn any thing for this. About decentralized power generation and distribution? About Light pollution? About life? Nah.....

Get ready for More MSBlast worm

After cashing or slowing down the networks and computer of many organizations (large and small), new variants of the Blaster worm have already been reported. Since Microsoft had issued an alert July 16 about the vulnerability that Blaster exploits, they (at least the larger org's) have no one to blame but themselves for not a) testing the patch, b) deploying the patch c) running a MS OS on a net facing system, d) not running Linux/unix on their net facing systems.

Zone Alarm seems to have handled things okay. All laptops or PC's (corporate or personal) should be running something like this as well as anti-virus systems.

Meanwhile so many people (who should know better) have been trying to figure out what the RPC stands for (the worm exploits an RPC DCOM hole in windows) are doing a Google search on 'RPC' and driving up the traffic to the XML-RPC site (in order to explain to their PHB's?) (RPC = Remote Procedure Call)

Here's what TechWeb News says about correcting the problem :

Advice For Prevention, Cleansing Of MSBlast Worm By Gregg Keizer, TechWeb News

Experts from all quarters are offering advice on ways to prevent MSBlast worm infection, and how to remove it if it gains a foothold.

Vulnerable Windows systems, which include those running Windows NT 4.0, 2000, XP, and Server 2003, should be patched immediately,
Microsoft urged on the home page of its Web site. The patch can be obtained here.

The Redmond, Wash.-based developer also provided a link to instructions on how to set up Windows XP's Internet Connection Firewall to prevent the worm from spreading to users' PCs, as well as a toll-free number that users can call (866-727-2338) for help removing the worm from infected systems.

The CERT Coordination Center posted advice that included recommendations for enterprises to block
and/or monitor a slew of ports, including TCP and UDP ports 135, UDP port 69, and TCP port 4444.

Anti-virus vendors have updated their definition files to take MSBlast into account, and urge their users to update their anti-virus software immediately.

Several have also made available removal tools to cleanse infected systems, or placed step-by-step instructions for manually removing MSBlast on their Web sites.

Symantec, for example, offered an automated removal tool on its site that users can download for free. F-Secure provided a similar tool for downloading, as well as a separate text document that contains instructions on its use.

Internet Security Systems did not provide a hands-off cleanser, but did offer instructions for removing MSBlast manually. They can be found on
ISS' web site toward the end of this document. It requires editing of the Windows Registry.

Using RSS in JSP

Java Net has an interesting piece on Using RSS in JSP which lead me to Informa, a RSS (Rich Site Summary) library for Java. Worth a look for learning and use in a furture revision of my Lotus Notes News Reader.

What is Fahrner Image Replacement technique, and why you should care

Russell Beattie talks about the huge increase in power behind the combination of XHTML+CSS (I agree), with links to an article In Defense of Fahrner Image Replacement (FIR is a CSS-based background image replacement technique, i didn't know that either!) by Vancouver's Dave Shea of www.mezzoblue.com fame.

A a demo of what is possible look at css Zen Garden a demonstration of what can be accomplished visually through CSS–based design, by selecting any style sheet from the list to load it into this page. Quite stunning

What's important about XP

Extreme Programming can be a radical and threating changes for anyone, even managment! ONLamp.com: Five Lessons You Should Learn from Extreme Programming [Jul. 31, 2003] focus's more on the Why before mentioning the What (or even the WHT!)

Code for Maintainability
Know Your Status
Communicate Early and Often
Do Things That Matter
Fix Your Most Important Problem First

Ask your Boss if these 5 things are important. When she agrees, then together look for ways to get there. XP by stealth! Hmm.. Then only question is when do you make your Boss aware of Extreme Programing (or Agile Development, if you prefer)?

Lotus Notes News Reader v0.3

New release of my R5.x Lotus Notes RSS News Aggregator. Many new features and improvements. I'm finding it very usable, and useful. NNRv.3.zip

What's a RSS News Aggregator?

New Features include :

An About Document
Improved Notes UI (outline, pages, and frameset)
includes a link to an action to process all active feeds.

Moved RSS Feed processing to a Java library. first attempted using a Java library for new agents got dreaded "Can`t make static reference to method". successful using Java library (july 23).
Created a Agent for reading selected feeds only in the News Feed view. July 22 2003, agent now using Java Library.
Reduce duplicate news entries. If a feed is run twice, rather than have 2 duplicate items either update the existing entry or do not create a new document. updating is preferred, in cause they edited the item, but initially just catch it and don't save a new document for RSS 2.0 use guid field and channel title to do lookup. for other feed types use item title and channel title.
Changed News views to show unread marks, so now I can quickly scan for new news items
Parse DC:Date and PubDate fields into domino date field, (NewsItemDate). News views use this field or @Created if it's not available. (or should I use a channel date?)
Changed News views to sort on NewsItemDate descending, new view sorted by NewsItemDate first. even easy to scan for what's new.

So what you think? email : ian@falsepositives.com

Update Dec 22 2003 : Here's how to get to working with Lotus Notes R6.x

See More, Categories : Domino/RSS

Napstizing the Record Companies

Robert X. Cringely writes about Son of Napster, One Possible Future for a Music Business That Must Inevitably Change . No doubt this is going to bouncing about the Blogosphere very shortly. Key points : the technology for digital music distribution is here (indead, it old news). companies that manufactured horse drawn carriages could have tried to make automobiles illegal Question : how did hourse drawn carriages respond? Cringely idea, called "Snapster" uses Fair Use sharing, and wide share distriubution to address the legal issue and lobbing of the Music Industry and it's lackey the RIAA.

Real World Business Intelligence

Globe and Mail reports on Marketing by numbers using marketing optimization to do predictive modelling: figuring out, based on statistical data culled from operational computer systems and past marketing campaigns, which customers are likely to respond if the bank sends them an offer -- a letter and/or phone call inviting them to buy a new product such as a credit card.

August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web

I wanted to post this story, from a year ago, in light of my Lotus Notes News Reader (the next interation is comming all nicely thanks).

Lotus Notes News Reader v0.2

This is an early draft of a R5.x Lotus Notes RSS News Aggregators.

See "What is RSS", for more detail, but the short answer is that Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is an XML-based format for content distribution, containing recent or changed items from a website.

I've included several example feed url's. Add your own Feeds, make them active and go. I've built it to handle RSS formats 0.91, 0.92, 2.0 and 1.0 (sometimes know as RDF). More detailed help, new features to follow. Given the growing number of Lotus Notes Domino weblogs (blogs), I thought it was over due time to have a a tool to read those, and other sources, in Lotus Notes as well. By all means email me with suggestions, feedback, etc....enjoy! NNRv.2.zip

A Note about RSS feeds...On many websites, and blogs the xml feed is identified with this a xml gif such as . for example Infoworld point to several feed on their home page this way :
Web Services The Notes News Reader need the url under the tiny xml gif : http://www.infoworld.com/rss/webservices.rdf, which is a RDF or RSS 1.0 feed.

update >> Lotus Notes News Reader v0.3 is the one you want.