taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Web: Urgh, I still have this damn cold I picked up in Ireland… sniffle cough etc. More vitamin C needed!

Anyway, just a quick plug for a very deserving Firefox extension, one I haven’t seen mentioned widely. It’s pretty common, when you wish to print out a web page, that you wish you could get rid of the obnoxious extra-wide sidebar tables, gigantic ads, or other extraneous parts of the page. Well, now you can:

Nuke Anything is a Mozilla/Firefox extension which offers two great features in the right-click context menu:

• Remove this object: this will remove the object you’ve right-clicked on — a table TD, paragraphs, images, IFRAMEs, etc.
• Remove selection: more usefully, this allows you to select exactly what you want to remove with a left-button drag, then right-click to remove it.

It’s really useful. I almost never print anything out these days without scrubbing off a few unwanted sidebars ;)

Tags: anything, cough, extension, firefox, page, plug, remove, sniffle, urgh, vitamin, web

Mail: GMail users, check your mail; if mine was anything to go by, you should have three new invites to give out.

Tags: anything, check, gmail, mail, mine

Tech: GPRS roaming works… technically. Joi Ito gets a $3,500 bill for checking his mail around the world. Yowch.

FWIW, I’ve never met anyone who’s used GPRS for anything other than the odd demo, or emergency use only, except for employees of the mobile carriers — and they get it for free.

My bet is that the basic failure was a disconnect between the real world and the specification stages — someone somewhere picked up one of those massively-inflated analyst reports a few years ago, said ‘I’d like a piece of that road-warrior market which will be worth $5 billion by 2005, it says here!’ and set prices (to stun) accordingly.

Tags: anyone, anything, bill, fwiw, gprs, ito, joi, mail, tech, world, yowch

Work: Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks, Danny O’Brien’s ETech talk.

Amazingly, despite not being an alpha geek ;), I already use all these things:

• a todo.txt file (anything else is inconvenient).
• everything incoming comes through email, including RSS (thanks to rss2email). Again, anything else is inconvenient; I couldn’t be bothered with another desktop app.
• I hack scripts for every repetitive task I run into
• I sync instead of backup; everything has a CVS repository running on a remote server, even my home dir
• I have a nasty tendency to web-scrape data

These tips definitely are good advice. Although I have a feeling the result is optimised to a weblogging UNIX geek who spends hours hacking perl/python scripts. ;)

I’m looking forward to LifeHacks.com when it does eventually go live… should be interesting.

Tags: anything, email, etech, everything, geek, hacks, life, overprolific, secrets, tech, work

Admin: If you have anything hosted on dogma.slashnull.org, our old shared server, get in touch with the boxhosting list, Vin, or even myself ASAP. It’s going to be gone in 2 weeks…

Tags: admin, anything, asap, dogma, list, org, server, slashnull, touch

Vacation: We’re back. Well, technically, my body is back, but the silver thread is reeling in somewhere over Greenland. So I’m pre-classifying my mail and looking for urgent stuff with my eyes glazing over instead of doing anything more useful.

Scams: Interesting Wired News article: ‘Cyber-blackmail artists are shaking down office workers, threatening to delete computer files or install pornographic images on their work PCs unless they pay a ransom’. ‘The e-mail typically contains a demand that unless a small fee is paid … they will attack the PC … or download onto the machine images of child pornography.’

Of course, it’s simply spammed out, and they phish in anyone who is dumb enough to take it seriously and reply. But it does raise an interesting point, which I read about last week in this interview with Pete Townshend:

‘Perhaps Townshend (was) thinking of a case at Southwark Crown Court in 1998, in which the judge made it clear what constituted possession: that you were in possession of child pornography not just if you actively downloaded it, but if it appeared on your computer screen at all.’

So that sounds like, if child-porn images are found on a PC — and it doesn’t matter how they got there — the PC’s owner is liable. So theoretically this could be exploited to cause serious legal difficulties to a UK resident with a lack of computer literacy, or a bad email client that displays images in messages from unknown senders without user approval first. Another bad law.

Funny: Andy Kershaw in North Korea: songs about revolutionary cabbage-growing.

Tags: anything, body, child, computer, mail, pornography, possession, silver, stuff, thread, vacation

ThisIsLondon: ‘David Blaine thought he was ready for anything. The US illusionist suspended in a glass box over London had prepared himself for 44 days of starvation, loneliness and boredom.

But there was one thing he had not planned for - Londoners.

… the prize for invention went to golfers who teed up with clubs on Tower Bridge and tried hitting the box with golf balls.’

Tags: anything, boredom, box, glass, illusionist, londoners, prize, starvation, thing, thisislondon

As I’ve said before, C-R is not an acceptable way, alone, to deal with spam. You’re just pushing the work away from yourself, and onto your legitimate correspondents — and you won’t make any friends as a result. Things get worse when anything more complex than simple person-to-person mail intrudes, like internet mailing lists. (And come on folks — that particular innovation is only 24 years old ;)

Case in point this week: Declan McCullagh gets bitten:

My reluctant conclusion is that C-R systems with flawed implementations have the potential to end legitimate mailing lists as we know them today.

and Dave Farber says:

If I start getting a flood of challenges from earthlink ipers that require my response I will most likely declare them SPAM and you will stop receiving IP mail.

John Levine’s follow-up is well worth a read, as he predicts massive (and trivial) whitelist exploitation by spammers to avoid C-R — and then we’ll be worse off than we were when we started.

Finally, there’s quite a funny quote in John’s mail:

A relatively easy to solve problem with challenge systems is that most of them are written by dimwits who don’t understand the way that e-mail really works. In 1983 the 4.3BSD Berkeley Unix ‘vacation’ program correctly dealt with mail from lists and other mechanical sources, yet 20 years later I still see out-of-office replies from Lotus Notes and MS Exchange to list mail every day. (Is there really nobody at IBM or Microsoft who used 4.3BSD or knows the rules of thumb to recognize non-personal but legit mail?)

I have often wondered that myself ;)

Tags: anything, bsd, innovation, internet, mail, mailing, result, spam, way, work

a memorable mistranslation found in a guesthouse at Annapurna Base Camp :

Help! I’m being underclocked! ;) Perhaps that explained the shortness of breath and dizziness…

(I did some scanning of the hundreds of photos from last year’s trip about a month ago, but haven’t had a chance to fix ‘em all up yet. And I’m not uploading anything until I get to CA and some decent bandwidth.)

Tags: anything, breath, camp, chance, dizziness, guesthouse, mistranslation, month, trip, year