It turns out that time() is going to report 1234567890 on Valentine’s Day this year for about 1/3 of the planet. Anyone on the wrong side of Greenwich Mean Time gets the joke.
One of the most amazing things to me about the typical adware scumbag is their desperation to justify their own behavior. An interview with such a person just went onto slashdot, in which in the site afterword, he attempts to compare his choices to the Millgram Experiment.
Of course, anyone with half a clue will remember three things:
The dirtbag goes on to talk about how difficult it was to ignore a challenging occupation when one doesn’t have many other options. Thing is, I could be making tons of money as a pirate, or writing malware, and I manage to get through my day without doing it. I’m also willing to bet that Drew Peters wasn’t actually looking for other jobs at the time.
“It’s even harder if the bad starts out small and slowly gets bigger.”
Horseshit. The second you do something bad, you object, and if they try to force you, you walk away. That’s why when I found out my old boss Russell was triple- or more billing his clients in my name, I told him that he stopped tomorrow, or I walked. Did I get fired? Sure, but I told the client what happened, so so did Russell, and I ended up getting the job back with a different boss and a much larger hourly billable.
Oh, and I had my honesty and decency intact.
Go to hell, Matt Knox. It’s not that hard to not write malware. It’s just hard for people like you. I hope that eventually you find yourself the victim of the things you’ve done to others; you’ve almost certainly caused far more damage than you’ll ever understand, during a time where it was extremely easy to get other work.
Disgusting.
A happy, healthy and safe 2009 to everyone. Remember the best parts in people you know, help the less fortunate, and help make 2009 better than 2008 in your part of the world.
[digg-reddit-me]I put an email address on usenet which I created solely as a test, using a name that I’m pretty sure nobody on Earth has. Within four days, it was getting Classmates reunion notices, and emails saying that my friends were trying to contact me, and that all I had to do was sign up for an account to find out who, and about what.
Unsolicited commercial email, and fraud to boot. Pretty much the definition of SPAM, isn’t it? So why isn’t anyone going after them like they are for the other spammers? Aren’t there vast sums of money involved?
Am I the only person who resents having to pay for SMS when I’m already paying for unlimited data?
THIS IS ONLY HALF WRITTEN. I have been sitting on this post, waiting for the mood to finish it, for months; because EEP18 is now being treated as a likely implement, I am immediately publishing the half-written version, because it exposes many (though not all) of the serious, irreconcilable problems with EEP18.
On the mailing list, people are actively trying to bring Erlang up to snuff with regards to web standards. One of the more unfortunate choices being discussed is JSON as a data notation. JSON, unfortunately, does not actually map to Erlang in a useful way. Joe Armstrong has gone as far as to suggest BIFs, which are decidedly unrealistic as well as unnecessary. My goal is to create a JSON handling library. However, the mailing list is beginning to put momentum behind an alternative proposal which is currently presented in BIF form.
This post explains why my approach is different. Many of the issues herein are discussed by the tabled EEP (EEP 18, “JSON BIFs” by Rickard O’Keefe), but some are not, and some of these issues are accepted when I believe they should not be. It is my position that EEP 18 is unacceptably dangerous. I will explain why.
[digg-reddit-me]My good friend Jeff happened to mention offhand his knowledge of a document I’ve been looking for for quite some time now. I’m sharing it with my readers in case they’re looking for something similar.
Let me be forward: I cannot stand the various Objective C books I’ve tried. They all want to teach me to be a programmer. I’m already there. I just want a book like Stroustrup. The PragProg book is awful: the first several chapters are about Mac development tools, like I give a damn. Everything’s through interface wizards. It’s nauseating.
Jeff heard mein painz0rz, and turned me on to From C++ to Objective-C. It isn’t perfect: it’s not super comprehensive, and it’s translated from a different native language (French), which leaves a few passages cumbersome. However, as one can tell from reading the intro, the author of the document, much like me, found little to love in the state of Objective C documentation, and wanted to write something for people who were already well established.
Kudos to Pierre Chatelier for writing the book that Apple and Alan Kay could not.
My boss Ryan wants the engineers at Kayako to start being more transparent on what they’re working on on the company blog. So, uh, I’m writing there. Yay. Just thought I’d let my traffic know; the content I put there will be solely about SupportSuite stuff, since that’s what I work on, but some of it is sorta interesting.
My boss’ boss, Varun, is letting me open source some of the work I’m doing at Kayako. I’m not supposed to talk about the interesting three until they’re ready for release, but I can tell you that a JavaScript ISO8601 implementation is among them, and that they’re all going to be MIT licensed, no GPL contamination.
More news as I get my butt in gear and finish the libraries in question. But, yay Varun!
PersonalScUtil
[digg-reddit-me]Update: These bastards called me at 4:30am to tell me how sorry they were that they were making inappropriate phone calls. When I asked for the company owner’s contact number, they said it had just been changed, and they didn’t know the new one (yeah right). When, after talking for 20 minutes, I asked Lorraine for the company’s mailing address, which they are required by law to provide, she told me she’d take my numbers off of their list, hung up the phone and stopped answering.
She didn’t even get the numbers she was going to remove from the list, of course.
I get three or four calls from this company a day, to a private cellular phone which is on the state and national do not call lists. Because this is starting to be well known, I am distributing information about the companies involved, so that the other people wrestling with these fraudulent calls can begin to fight back.
It doesn’t take that many people calling the phone company and police to get this handled, but it does take more than one.
It’s Dealer Warranty Services. You can speak with Shane Richards or “Lance the Manager” who refuses to identify himself. The company owners are Jeff Zykan and Mark Schwab. They will tell you they will call you back; they never do. Eventually they blame this on “Craig” at Voice Solutions, which is an unmanned phone switch that never has human responses and does not return calls from voicemail; 1-727-532-7100. If you manage to talk to craig, he will give you a fake number to call back (the one he gave me was for Walla Walla University.)
Be careful – these people turn off the phones to avoid calls. Amazing scumbags.
They know how far in violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act they are. Your appropriate first step is to check if you are in a one party consent state (they are), which allows you to tape record your calls without warning the other end. Then, call them, and ask them for the contact information they’re required by law to provide.
When they refuse, contact your phone company and tell them you want to file an abusive caller claim. The phone company should begin a report then instruct you to call your local police.
Call your NON-EMERGENCY local police number (do not use 911). Ask to file a police report. It’s free and takes about five minutes. Then call your phone company back and finish the abusive caller complaint.
When enough of these get filed, the phone company can disconnect the source of the calls.
The best way to deal with illegal calls is to use the law to end their ability to do business.
The phone number to Dealer Warranty Services is 1-800-581-1575.