テッククリ Tech Kuri

new posts will be at tokyokuri

2008-04-05T22:53:00.000-07:00

I've decided to consolidate my blogs for simplicity, so new posts will be at tokyo kuri with the "tech" label.

A japanese archiving tool

2008-02-10T23:08:00.001-08:00

One free archiving tool that I've used before is Lhaplus (Japanese site). There are quite a few free tools that I've used and they all seem to be quite good. The only difference seems to be in usability.

An interesting puzzle

2007-09-14T20:57:00.000-07:00

Stack Growth : How would you find out if a machine’s stack grows up or down in memory?

I found this person's solution quite interesting..

extreme programming, kind of

2007-08-30T09:37:00.000-07:00

My current project is giving me a pseudo extreme programming experience, as I spend a lot of time with a colleague trying to figure problems out and debug stuff on the fly. It's partially out of necessity as the colleague doesn't speak Japanese and most of the team doesn't speak that much English. I should read up on extreme programming points and try to apply them.

an article on unicode

2007-07-11T00:42:00.000-07:00

While doing some research on unicode and Java, I ran across a reference to this article on basics. The opening is quite funny, so I'm looking forward to reading it.

debugging your java classpath

2007-07-09T03:07:00.000-07:00

Trying to run stuff from my command line was an interestingly frustrating experience, but this FAQ-type page came in very handy.

practice test take 1

2007-06-20T05:20:00.000-07:00

I got about 72% on my first practice test for SCJP Java 1.4. Had about 44 minutes left over. Not bad, but can do better. The actual test will probably be more difficult so I'd like more than a 20% buffer.

Programming is so much fun

2007-06-07T05:43:00.000-07:00

For about 5 months I've been doing support and troubleshooting for a large project. Good for the conversational and people skills, but not as good for exercising some parts of my brain.

Now I'm back on development, and it's such a joy! I understand coding so much more than people. Heh.

seeking wireless headset recommendations

2007-05-26T06:42:00.000-07:00

I'm not in a hurry, but eventually I'd like to get a wireless headset. The cheapo headset I got has gotten flaky on me (the microphone part has come loose) so I got a cheap microphone that plugs into the mike port (plug?). The wireless headsets I looked at all cost more than I could justify spending on zero research. Recs, anyone? Yes, you, my copious readers. Laf.

While I'm talking about eventual purchases, I'm gonna get a linux box one of these days. Maybe after I move to a bigger place.

Japanese text editor

2007-05-26T05:31:00.000-07:00

I've used Hidemaru, Sakura, WZEditor, xyzzz, and other editors capable of handling Japanese text, but I'm going to check out EmEditor's free version. I used a trial version last year and found it very easy to use, but wasn't motivated to buy it. it.

Java: Processes and Threads

2007-04-30T05:43:00.000-07:00

The Java Tutorials > Essential Classes > Concurrency > Processes and Threads

Sanghera's book confused me so I had to review the differences between processes and threads!

A process has a self-contained execution environment. A process generally has a complete, private set of basic run-time resources; in particular, each process has its own memory space.

...

Threads are sometimes called lightweight processes. Both processes and threads provide an execution environment, but creating a new thread requires fewer resources than creating a new process.

Java: bounded wildcards

2007-04-30T05:20:00.000-07:00

The Java Tutorials > Bonus > Generics > Wildcards

public void drawAll(List shapes) {
...
}

There is a small but very important difference here: we have replaced the type List with List. Now drawAll() will accept lists of any subclass of Shape, so we can now call it on a List if we want.

List is an example of a bounded wildcard. The ? stands for an unknown type, just like the wildcards we saw earlier. However, in this case, we know that this unknown type is in fact a subtype of Shape. (Note: It could be Shape itself, or some subclass; it need not literally extend Shape.) We say that Shape is the upper bound of the wildcard.

There is, as usual, a price to be paid for the flexibility of using wildcards. That price is that it is now illegal to write into shapes in the body of the method. For instance, this is not allowed:

public void addRectangle(List shapes) {
shapes.add(0, new Rectangle()); // Compile-time error!
}

You should be able to figure out why the code above is disallowed. The type of the second parameter to shapes.add() is ? extends Shape-- an unknown subtype of Shape. Since we don't know what type it is, we don't know if it is a supertype of Rectangle; it might or might not be such a supertype, so it isn't safe to pass a Rectangle there.

On the other hand, if you specify the upper bound of the wildcard, it's okay to add items to the List shapes.

Java: regular expressions

2007-04-30T05:06:00.000-07:00

The Java Tutorials: Essential Classes > Regular Expressions > Quantifiers

Greedy Meaning
X? X, once or not at all
X* X, zero or more times
X+ X, one or more times
X{n} X, exactly n times

Need to memorize these.

combining blogs

2007-04-30T05:03:00.000-07:00

I was thinking of migrating this blog into my tokyo kuri blog, now that we have tags available. But given my last posts, it'd be a little embarrassing to force this content onto general readers. It's a topic of limited interest, after all, if you don't work with this stuff.

I will be copying my posts from my work sns over to here, though.

Java: formatters

2007-04-30T04:58:00.000-07:00

I'll need to revisit this topic as I only have superficial comprehension of Java Formatters like NumberFormat.

Currency objects are distinct from locales because a particular locale may use multiple currencies.

Java: super keyword

2007-04-30T04:57:00.000-07:00

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/java/IandI/super.html

Invocation of a superclass constructor must be the first line in the subclass constructor.

The syntax for calling a superclass constructor is

super();
--or--
super(parameter list);

update on Sanghera's SCJP Exam for J2SE 5

2007-04-27T22:09:00.000-07:00

I've started rereading the book, and I definitely don't recommend it for preparing for the SCJP exam for J2SE 5.

There are so many errors! Significant errors, like what exception FileReader and FileWriter throw from their read/write methods - there's a table aggregating the I/O exceptions for various Stream classes and their read/write methods, and it's wrong. Kind of annoying. Keeps me sharp, I supposed, but the Sun book has to be better.

Also, the lack of formatting of code snippets is really annoying; it's hard to read.

I'll post a list of the errata later.

For now:
p.209
* "public FileReader(...) throws IOException"
should be "throws FileNotFoundException"

p.210
* "public FileWriter(...) throws IOException"
should be "throws FileNotFoundException"

p.214
* Table 8-6 FileReader, FileWriter exception thrown by Read/Write Methods should be IOException.

p.214
* It alternatively refers to "a string and two objects are written to the stream" and "the String and the Date Objects that were written to the file," when the first code snippet writes two Strings and one Object.

* bottom code snippet "(MyClassSerial)" should be "(MySerialClass)" on the 4th and 5th lines.

Java 5 SCJP take 2!

2007-01-14T09:16:00.000-08:00

After being a little demoralized last year (what, I can't learn the new features in 4 weekends?), it's time to take up the gauntlet again and count down till June when I absolutely have to take the Java Certified Programmer Exam for Java 5. My voucher expires then, as I mistakenly bought the voucher before I was ready to pass the exam.

Do not buy the exam voucher until you finished 80% of your studying! Would be my suggestion in order to save you money.

Because it would be unhappiness to fail the exam.

Anyway, take 2 begins!

Wish me luck.

Current useful study guides:
* Java Tutorial for the Sun Certified Java Programmers Exam
* a practice exam a day (Java 5)
* last minute review guide

I'm thinking about buying this study guide:
http://bookweb.kinokuniya.co.jp/guest/cgi-bin/booksea.cgi?ISBN=0072253606&BN=OFF
But am balking a bit at the cost. Still, it's convenient.

There's also Marcus Green's book.

In the end, Sanghera's book left me more confused than anything. I guess I really need to practice and work out the new concepts; just reading a book won't do it all.

SCJP 5.0: Collections: the Map Interface

2006-09-18T02:41:00.000-07:00

Some Map Interface methods:

void clear()

boolean containsKey(Object key)

boolean containsValue(Object value)

boolean equals(Object obj)

Object get(Object key)

int hashcode()

boolean isEmpty()

Object put(Object key, Object value)

void putAll (Map m)

Object remove(Object key)

int size()

Collection values()

For more detail see Sun's tutorial.

SCJP 5.0: Collections: the Collections Interfaces

2006-09-18T02:32:00.000-07:00

Collection
^       ^
|       |
List   Set
        ^
        |
       SortedSet

Map
^
|
SortedMap

SCJP 5.0: Collections: the Collection Interface

2006-09-18T02:28:00.000-07:00

Some methods in the Collection Interface:

boolean add(Object obj)
boolean addAll(Collection c)

void clear()

boolean contains(Object obj)
boolean containsAll(Collection c)

boolean isEmpty()

boolean equals(Object obj)

int hashcode()

boolean remove(Object obj)
boolean removeAll(Collection c)

Iterator iterator()

T[] toArray(T[] array)

For more detail see Sun's tutorial.

An interesting talk on avoiding obsolescence

2006-08-05T21:56:00.000-07:00

From the authors of the Pragmatic Programmer, a talk on How to Keep Your Job.

Tools are more reliable than those funky people anyway.

Regex links

2006-06-26T07:34:00.000-07:00

Regex (regular expresssion) is referred to as 正規表現（せいきひょうげん） in Japanese. And people like to say that Japanese technical language is all straight from English. I think not.

www.silveragesoftware.com has some nice explanations.

There's a sample chapter of Jeffrey Friedl's Regex book.

This page on applying url redirects in Apache gave me some hints on how to write the regex I wanted.

This regex testing page let me test out my expression:
.+\.(bmp|gif|jpg|jpeg|png)$

Basically I need to only allow files with the above extensions.

Java servlet

2006-05-28T19:08:00.000-07:00

What is a servlet?

From Stefan Zeiger's novocode.com:

Servlets are modules of Java code that run in a server application (hence the name "Servlets", similar to "Applets" on the client side) to answer client requests. Servlets are not tied to a specific client-server protocol but they are most commonly used with HTTP and the word "Servlet" is often used in the meaning of "HTTP Servlet".

Struts and file upload

2006-05-21T08:25:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to use a form that has a array of FormFile as a field of the form.

I can use to display the FormFiles with no problem, but when I submit the form, the array only has null values.

To be completely specific, I made a bean where one of the fields is a FormFile.
And my form contains an array of this bean.

When I submit the form, the action gets an array of my bean, but the FormFile attribute is null.

If I create a FormFile field directly in the form and submit it, it works as expected, giving me the uploaded file information.

Is it not possible in struts to upload a variable number of files?

I'm sure it's possible, but I have a feeling it'd be easier to just declare five FormFile fields and deal with that.

update: 2006-05-22:
I made two now obvious mistakes:

1) Need to set indexed="true" for the fields generated inside my iterate loop. This way, instead of generating (in my case) five < input name="uploadFile" type="file"> fields, I can generate
< input name="images[0].uploadFile" type="file">
< input name="images[1].uploadFile" type="file">
< input name="images[2].uploadFile" type="file">
< input name="images[3].uploadFile" type="file">
< input name="images[4].uploadFile" type="file">
where each field has a distinct name (except that there is no space between "<" and "input" normally; I added it so you could see my code).

2) My second mistake was setting the id attribute in the iterate tag to a string different from the name of my file array. My file array is called images, and I set the iterate id to "imageArray." This would generate five fields called imageArray[0].uploadFile, imageArray[1].uploadFile, etc. Since imageArray doesn't exist in my form bean, upon submission of the form the file data gets lost since there is no parameter to save imageArray data to.

Both of these mistakes are really obvious to me now, but I shouldn't have made them at all considering that I encountered the same issues half a year ago. Bleh.

update 2006-06-26: I did have to do a little fiddling to get the validation errors displayed properly. The html:errors tag sadly does not support iteration directly, so you have to use jsp expressions to get the index appropriately.

yahoo mail has the most annoying ads

2006-05-13T09:12:00.000-07:00

I should stop using it. There's this ad that displays a larger ad if you roll over it, obstructing the mail that I want to see. Using tabs in my browser pretty much guarantees that I roll over the stupid add. A short term solution is learning to use the firefox shortcuts.

macromedia got bought by adobe?

2006-04-04T07:10:00.000-07:00

Dang, I really am out of touch with the U.S. IT industry. LAF. Wow...

html links in online banking emails

2006-03-23T16:59:00.000-08:00

With the prolific phishing attacks, I really don't understand why credit card companies and other financial institutions continue to send out emails with html links embedded in them. It seems safer to send the link in text and have the user copy and paste it. Certainly that's less user-friendly, but I think a lot of people don't check link destinations properly. Hopefully those people don't do banking online, but there's no guarantee of that.

C# programming

2006-03-21T22:56:00.000-08:00

So far, all the programming I've been doing in C# has practically been procedural. There's no encapsulation, and it's really hard to create a black box. Messy, very messy so far.

sqlserver rownum equivalent

2006-03-16T00:57:00.000-08:00

There's apparently no equivalent for Oracle's rownum in SqlServer, so this page came in handy for doing the equivalent.

audio recording software, thunderbird

2006-03-14T23:48:00.000-08:00

Occasionally I use Total Recorder to record some of my favorite programs from bbc radio. It's a solid program that I've never had problems with. Definitely worth the mere $12 for the standard version. The pro version seems very nice though, automatically splitting up files for you.

However, after upgrading from XP Home to XP Professional, my installation was messed up so I thought I'd try some other recording programs and see how they compare. Right now I'm testing out Loop Recorder. So far it seems quite straightforward and easy to use.

update: Mar. 17: actually, it's a bit confusing to use. But I like the editing feature; when you save you can specify the exact section you'd like to save.

I'm a little annoyed by how Thunderbird crashes occasionally. I hate losing emails that way.

I don't remember, .NET

2006-03-14T19:03:00.000-08:00

I swear my team leader is falling back on the classic Reagan defense of denying all knowledge. The client asked why we didn't point out that the change that they requested was odd. Team leader's response, "We didn't notice that it was strange." Either he's lying or he has no long term memory.

I can kind of understand the desire to forget all facts related to this project, but it makes me wonder if he's getting senile or something, even though he's only 40.

So far, I am highly unimpressed with .NET. First of all, Visual Source Safe seems pretty weak. It takes a couple clicks to see comments associated with a particular commited change. Also, is it at all integrated with Visual Studio?

The debugger doesn't work at times. For no apparent reason.

C# questions

2006-03-07T23:18:00.000-08:00

Kind of fun reading: C# interview questions.

taco bell?

2006-02-26T20:20:00.000-08:00

I felt like an American the other day.

I was watching a show where this music promoter talked about Eminem visiting Japan. Apparently he really likes Taco Bell and that was the only thing he wanted to eat every day. However, Taco Bell doesn't exist in Japan; none of the Japanese celebrities had ever heard of the chain. So, they actually had Taco Bell staff come to Japan (bearing Taco Bell supplies I presume) and feed Eminem while he was here on tour.

One of the guests on the show asked the promoter what Eminem's favorite Taco Bell food was. She had no idea, so she offered, "Taco Bell hamburger?"

ROTFLMAO. Obviously, they have never been to Taco Bell.

The show is set up so they have 4 people who fall under a specific job description, but one of the 4 is an actress merely playing the role. The celebrity guests get to ask various questions about the work and the 4 people tell stories about their jobs. So that day there were 3 music promoters and one actress playing a music promotor. After hearing the woman say "Taco Bell hamburger," I thought that she had to be the actress. But she turned out to be a real promoter, so apparently she didn't actually deal with the Taco Bell people or look at the food. It also might have been a story that she heard from a coworker, or she could have been just clueless.

Visual Source Safe

2006-02-22T21:29:00.000-08:00

I am so far unimpressed with this versioning control system. Need to read up on how to use it, but the view for commit history and comments is pretty lame.

c# references

2006-02-21T18:25:00.000-08:00

beginner references:
http://www.softsteel.co.uk/tutorials/cSharp/contents.html
http://www.csharp-station.com/Tutorial.aspx

simple form calling and dialog return values:
http://www.publicjoe.f9.co.uk/csharp/csharp19.html

passing values between forms:
http://www.codeproject.com/dotnet/PassingValuesBetweenForms.asp

oracle written user functions

2006-02-14T18:19:00.000-08:00

I needed to write a simple Oracle PL/SQL function today.

This example came in handy.

The difference between a PL/SQL function and a PL/SQL procedure is that a function returns a single value, and a procedure doesn't return any values.

However, a procedure can modify parameters (and I think a function can too), so even if you don't return any values, you can get information back to the caller.

backups

2006-01-19T21:31:00.000-08:00

Everyone's been backing up their computer regularly right?

And I would recommend constantly storing your important documents in 2 physical locations at all times. At least for the accident-prone (me), it really comes in handy.

One of these days I need to buy Beyond Compare from Scooter Software. It's easy to use and reliable. I like it a lot. I use it for comparing files and directories for differences. Good when you're sharing files outside of CVS.

J2EE multibyte character processing

2005-12-07T03:06:00.000-08:00

I just ran across an interesting article on Multibyte-character processing in J2EE. It looks like a good introduction to the issue.

Here's an IBM article on J2EE settings for Websphere. It also offers some suggestions for Struts settings.

A Java i18n Checklist

Overview of I18n and internationalization with Java.

Microsoft Word

2005-11-23T20:51:00.000-08:00

I like Excel, but Word is just horrible. That autocomplete functionality is annoying and a pain to disable. And that voice data option! A total bug when working with Japanese text.

how does your design hold up?

2005-11-17T17:11:00.000-08:00

Just how good is the code that you write?

The true gauntlet comes when you start testing and fixing bugs.

*How easy is it to find your bugs?
*How easy is it to fix your bugs?

I started to write "and more importantly, how easy is it to fix your bugs," but both questions are equally important, as hard to find bugs are naturally hard to fix.

The true test of the flexibilty of your design is when you have to make changes to allow for changes in the specifications, mistakes in the specifications, misinterpretations of the specifications, and plain bugs.

Good designs are easier to change than bad designs. They're less brittle, so changing a feature won't cause other features to break.

In the long run, a good design saves a whole lot of headaches in the testing phase and beyond.

My boss pointed out that the most experienced (and best) programmer should write the core functionality and samples so that the less experienced programmers can use the code as templates to implement other portions of the system. It's a very efficient way to make use of your programmers.

And, the most important aspect of any project is communicating the requirements.

rss feeds are great!

2005-11-14T21:51:00.000-08:00

Easy opt-in, easy opt-out. Hehe. Push content so I don't have to run around checking all my favorite sites. Of course, I can easily see how this can get out of hand. But at the moment, it's not a problem. Reading is fast, anyway. Um, yes, not atom feed for this blog yet; just my main one has it. I mean, who really reads this anyway?

Apache Jakarta Struts tag html:multibox

2005-11-07T20:08:00.000-08:00

I have a recurring issue using html:multibox, specifically with indexed properties.

Used normally, it's a pretty straightforward and pleasant to use tag. Some links:
* html tags FAQ
* introduction to using multibox
* an example of multibox in action
* another example of multibox

In the case of Struts 1.1, multibox cannot take indexed properties.

identity theft and the SSN

2005-11-02T00:18:00.000-08:00

There's an interesting discussion of identity theft at Slashdot.

copy-protected cds

2005-10-25T23:30:00.000-07:00

I went to HMV in Takashimaya Shinjuku, where they had 3 of Jamelia's albums. It's kind of sad (but a brilliant way to sucker those collectors) when the same music store carries 3 different versions of the same album. I found Jamelia's Thank You album, including the 2003 release with 12 songs (U.K. release probably), and two 2004 releases, one the International version with 14 songs, and one the Japanese only release, with a grand total of 17 songs (4 versions of Superstar). Anyway, aside from the track differences, the 2003 release had no copy protection, the 2004 International release had copy protection (a warning that the CD does not play on all media devices), and the Japanese release had more complicated copy protection (that I'm not sure I fully understood as it was all in Japanese). I spent half an hour trying to debate which version to buy. Price differences were negligable, with the more recent versions more expensive. I wanted the Japanese version (being a sucker for those extra versions of Superstar), but if I can't listen to the songs on my mp3 player, it's just not as useful.

email suggestions

2005-10-12T00:10:00.000-07:00

1) Double check your email before you send it. In particular, if sending an attachment, attach the file before doing anything else (such as typing in the sender's email address).

Eclipse JSP and XML editors

2005-10-11T02:34:00.000-07:00

The Eclipse Web Tools Project (for the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment) has useful tools for Web application development. I specifically installed it for the JSP editor and XML editor. There are a bunch of other tools included in it, of course. The simplest way to install the Web Tools Project is to follow these instructions in your existing Eclipse installation. I have Eclipse 3.1 installed and updating took a while but worked smoothly.

guarding personal data

2005-10-04T01:34:00.000-07:00

I've been pretty free with my personal information when registering for websites in the past. However, it hit me today just how little people care about protecting the personal information of the people who use their sites. I think a large part of it is ignorance about the importance of personal information.

From now on, I will be very firm about not giving out certain personal information. I'm also going to clean up the information that is currently being stored on various websites.

It's probably best not to do any online shopping. But I really like online shopping.

I really ought to delete my orkut account... but I can't bring myself to do so yet.

writing design documents

2005-09-29T02:46:00.000-07:00

Although professional graphics make a really nice impression, I think it's a mistake to invest a lot of time into getting professional mockups made for the basic specification phase.

Having some basic icons is good for maintaining an acceptable level of aesthetic appeal. However, having a single designer create realistic mockups for all of the pages is inefficient when when the design is still moderately fluid.

The page layout is still changing significantly, which means trashing entire pages of work. Also, we've only got one designer assigned to this part time, so I think it's unreasonable to have her do all the mockups. Also, any design changes have to be communicated to her so that she can adjust the mockups accordingly. We have six people writing specification documents and only one designer. It doesn't scale at all.

Social networking suggestions

2005-09-19T23:56:00.000-07:00

There's so much interesting content out there.

Christopher Allen's advice on social networking is pretty interesting. Implementing his suggestions would make a pretty cool site, but take a lot of effort to create.

I also read part of his thoughts on Orkut.

I am part of Ryze and Orkut.

Orkut has gotten really annoying, especially with the recent tie-in to Google Mail. I never use it anyway.

Ryze is ok. Half the people seem to be random opportunists and the other half have really interesting things to say. I personally find it annoying that free account holders (i.e. me) can't use most search functionality.

enterprise application security

2005-09-19T23:49:00.000-07:00

An interesting article on writing secure applications.

social networking sites and privacy

2005-09-19T23:07:00.000-07:00

While doing some research for work I came across this interesting piece by Roger Clarke via corante.

Through the 1990s, there was a recurring piece of pop-anthropology verging on an urban myth, referred to as 'six degrees of separation' (e.g. Matthews 2000). During 2003, apparently inspired by this idea, a number of companies released services to assist people to 'network'.

Many of these services encourage or even require that users provide information not only about themselves, but also about their friends or contacts. In some cases, users' address-books may be stored on the company's server, which is accessible over the Internet, and therefore from any Internet-connected device.

This paper provides a brief privacy impact assessment of such services. Its primary concern is not the privacy of the users who sign up for such schemes. That is a legitimate topic for an article as well; but those users are providing data about themselves consensually, and the risks and (lack of) protections are reasonably well-understood. This article instead focusses on a matter that is new, and of great concern: the privacy of other individuals whose data is volunteered to such services by its users.

I've only skimmed a portion of the paper but I found this statement very interesting:

Several of the sites display the Trust-e 'meta-brand'. Meta-brands were examined in an earlier article in this series (Clarke 2001), and their value was shown to be very close to zero.

I've always wondered if stuff like the Trust-e 'meta-brand' was any use. I shall have to go read this meta-brand paper.

good programmers

2005-09-05T00:20:00.000-07:00

Paradoxical but interesting essay on Why Good Programmers Are Lazy and Dumb.

In the endless battle between a programmer and the compiler, it’s best for the programmer to give up early and admit that it’s always him and never the compiler who’s at fault (unless it’s about character encoding issues, which is the part even the compiler gets wrong).

current anti-virus and anti-spyware and anti-adware

2005-08-29T18:59:00.000-07:00

There must be an easier way to say all that.

Software to protect my computer:
AVG Free Edition
IE-SPYAD2
Spybot Search & Destroy
SpywareBlaster
SpywareGuard
WinPatrol
ZoneAlarm Free Firewall (not using)

Debugging tool:
HijackThis

I think WinPatrol isn't needed if I use the firewall, but since there are some issues connecting to the internet while using ZoneAlarm, I'm keeping WinPatrol and using the XP firewall for now. There are some other firewalls I can try, but I'm a little leery of installing too much software on my machine.
I uninstalled Ad-Aware since I have Spybot.
I uninstalled Symantec Antivirus. For whatever reason it's not working. AVG found 2 trojan horse viruses.
Spyware Doctor actually does not have free real-time support, so I uninstalled it.

firewalls

2005-08-29T18:57:00.000-07:00

I skimmed a nice introduction to firewalls today. I should send it to my mom, but I don't think she'd understand it.

antiprocess

2005-08-29T18:09:00.000-07:00

Not really a tech posting, but I found this interesting article describing "antiprocess".

I haven't had time to read it yet but below is an excerpt:

The Formal Explanation: Antiprocess is the preemptive recognition and marginalization of undesired information by the synergistic interplay of high-priority acquired mental defense mechanisms.

An Informal Explanation: People can very cleverly defend their beliefs without having to fully understand the arguments against them.

A Very Informal Explanation: They're not being annoying on purpose.

word verification for comments

2005-08-28T20:53:00.000-07:00

I was getting spammed by random posters advertising their sites so I turned on comment word verification.

There should be a one dollar fee for each item of spam, be it a comment or email or whatever.

thanks to spywareinfo

2005-08-28T18:05:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the good people at SpywareInfo I think I have gotten rid of my vundo infection. All of this proves that for whatever reason, Symantec Antivirus is not working for my computer. Symantec actually has a fix for the vundo trojan, but Symantec Antivirus didn't find the infection on my computer.

Since my computer is vital for work, it's really disturbing to have hostile software on my computer. I am indebted to SWI. It's really cool that there are all these forums and websites for battle adware, spyware, and viruses. I guess it's a symptom of the problem with these types of software.

evil adware

2005-08-25T18:14:00.000-07:00

Argh! I've been infected! First by the poorly named WinFixer, and now by MatchService.com. I suppose that as infections go, adware is not as bad as viruses, but they are nontheless annoying.

In an effort to battle them, I have installed all sorts of anti-virus programs.

cwshredder (Cool Web Site Shredder)
CCleaner
HijackThis
RegistryFix
SpyBot
SpyWareDoctor

I was a little disappointed that cleaning up my Registry has not improved my computer's performance. Or perhaps the adware is interfering, as my computer's startup time is markedly slower than before. Bah!

At least I got rid of that superfluous Thunderbird 1.02 uninstall listing.

2005/08/28 note:
I also installed:
Lavasoft's Ad-Aware
SpywareBlaster
Winpatrol
IE-SPYAD2
and plan to install:
grisoft's antivirus software (debating about using the firewall too)
bhblaster

Since I don't need RegistryFix, I uninstalled it. Thinking about getting rid of CCleaner too. That still leaves me with a lot of software to battle bad software.

Technically Ad-Aware and SpyBot are redundant, so I could get rid of one. SpywareDoctor is the only software with free realtime support, but I keep getting an error saying that the database is incompatible with my version of Spyware Doctor, so I wonder if it's actually working properly.

ASP today

2005-08-18T19:46:00.000-07:00

My task today, learn as much about ASP (Active Server Pages) as I can. Starting off with what I can find at webmonkey.

Ugh, it's telling me to use VBScript. I think not. I don't really want to write a page with Javascript either. Come on, give me a real scripting language please!

You know acronyms are being overused when there are 2 or more plausible meanings for a single acronym.

securing your files

2005-08-15T18:53:00.000-07:00

so now that you've backed up all your files, how do you make sure that all your digital info is safe?

My phone doesn't really contain any sensitive information, so that's ok.

My pda is password protected. I wonder how safe that means it is. I bet it's easy to hack :P

My computer is password protected. How safe does that make my computer? I'd imagine it means nothing in terms of keeping my files protected. Anyone could probably rip out the hard disks and access the files from another computer.

My backup files are for the most part not encrypted either.

Bah. More stuff to do :D

Cisco and ISS vs. freedom of speech

2005-08-15T18:19:00.000-07:00

You know, some people are just twisted. From Cryptogram, I read that Cisco and ISS tried to stop the presentation of a security flaw. Oddly enough, they had initially supported the research and presentation.

There is an interview with the researcher who resigned from ISS because they wanted him to censor his presentation.

gmail download

2005-08-04T22:43:00.000-07:00

I downloaded my gmail emails to thunderbird today. My mail files are getting huge! Backups are good anyway.

lenya

2005-08-01T00:54:00.000-07:00

I was investigating CMS (content management system) packages and took a look at Apache Lenya.

The idea of link management is very appealing. No more broken links, And users without the capability of viewing a link are not shown it.

tech-flavored postings will be here

2005-08-01T00:42:00.000-07:00

I decided to finally to separate out the more techie postings from my regular musings. My friends and family are less likely to be interested in these kinds of postings (well, my family is less likely; while my friends are more likely) and I don't want to make them wade through them.

Plus, I can build an aura of compentency and erudification with a tech-focused blog. Yes, indeed.

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