lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

The Farm: The Tucows Developers' Hangout has a list of of quick reference cards available online. I have to get the reference cards for emacs, HTML and HTML entities printed out for the office.

Electronic Numerical ntegrator and Computer (ENIAC) was the first computer.BCP's Photo Gallery has closeups of the vaccum tubes and transistors of the ENIAC. Hard to get excited about it, if you are not a computer geek, but pure art for me.

Get your ascii generated text. In the meantime, let me satisfy my ego

Font: isometric3
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 /_/:/ /:/__ /__/:/ /:/\:\    \  \:\ 
 \  \:\/:::::/ \  \:\/:/_\/     _\:\
  \  \::/~~~~   \  \::/          /  /:/
   \  \:\        \  \:\         /__/:/ 
    \  \:\        \  \:\        __\/  
     _\/         _\/               

Font: caligraphy
                                  
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A few days back, a message was posted to the india-gii mailing list, with the following spam message.

Return-Path: 	<collectstore2 at yahoo.com>
Received: 	from web12010.mail.yahoo.com (web12010.mail.yahoo.com
[216.136.174.137]) by www.webindia.com (8.11.6/8.11.6) with SMTP id
i6O2p3G05024 for <xxxxx at example.com>; Fri, 23 Jul 2004 19:51:03 -0700
Message-ID: 	<20040724025325.62740.qmail at web12010.mail.yahoo.com>

Received: 	from [213.185.119.130] by web12010.mail.yahoo.com via HTTP;
Fri, 23 Jul 2004 19:53:25 PDT
Date: 	Fri, 23 Jul 2004 19:53:25 -0700 (PDT)
From: 	SAMMY SHOLOLA <collectstore2 at yahoo.com>
Subject: 	international order
To: 	xxx at example.com
MIME-Version: 	1.0
Content-Type: 	multipart/alternative;
boundary="0-631815243-1090637605=:57251"


Hello Sales,
Please i will like to order for some products in your store and will
like to know if you ship goods internationally,Please reply as soon s
possible regarding this so i will know the next step,besides i will be
paying with my Credit Card.Hope to read from you sooner.
Best Regards,
Sammy Sholola 

I was quite intrigued by this spam. This is quite different from the Nigerian-419 scam. On the face of it, it appears to have come from a confused customer. I tried to search for a discussion on this type of scam but did not turn up anything useful. I posted a message back to the mailing list. Suresh Ramasubramanian and Devdas Bhagat were kind enough to throw more light on this type of scam

The scammer pays with a stolen credit card, or by a fake cashiers check. However, that is not the only means these slimeballs swindle money. If the product you are selling costs Rs.6500 he will pay you Rs.10,000 (story is, he got a check from one of his customers, and he is endorsing it over to you, and you have to pay him the difference in cash by western union). Western union transfer is instant ... but when you present the check in your bank, it has to go to the foreign bank for clearance before it is found to be bogus, so that money credited to your account till the check clears is now debited back to the bank. In the meantime if you have gone and shipped the goods, you face even more loss.

Last night I thought of a question. What do you think is the most useless profession in the world ? i.e. if all the members of that profession are wiped out, you would not notice a difference ?

The two professions that I could say can be wiped off safely are

• Models
• VJs
• Weatherman

After much deliberations I could think of nothing else. Like a good geek, I popped this question to one of my friends and he added another profession to the list Newsreaders. (He also added mother-in-law to the list, but I do not think it is a profession. Moreover, if she disappears suddenly, your wife (and consequently, you too) will notice it). Next I put this question in two IRC channels (#phpc, #joito) I frequent. The list now grew up a little

• tanning salon owners
• vb coders - it is a useless profession, but if the vb coders disappeared, people would notice as things would start working.
• Astronauts - but a few people are of the opinion that being a astronaut is not a useless profession. My personal thought is, yes it is [a useless profession]. For space exploration, it is cheaper and better to send robots.
• politicians and lawyers. however people would notice both's departure.
• derivatives market trader? suit in general? middle manager?
• President of India
• queen of england and other royalty stuff - this I consider the moooost useless profession (can you even call it that ?).

I hear kids today aspiring to become a VJ .. I wish I would hear someone say (s)he want to become a sys admin/programmer someday .

Annexure
An interesting bit of conversation that occurred while discussing this question

lunatech: Q-FUNK, michel_v and ppl who answered my hypothetical
question, consider the following answers, President of India, queen of
england, and other royalty stuff

Q-FUNK: lunatech, royalty is fine as long as it manages the transition
to "rich bastard lving on their ancestor's assets" and stop being
allowed to live off the population's taxes or off undue tax exemtions.

lunatech: Q-FUNK, if they disappeared suddenly , will you notice the
loss ?

Q-FUNK: lunatech,  I would not, as I'm not a Brit 

KevinMarks: Queen of England is a handy thing as she provides a
sepration between pomp and politics

travlin: yeah, you know, you can whip her out whenever you need a
little pomp

Suw: plus she keeps Buck House spick and span

travlin: it's a just add water sort of thing

travlin: 

Congratulations to Teju for being the first to put his comment on my new blog. Thanks dude for being a good friend :smile:

Today I was looking at the MSN sandbox to download Lookout Email Search Tool. Lookout has been receiving quite good review for searching your Outlook mailbox. Here is how it was described

You can use Lookout to search your:

• Email messages
• Contacts
• [snip]
• ... Very soul (okay, not true)

ery uncharacteristic of M$, usually the element of play is missing in their site. If you go visiting, have a look at their new search . It gives quite good result. Not sure how much of their algorithm will be implemented in the final release... it is good till it lasts.