lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

Ftrain.com has a bunch of productivity enhancing tips that can be used with emacs. I could not get the "search the web within emacs" working but I hope to write a shell script that will do the job and then call that script from withing emacs. I had found that link from this post by Merlin, called Calling all Terminal nerds. One of the comments there has pointed to the rockin' the emacs post, which points out how to use planner.el from Sacha Chua.

I was reading through the google news item IBM Donates Voice Code to Apache, which reminded me of a interesting thread in the Full disclosure mailing list.

The poster to the mailing list said that one of his users had contated him with a weird problem. As soon as the user had turned their machine on, brought up Word, the following message started "typing itself"

": 121-nighters and windows of confidence in your own problems in the matters when the company has no problems regarding .... [snip] "

Though it may seem that there is a glitch in Word, or some overflow in the clipboard memory, it is possible that the speech recognition software was the actual culprit. If the speech recognition software is turned on and there is a radio playing nearby, it will pick up by the software and transcribed on Word.

Original thread here and here .

As Macbeth would have said "To GET or to POST , that is the question". The general consensus is :

• Use GET when you want to give the user the ability to bookmark a page (as all the data is held in the URL and does not rely on an existing session on the server.) The "get" method should be used when the form is idempotent (i.e., causes no side-effects).
• Use POST when a form causes side effects (for example, if the form modifies a database or subscription to a service).

formed discussion over this topic in this usenet thread. Some words from the bible covering this topic. A more lengthy but not boring discussion on this topic is URIs, Addressability, and the use of HTTP GET and POST

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.

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.