The real Story About Ping
Sometimes, the reader reviews on Amazon.com are kind of, well, pointless. But not when it comes to the trenchant review of the children's classic The Story About Ping, Scroll past the boring description of the book ("the tale of a little duck alone on the Yangtze River") for this review:
Using deft allegory, the authors have provided an insightful and intuitive explanation of one of Unix's most venerable networking utilities. Even more stunning is that they were clearly working with a very early beta of the program, as their book first appeared in 1933, years (decades!) before the operating system and network infrastructure were finalized.Then keep reading...The book describes networking in terms even a child could understand, choosing to anthropomorphize the underlying packet structure. The ping packet is described as a duck, who, with other packets (more ducks), spends a certain period of time on the host machine (the wise-eyed boat).
Rising from the dead
Didn't Weird Al Yankovic go away with the '70s? Alas, no. Check out his 1999 music video, It's all about the Pentiums, featuring such immortal lyrics as:
You think your Commodore-64 is neat-o
What kinda chip you got in there? A Dorito?
More like DotSnoozeGuy
Spent any time watching Dotcomguy in his year-long house arrest? He's pretty boring, isn't he?
5/18/00
Drudge sludge
It happens all the time - somebody sends out an e-mail message and accidentally includes everybody in his or her address book in the CC line (why can't e-mail vendors come up with a "Duh!" filter to prevent that?).A staffer on the Hillary Clinton campaign did that last weekend. She CC'ed, instead of BCC'ed, reporters with an advisory that her Rodhamness would be making a campaign stop in Manhattan (by the way, while Rudy Giuliani's getting most of the press these days, Clinton also faces opposition from Green Party candidate and undead former Munster Al Lewis).
Reporter in training Matt Drudge promptly published the entire list of addresses of these "insider media stars" on his site (you can see his report, which includes a funny line about how the mistake "nearly crippled the campaign's e-mail alert system," although he's since deleted most of the names).
Reporters on the list say they were quickly inundated with e-mail from People with Issues.
Among the victims: Pierre Borque, a Canadian reporter who has nothing at all to do with coverage of American politics (being Canadian and all). Borque reports he was "bombarded by emails from just about every political voice and wacko come-on on the continent." They include a guy who accused him of being "socialist slime" and another who wanted to know what Borque was going to do about the secret government toxic-waste tests in the skies above rural America.
When Slashdot gets Slashdotted
Slashdot has an interesting overview of a distributed denial-of-service attack against it last week. No, of course, they're not immune.
Don't click here
No, you would never waste your time and your company's bandwidth by calling up the Victoria's Secret live Webcast from Cannes at 3 p.m. EDT (12 p.m., PDT). Sure, sure, it'll crash like last year's live show, anyway. Besides, you wouldn't be caught dead using the Windows Media Player that's required this year. No, of course not.
5/17/00
Don't cry for him, Eckhard Pfeiffer
The three of you who felt badly about the way Eckhard Pfeiffer was drummed out of Compaq
should stop that right now. Pfeiffer yesterday sold his latest venture, German eBay wanna-be ricardo.de, for roughly $1 billion. Purchaser: QXL, which has been engaged in something of a bidding war with eBay for European auction sites of late.
Your tax dollars at work
You know, and I know, that neither the FCC nor the US Postal Service is proposing a modem tax (for that matter, neither is the Canadian parliament). But that didn't stop the House of Representatives from voting yesterday to ban the tax anyway.
Low self esteem
A recent British survey finds considerable fear, loathing and angst among IT staffers: IT staff shiftless crooks who can't get dates, say IT staff. Are things better on this side of the pond?
Shake, rattle and roll
If you live in an earthquake zone (such as, oh, Boston, Mass.), then skip this item. Otherwise, if you want to get a good sense of what it's like to live through an earthquake, go to Shaky Google. It's a search engine masquerading as an earthquake simulator. Don't worry, it stops after a couple of moments.
Question of the day
"How can you set-up an application profile for a job role? The concept is that the user account would be a member of this profile to gain access to the authorised applications. How can this be achieved on Novell Netware 4.11?" Answer forthwith.
5/16/00
Free stuff
The other day FARK.com posted a note about a site that lets you get a free pack of gum. That got me to thinking - what other free stuff can you get just by signing away your personal information on the Web? So I scooted over to AltaVista and typed free stuff into the search box. Besides the usual free software and free DSL service you've come to expect, I found a bunch of free stuff:- 300 personalized address labels
OK, you will have to pay $1.97 for shipping. - Cider mix
- Nescafe
- A Mrs. Cubbison's Stuffin' Sack
"Once you've used the turkey Stuffin' Sack from Mrs. Cubbison's, you'll never dread stuffing the bird again!" - A pair of pantyhose
- Oil of Olay Complete Radiance Liquid Foundation
Fair beige shade - Multi-Vitamin Herbal Supplements for dogs
- Alpo dry dog food with Chicory
Chicory? - A teddy bear
OK, technically it's a coupon that lets you get a teddy bear at a store, but that still might be better than sitting through yet another trade-show demo to get one. - A pack of Trojan condoms
Question of the day
Greg is a user with a VPN problem - he can get his VPN client to connect to an NT server over a dial-up line but not over DSL (specifically, IDSL). Any suggestions?
Second question of the day
Creedence Waetford writes: "I have a lot of info on how SANS will be an asset to our company, but what are the risks and disadvantages of SANS, besides the wide range of costs????"
5/15/00
Shocker: ILoveYou hits Unix boxes
Just in case you missed it, here's a copy of the Unix version of the ILoveYou virus:
This virus works on the honor system: If you're running a variant of unix or linux, please forward this message to everyone you know and delete a bunch of your files at random.
O'Reilly's Ark
Finally, somebody has compiled a list of all the animals on the covers of O'Reilly books.
Is that really her name?
One of the minor irritants of modern life is Marilyn vos Savant, the Parade columnist who claims to have the world's highest IQ and to have been born with that name. Yeah, right.Fortunately, she's not generally irritating enough to make you want to do anything about her, except turn the page and then forget about her until you stupidly pick up Parade again the following Sunday. However, she's gotten under the skin of one Herb Weiner, who, since 1995 (!) has run a Web site to point out mistakes in her columns.
Classic commercials
It's regarded as one of the classics of television advertising - the hammer-wielding woman smashing the totalitarian state to announce the Macintosh. Now you can relive the moment (remember, it actually only aired once) - along with the Nike Y2K commercial that shows rioting and looting and errant missiles exploding over a big city on 1/1/00.
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