Many years ago, I worked with a firmware engineer. We'll call him 'Bill'. 'Bill' was an interesting character, for he was fond of saying provocative things in order to observe your reaction.

I walked in to Bill's office one day, and he was sitting there with his feet on the desk, leaning back in his chair. Hands clasped behind his head. I'd have thought he was napping except I noticed that he was staring at the ceiling.

"What's up, Bill?", I asked.

Bill replied: "Oh, I'm working on the firmware for the new color printer, and I'm thinking about what to do if someone opens the cover in the middle of a print cycle. It's giving me fits."

He continued: "Sometimes I wish humans were descended from dogs instead of apes." He paused.

"Why's that, Bill?" I asked, taking the bait. By then, I was on full alert.

"Maybe then they wouldn't be messing around, pushing buttons when they shouldn't." Bill said. Clearly, this was the punch line he was waiting to deliver.

"Yeah", came my immediate reply, "but then, you'd be sitting here, pondering what to do when the user urinates on the printer with the power on."

Bill broke out laughing. Clearly, he wasn't expecting that response.

Mission accomplished.

I found this one one of my classified ad sites today:

Join one of the best Advertising Company of India. We pay you for your hard work. 100% Payment urance. Its a Ad Posting job (copy-paste work). Unlimited Monthly income. For Details visit : www. [spammer-site]. com or Email us at [email deleted] or Call us at [phone number deleted]

This is too funny - spammers dropping spam ads for spam ad droppers who will then drop spam ads onto more sites. It's "copy-paste work". Indeed. This is recursion run amok.

And even funnier: they claim to be one of the "best Advertising Company of India" and yet Akismet bounced the spam ad without breaking a sweat. Nice work!

I am very near the point where I would support the death penalty (or at least prolonged, televised waterboarding) for spam operators - the people who set up and run spam operations.

Here's a nifty tool for your bag of tricks: JavaScript snippet that tags HTML elements with browser- and OS-specific attributes so you can target browser- and OS-specific 'peculiarities' without resorting to the usual bizarro selector tricks or Internet Explorer-specific conditional comments.

Using this script, you can target browser-specific elements via simple CSS selectors as follows:

.ie6 #targetElement { border: solid 1px #eee; }

OS Codes

win - Microsoft Windows
linux - Linux (x11 and linux)
mac - Mac OS

Browser codes

ie - Internet Explorer (All versions)
ie8 - Internet Explorer 8.x
ie7 - Internet Explorer 7.x
ie6 - Internet Explorer 6.x
ie5 - Internet Explorer 5.x
gecko - Mozilla, Firefox (all versions), Camino
ff2 - Firefox 2
ff3 - Firefox 3
opera - Opera (All versions)
opera8 - Opera 8.x
opera9 - Opera 9.x
konqueror - Konqueror
webkit or safari - Safari, NetNewsWire, OmniWeb, Shiira, Google Chrome
chrome - Google Chrome

This only helps with JavaScript-enabled browsers, but it's an interesting alternative to the usual CSS madness.

Here's a standalone module that provides the handy customization described at AngryDonuts.com. You can see it in use on this site.read more »

In a Reuters article, Eric Schmidt talks about their stated philosophy - "Don't be evil" - and how this translates into practice, and what it means to the company.

In an on-stage interview with writer Ken Auletta of the New Yorker magazine, Schmidt said "Don't be evil" is meant to provoke internal debate over what constitutes ethical corporate behavior, rather than representing an absolute moral position.

Google will likely continue to have difficulties in the PR arena, because, for many people in this culture, CORPORATION = EVIL RICH = EVIL, and BIG = EVIL, thanks to a variety of social factors.

And because BIG (or rich, or successful) = EVIL and CORPORATION = EVIL for many people, there is simply no way that G can avoid being viewedas EVIL as they continue to expand into new business areas (regardless of the validity of such a view).

See, when Google was the upstart, the underdog, the brash newcomer, the better alternative, it could get away with the slogan, and it worked well for them. It's not working so well these days.

Note that I'm not calling Google evil (although I think Google sometimes does things that makes people wonder if they take their stated philosophy seriously). I'm pointing out a cultural trend towards class (and economic) rhetorical warfare, over which Google has little control. And that is what will cause trouble for Google, over the long haul.

Here's a funny (and over-the-top) diatribe on the advantages of the Imperial over the metric measurement system:

The metric system also fails to be sized appropriately for humans. Because of its derivation, units of measure are divisible by ten, but ill-suited for labor that does not involve extensive mathematical computations. Is it any wonder that a man is still six feet tall? Measuring a six-foot, 31-year-old man's height in centimeters (182) makes as much sense as measuring his age in months (372).

Link

OK, this is off-topic but what the heck - it's interesting (to me, anyway).

I've seen commercial advertisements for Silver Lightning on various television shows, The product demonstration shows a person placing the Silver Lightning plate under water, then placing tarnished silver on the plate -- and like magic, the silver brightens and the tarnish vanishes.

I'm an inquisitive guy, so I assumed this was due to some kind of chemical reaction involving electrolysis, so I searched the web to see what I could find on the subject.

It turns out that silver tarnish is silver sulfide, much of which comes from the trace amounts of sulfur in the air. The Silver Lightning product is apparently nothing more than an aluminum plate, which, when placed in a solution of baking soda and water (about 1 cup per gallon) causes an electrochemical reaction that draws the sulfur away from the silver and to the aluminum.read more »

When trying to keep web site content clean and on-topic, the site administrators often face monumental challenges from spammers.

Mollom.com is an alternative to using the Spam or Akismet modules. It's in beta at present, and it is free of charge at present. It is expected to remain free for low-volume users (for details, please refer to the mollom.com web site - link below.)

I was debugging a Windows application that makes use of DirectShow to render media - and for some strange reason, the application would terminate without warning when run under Visual Studio's debugger.

No error message, no exceptions, nothing. The application ran fine outside the debugger. I was able to debug the same code base several weeks ago without incident.

Poking around a bit, I isolated the line of code causing the silent termination: The DirectShow IGraphBuilder interface's Render method. Digging deeper, I find that the ultimate culprit is Ahead Nero 7 Essentials, which had been installed on my development system several weeks before. Apparently, Nero Essentials installs a variety of DirectShow filters on the target system, and, these filters actively prevent running under a debugger. In this case (on my development system), there was absolutely no error message or other indication of why - just a silent termination.

After I isolated the problem, I was able to determine that there is supposed to be a "Nero Protection Error" message box presented to the user, but it never appeared on my system, nor did the system event log contain any useful information. Feh.

This gets my vote as one of the dumbest stunts I've ever seen. I am pretty sure there's nothing all that special about Nero's DirectShow filters, and, if someone really wants to reverse engineer them or break the protection/licensing, they will. This lame attempt does nothing more than encourage (force?) legitimate users to remove the Nero filters from their machines. Nice going. Did the developers or marketing geniuses stop to think about this use case?

Ahead Nero 7 Essentials just cost me an hour or more of productive time. Then there's the aggravation.

Lame. Stupid. Did I mention lame? And I used to *like* Nero software.

ImgBurn - Freeware, and it works!

Update: I've tried ImgBurn, a freeware CD/DVD image read/write utility, and so far, it looks good. UI is slightly wonky but it's a very good piece of free software - and, best of all, you can install it without Administrator rights. Give it a try!

Ringtone Downloads - what's all the fuss about?

Ringtones. Seems like everybody's searching for them and downloading them. Ringtone download sites are all over the 'net, and ringtone download advertising is pretty big business, if the number of ringtone download site ads visible on the average web site is any indication.

Ringtones For You, Ringtones For Me, Ringtones As Far As The Eye Can See...

I've never spent much time paying attention to ringtone download sites. I always figured that they were aimed at a younger audience, and, I have always been satisfied with the ringtones that were built in to my cell phones. Who's visiting the ringtone sites?read more »