blog.dlade.net

When spam goes wrong

I’ve been seeing a lot of blog posts about spam recently, probably set off by this post from Dale Dougherty on how we’re losing the war on spam. I just got a spam message that makes me think we’re doing quite a good job fighting against it. It’s not that I’m getting less spam than before, far from it, but I have a filtering technique that usually works very well.

The message that I’m referring to got filtered as spam, but because of the title and the reasonable name of the sender I had a quick look to confirm that it was in fact spam. It was, and I’ve been getting similar ones way too many times, but this time the text they had grabbed from somewhere was an excerpt of the Atom RFC, and the image that tried to make me buy some shares was tiny with dark striped text on black.

There’s something strange about getting a spam where the main message they’re trying to sell is unreadable and the body they’ve slapped on to it to avoid filtering is actually something that’s interesting and valuable.

Things I did not know about apples

A few days ago, I mentioned to a friend that Michaela and I fairly easily go through two bags of apples per day. I knew that an apple a day keeps the doctor away (Or “ate an apfel avore gwain to bed makes the doctor beg his bread” (No, it’s not Swedish, it’s old English.)), but I was a bit curious to find out what six apples a day would do, so I did a bit of research on the subject of apples.

It turns out that while they may keep the doctor away (or begging for bread), they are likely to get you a closer relationship with your dentist, increasing the risk of caries significantly. On the other hand, they improve your gums and reduce the risk of mouth cancer. As always, there is not a simple black and white answer.

But on the subject of cancer, apples provide flavonoids and other fun antioxidants that will take care of free radicals and stop the general destruction they can cause. It turns out, though, that the more traditional variants (I can’t get used to the word “cultivars”) of apples are better than the modern ones and so I’m starting to believe that the mass-produced all-equal-size pip-less Braeburns that I’ve got into the habit of buying at Sainsbury’s will do absolutely nothing for us. It’s encouraging to see that another favourite, the Egremont Russet, scores very high on some compounds.

As an aside, it’s interesting to find that apples contain cinnamic acid, which is otherwise normally found in the oil of cinnamon. It’s like nature has known all along that apples should be eaten with cinnamon.

The conclusion of my quick research (also known as googling) is that the kind of apple we should really be eating, which would battle various cancers, contains the antioxidants that we have all learned to love and in addition to all that actually battles caries instead of causing it is called “dark chocolate”. Apparently, cocoa beans contain antibacterial agents and the cocoa butter coats the tooth to prevent plaque. But then I guess the fat contents of chocolate might be bad for the diet, so I guess what I’ll do is what we all like to do most: Resist change and continue as before. Or maybe brush my teeth a bit more regularly.

DWR looks scary

Yesterday, I got an invitation to a new site that is currently in beta and I started playing around with it, viewing source and looking at their javascript as I would normally do on any site, when I suddenly, completely by accident, discovered a DWR test page. With DWR being an Ajax interface to Java, the test page was an auto-generated list of available method calls on the web API. Not only that, but it let me call any of these methods with whatever parameters I wanted.

With the site more or less completely built up via this method, there were 139 methods available to play with, including scary looking combinations like listUsers() and deleteUser()… Now, it’s obviously up to the site’s developers to use some common sense when deciding what methods to make available to javascript calls and to remove or protect this test page so that it can’t be accessed externally, but it looks to me like DWR has certainly made it easier for them to shoot themselves in the foot. I absolutely love this bit on the DWR security page: it would be silly to worry too much about DWR when the rest of your web-app could be open

Oh, and for your information, it was difficult but I resisted the temptation. I reported it to the developers without having made a single API call, and they closed the page up within a few minutes. I still think it seems very dangerous to make methods like deleteUser accessible via javascript, though.

Child well-being and carrier bags

In an effort to reduce the amount of carrier bags we use, we have bought a nice looking, stronger and bigger bag that we try to remember bringing with us when we go shopping. As I went yesterday, I obviously forgot the bag at home once more and started thinking about British attitudes towards their carrier bags. I noticed that the father and son in front of me took five carrier bags for things that I would have packed in two. A week ago, when cleaning out a cupboard at home, I discovered exactly how many carrier bags we had stuffed in there to be used as bin bags some time in the future. If half a cupboard stuffed with bags is what we have collected over the last year, I can only wonder how many bags the father and son collect if they’re using 2-3 times more bags than we do.

At this point, I had the table listing child well-being per country in my mind. I had noted that Sweden and Denmark were in the top three and the UK and USA are at the bottom of the list. Then it struck me. In the US and the UK, carrier bags are given away for free. In fact, you might say “The UK is addicted to carrier bags. In 2005, 17 billion carrier bags were given away for free in the UK. In contrast, in both Denmark and Sweden you have to pay your carrier bags. But what about the Netherlands, at the top of the list? Well, I haven’t been to the Netherlands for years and I really can’t remember, but a quick search shows that you do in fact have to pay for your bags there.

So, there is clearly a correlation between free carrier bags and a low child well-being. Something to think about next time you go shopping.

Unpredictable weight loss

To keep track of my weight loss, and to have something to display on dlade.net/weight, I weigh myself every Friday morning after going to the toilet and add the weight to a simple text file that the chart is built from. I always take a pleasure in having lost weight, and suffer severely when I see the chart go up again. This week, I was really looking forward to my weekly weigh-in. I had eaten less than my daily allowance every day of the week and run further than ever before.

This morning, I was shocked to see that I had actually gained weight compared to last week. I feel that I can see very clearly that my reflection in the mirror and the hands that I hold in front of me right now are a lot slimmer than they used to be, but the chart tells a different story. I still weigh the same that I did nine months ago. Oh well, I’ll just do what everyone else does and blame it on my body building muscle or retaining water or something…

Coming late to the party

After reading that last.fm is going to get a whole lot more music in their library I decided to give last.fm another try. I don’t know what happened to make me avoid it until now, but both my standard login and my backup one are registered but not used. It’s clear that I’ve wanted to try this out before. It’s also clear that the whole usewhateveraddressyouwant@dlade.net situation is a bit dangerous, since I can’t figure out what email works with their password recovery system.

So I’ve created yet another account and tried it out once more. What really surprised me about last.fm is that it has actually heard of the artists that I like to listen to, and has already within the first hour of using it managed to suggest other artists that I hadn’t heard of but whose music I actually liked. At the risk of sounding Californian, that is just awesome. Other services of the same kind usually have no idea what I’m talking about when I mention Hedningarna or Amadou & Mariam, and when I finally find an artist they have heard of (such as Nitin Sawhney) they pick up on a part of the music that I don’t particularly like and then quickly steer off towards mainstream music.

I’ve needed to find some new music for a while now (read: years.) This could be a good start.

Progress report on running

Running felt very easy today, so I added a few extra minutes and ran my first 10k. Well, actually, because of a technicality with the gym machines where they make it much easier to specify a time than a distance, it became 10.11 km. Although I’m generally impressed with how advanced these machines are, there’s clearly room for improvement when even a programmer and computer user since over 20 years has trouble remembering to press the correct button sequence to start off with a distance instead of a time.

Another weird technical issue I have with the treadmill is that the “calorie consumption per exercise” slowly drops as the session goes on, despite the fact that I’m not changing any of the input values (time, speed and gradient). I’ve studied it a few times now, and every time I’m running the value starts a bit high and then drops 1.5-2% until it reaches its final value. I really can’t figure out why it would do that. Any suggestions?

XHTML adoption in the mobile world

Micah Dubinko mentions with a tone of surprise, both in his article Is XML 2.0 Under Development? and in a subsequent blog post, that despite the poor browsers, XHTML adoption is still farther ahead on the mobile web then the desktop web.

In my opinion, it’s the exact opposite. It’s because of the poor browsers on mobile phones that XHTML is ahead on the mobile web. For a mobile developer, there is a clear reward in going with XHTML. You are much less likely to have your page break on a random phone if you stick to XHTML MP than you are if you go with HTML. On the desktop web, there is no such reward. In fact, if you make a mistake somewhere, your page is much more likely to break if you claim in the content-type or doctype that it is XHTML. There is no reward on the desktop web in going with XHTML apart from a general feeling of having upgraded to a later standard.

Before and after

I was reminded tonight of my old before and after picture on flickr from a bit over a year ago, which is my most viewed picture there, and decided that it was time I made a new one. This new one uses pictures separated by exactly two years. Both pictures are taken around Christmas, both in Slovakia and I’m wearing the same scarf and similar jackets. Obviously, my taste in clothes hasn’t changed as much as I thought over this time period. Trust me when I say that the clothes I wear underneath the jacket are very different, though. It’s amazing how much more fun it is to shop for clothes when the shops actually sell stuff that can be pulled over your body.

Anyway, here is the new picture:

Video with Reggie Watts

I definitely won’t make a habit out of posting links to videos. Generally speaking, I really dislike the trend towards both sound (podcasts) and video (youtube and friends) clips on the web at the moment. I soak up a lot of information, going through hundreds of articles, blog posts and emails every day before getting on to what I really should be doing. I read quickly, but I also quickly skim through the content to see if it actually interests me and often skip through as much as half of it without even remembering properly what it was I skipped. This habit of mine has most definitely left me more impatient than I used to be (and would like to be), so taking five, ten, fifteen minutes to fully focus on a stream that I can’t skim through in any way tends to make me extremely frustrated.

That said, I’ve played this video of Reggie Watts at least five times now. He’s doing an amazing job at improvising a song with just his own voice and a sampling box. It’s the kind of stuff that the little boy inside me dreams of being able to do.