Phil Scott's WebLog

Quite exciting this computer magic

  • Ebay and your credit card info

    One of my students just got a spam message telling him to update his eBay account information.  Looks pretty professional, and IE tells him the url it takes him to cgi5.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?accupdatev

  • Make your own IE Patch

    Via slashdot, some enterprising individuals released a “patch” for IE's url spoofing vulnerability.  The problem is that it has some pretty nasty buffer overflow vulnerabilities itself.  While you have to respect the “if MS isn't going to do it, I'll do it myself!” attitude, you know some conversation happened like this:

  • Real

    Frank has a great set of links regarding the Real suit against Microsoft.  Real Media needs to stop installing spyware and BUFFERING BUFFERING BUFFERING BUFFERING write some software that doesn't suck.  Pretty much the only format I like to see videos encoded in is QuickTime or DivX.  I still haven't really bothered to figure out what the difference between ASF and WMV files are.  All I know is that I can download them...sometimes.  Has anyone in the history of the internet had an enjoyable experience using streaming video ala Real or Microsoft's streaming video?  The only time it is appropriate is for live events.  Otherwise, give me an opportunity to download it while I'm cooking dinner, and let me watch it without buffering.

  • The Ol' Apache vs IIS Netcraft Story

    Reading the comments to this article on Slashdot made me vomit in my mouth.  Hey, Apache is great.  It's free!  My sister is paying $3 a month for a decent host for service.  How are they able to charge so little?  Because they pay nothing for the software, and the have some pretty talented people working there for real cheap.  But reading through the comments about people switching to Apache because IIS is hard to configure, applications crash on it more (wtf?) and that IIS is chock full of holes and are constantly being hacked is just plain retarded. 

  • KYdotNET Tomorrow

    My plan is to make it up to the KYdotNET meeting tomorrow.  If you are going to be there, drop me a line in my comments.  If I do go, I'll probably be the 24 year old wearing a navy blue sweatshirt with a hood and blue jeans.  It's the only clean clothes I have left for tomorrow.  As many geeks will probably be wearing that same outfit, just look for the handsome, suave and modest guy wearing the navy blue sweatshirt with some blue jeans.  I'll keep you guys updated on what I'm wearing so that people can spot me in case I either 1) do laundry 2) buy more clothes 3) just wear something that's laying on the floor and doesn't smell that bad. 

  • sTICKEYkEYS

    Sometimes I'll go to type something in, and I'll be holding down the shift key.  Lock, loaded and ready to write one kick ass sentence.  The problem is that my brain kinda forgets what I'm doing.  No big deal, I'm used to it.  But the next thing I know BEEP StickeyKeys has turned on.  And in a rush of confusion that can only be brought on by when your brain is at idle and suddenly gets beeped at, I simply hit enter.  God help me at this point.  Pressing shift acts like the caps lock key, the caps lock key seemingly makes the little light on the keyboard mean the opposite of whatever it indicates, and I'm pretty sure the Scroll look key and the SysRq keys switch functions too.  Any combination of shift, caps lock and the letter n seemingly simply set caps lock to the opposite of whatever I think it should be at that point.

  • KYdotNet: Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability

    Next Tuesday the local INETA group is meeting and Tim Landgrave is presenting a topic on Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability.  Normally, making it to these meetings is kinda a pain for me so I've never actually gone to them (everytime I've had a free Tuesday evening it's been something like “Using Delegates” or something else insanely boring).  Anyways, as of right now I think I'll have that night free, and I'd to see some other people's ideas on application performance and scalability.  I can't help but think that he'll simply be presenting the “Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalibility” Patterns & Practices or rehash of what was in the webcast (I can't find a link for it, anyone?) based on the name.  Tim is the RD for Louisville, so perhaps that might be interested to hear him talk.

  • Football Loving Geek

    Like any good football loving geek (I was nicknamed the Michael Vick of Intramural Football at my college BTW), I was intrigued by our current situation involving USC, LSU and OU.  I personally think that Michigan is going to beat USC and OU will beat LSU, so I really am not going to get flustered over that aspect of the polls.  But really has me interested is the statistics part of things.  Now, I never strived in my statistics courses (I called the courses sadistics 101), but you throw football into the mix and suddenly I want to bust out the TI-83 and come up with my own computer rankings to rule them all.

  • Stupid Install Tricks

    I never knew this, so it's new to me (duh).  Anyways, if you press shift-F10 during a windows setup you get a command prompt.  What's the importance of this?  You can play freecell while setup runs.