Category Archives: Rants & Raves

Stupid, Stupid!

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Web forms should be designed to minimize data loss. Let me explain two scenarios in the past 24 hours:

  • I spent a while getting the wording just right on my Craigslist post. I found one minor thing to fix, so I clicked back. But stupid, stupid Craigslist dynamically generates the names of the forms (probably to combat spam), which meant that none of the data showed up when I clicked back, since, as far as Firefox was concerned, it was a brand new form. So I had to rewrite it from scratch. Grrr! This is a really bad design idea.
  • I spent even longer crafting a reply to an e-mail in OWA. I finally got it just right and clicked “Send.” And got the login screen. It seems that, even though I was actively working on the e-mail, I timed out due to inactivity. Of course, the e-mail I wrote wasn’t sent, and wasn’t even saved as a draft. It’s just gone. To me, this is a major bug.

I can’t do much about Craigslist, but it’s a “Fool me once…” thing with OWA. I think this was the third time I’ve lost an e-mail I spent a long time working on due to the inactivity bug. So I think I’m just going to start forwarding my school mail to GMail.

Professor

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On our trip to Ghana, we had ten students, two faculty members (who we basically considered students), and two professors.  We tried to pull tables together so that all fourteen of us could have our meals together, but sometimes we’d be lazy and just sit at individual tables.

One morning, I had breakfast with one of the professors and another student. When I sat down, the professor and student were talking about the career track of a professor. I think both of us students walked away convinced that it was something we wanted to do. There are lots of reasons: the pay is good; the job comes with some level of prestige; you get summers off, a month off at Christmas, and Spring Break; but, most of all, I think it’s because I would just enjoy it, and I think I could do a better job than many incumbents.

We were talking about prices in Africa, and someone mentioned the conversion rate, but then added that because of PPP, things were a lot cheaper. When I learned about PPP, we talked about exchange rates, inflation rates, a “long-run equilibrium,” and some complicated formulas that no one understood.

In Ghana, a dollar could buy me three bottles of Coke. In America, a dollar might not even buy me one bottle of Coke. Why don’t discussions of PPP start there? It’s a really simple concept if it’s explained in terms that real people understand.

Accounting is probably the most boring subject I’ve ever taken. The problem with this is that accounting is a fascinating field. Understanding accounting principles helps you know enormous amounts about a company’s earnings. Understanding accounting can help you spot fraud. (Or conceal fraud.) But no professor ever taught it that way.

I think part of the thing is to throw out the textbooks. You need books, absolutely. But textbooks, almost by definition, are boring. This book has good reviews. (Of course it doesn’t cover the whole field of accounting.) You might throw in another book on fraud. Keep the assigned readings short. I think that, if you actually choose an interesting book, some students might actually read it! And maybe they’ll even want to come to class and learn.

How to Fix the Internet

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Okay, so this won’t fix the Internet, but I think it’s high time that what I’m about to suggest is implemented. It’s not exactly a revolutionary idea that I just came up with. It’s what people have been talking about for a decade.

ISPs need to start blocking crap from originating on their network. The only reason, as best as I can tell, that they’ve done anything about spam is that they were getting ‘collateral damage’ when huge chunks of their networks were being listed as spam havens, causing legitimate e-mails to bounce and really irritating all their customers.

Let’s say that your computer gets infected by a virus that causes it to ping flood a given Internet site. What should happen?  I think there are three courses of action. The ISP can do nothing, which is easiest. That’s the status quo. The second option is that some simple firewall rules could detect that your IP was suddenly generating hundreds of ICMP packets a second, have the system automatically realize that something fishy was going on, and remove you from the Internet, perhaps redirecting all your traffic to page indicating what was going on and how to fix it. Or, third, and easiest of all, they could simply firewall off the ICMP attack you were trying.

A lot of the viruses/worms are super-easy to detect. They try to connect to hundreds of computers at once on an obscure port. That alone is something that no ‘real’ user is likely to do. But you can go even further, and have your firewalls do some Layer 7 inspection. (But ooh, that would cost money, and ISPs don’t like that!) They could look at the ‘payload’ of the data and see if it matched the ‘signatures’ of known viruses.

I’m not proposing that your ISP should have people monitor your every move with packet sniffers. I’m proposing that ISPs implement the equipment that would let it detect blatant abuse of the network, which consumes not only their resources but the resources of countless other networks, and stop letting crap go on. Imagine if, once Nimda was known in the wild, your ISP prevented any incoming attacks from reaching you. And that a few of their clients got infected anyway, but that when they tried to use a web browser, all they got was a message indicating that their computer was infected with a virus that was trying to spread with other computers, so they lost their Internet connection until they fixed it, and, oh, here’s instructions on exactly how to do it.

I suppose some customers would be angry. But I think, overall, it’d be worth inconveniencing a few people who couldn’t keep a clean computer anyway.

(Okay, so Nimda was a bad example since it spread so quickly. But it’s not like it was over and done with by the end of the day.)

It wouldn’t block everything. Really clever, malicious stuff would get through. Obscure stuff would get through. Brand new exploits would get through. But it’s just absurd how many attacks go on that everyone was already aware of, and it strikes me as even more absurd that ISPs seem like they couldn’t care less. If nothing else, it’d save them a lot of bandwidth.

Hampton

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The Powerball is getting to levels where I play. So I was looking at real estate. I started looking at Portsmouth, which has some nice places. But then I turned my gaze to Hampton Beach, where I noticed something interesting.

There are a ton of hotels for sale. Like, at least half a dozen. Several of them are big.

The pessimist wonders why there are so many hotels for sale, and whether market conditions in Hampton are poor for some reason.

The optimist thinks that six (at least) hotels all up for grabs is a great market opportunity. There are still competitors, so you’re not really a monopoly, but owning a bunch of hotels surely gives better market leverage than owning a single hotel. Other benefits include referrals (“No, we’re all booked for that weekend–but our sister hotel down the street has openings…”), and a sort of ‘laboratory’: you can implement something in one and see how it works; say, a certain type of renovation, price increases, or changes in scheduling. (Plus, there could be economies of scale if you shared services between them, such as buying supplies in bulk and having handymen who serve all locations.)

And $3,000,000 for a 60-unit motel is $50,000 a room. I can only imagine that they need work, but I also imagine that if they were sold as condos, they’d fetch a lot more than $50,000 apiece. Although they’d probably need to be retrofitted for kitchens and the like.

Phishing

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I realize I’m probably not the typical e-mail user, but I’m constantly amused at how pathetic phishing e-mails are. So this is a public service announcement… Don’t trust e-mails:

  • That claim to be from a big, legitimate organization, such as a greeting card company or the Nigerian government, yet are mailed from something like a Yahoo account.
  • That link to a random IP address as a company’s website.
  • That ask you download a .exe file for no apparent reason.
  • That tell you that someone you’ve never heard of has sent you agift.
  • That claim that the Nigerian government owes you lots of money if only you can send some money to the guy e-mailing you.
  • If you ‘win’ $2.5 million in an online UK lottery drawing that you never entered, that will be payed out from their Africa branch, after you contact their “fiduciary agent” with an e-mail address on Yahoo in Poland. (I give them credit for knowing the word fiduciary, though.)
  • If e-mail from a complete stranger has nothing but an attachment. (Since I’m on Linux, where .exe viruses won’t do any damage, I opened the attachment, a ZIP file. It actually just contained a PDF with spam in it. But who (besides me) is dumb enough to open attachments from strangers that don’t even have an explanation?)
  • If the Central Bank of Nigeria says you won $15 million, but that their payment system is broken so they need your bank account information.

When convincing looking e-mails come in purporting to be for a bank trying to ‘confirm details’ after ‘a problem with your account,’ I can see how some people might fall for it. But when the Central Bank of Nigeria is trying to deliver you $15 million in cash for no apparent reason, but needs your bank account information first? And the e-mail is littered with misspellings and just nonsense? How could anyone fall for that?

Cars

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It seems like the car industry has been working really hard to make its cars something people want. (Although they’re still dragging their heels on gas mileage.) I’ve always been somewhat amused that a lot of the ‘hot new cars’ are just really, really old models with a bit of contemporary flair.

I want a ‘new’ car that looks like this one. A rumbleseat in the back. (Although you might have safety issues in 2008, as opposed to 1930.) A spare tire on the side. (Functional.) A giant chrome grille on the front. A soft-top convertible. And windshield wipers that come down from the top of the window. And big bug-eye headlights. (I really don’t care for the massively-crooked style of photography.) Check out the fins on the blue car with people in front of it.

Maybe another car that looks badass and yet is a convertible.

Or how about hyper-round, from the vehicle frame to the windows? Just design some awesome-looking cars that don’t all look the same, give them good gas mileage, make ’em safe, and make ’em cheap.

Do I?

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I just did my semi-annual rolling of my accumulated change (not so much this time: $38.50. I’ve been trading a lot of change in for bills at work). Then I logged into my account at my bank to see where I wanted to put it.

And I noticed that they’re having their annual (?) raffle. They sell 5,000 tickets at $20 apiece. The prize is a 2007 Lexus ES350, which is a beautiful car. (Basically a luxury version of the new Camry.) I’m perfectly happy with my car, but, well, who wouldn’t want a 2007 Lexus?

The money goes to benefit charity. (Although really, they’re raising less than $60,000 ‘profit’ via the raffle, which isn’t so impressive?) I can think of the $20 ticket as some of the change I’m bringing in.

I just can’t make up my mind, though. 1/5,000 aren’t great odds, but then again, it’s far better than my odds in the lottery. But $20 to probably win nothing? But it’s for charity. And I have that ‘extra’ $38.50 sitting on my desk. So do I enter or not?

Stupid Ideas

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The trip I’m going to be taking to Africa is part of a class. So I have some assigned readings, and we’re supposed to be commenting in an online forum.

I’m having problems right now, because the ‘online forum’ is randomly comprised of Java applets. Not only is it the worst layout I’ve ever seen, but there is no reason for Java to be used.

The reason I’m complaining so loudly about it, though, is that it seems to be crashing Firefox on Linux right now. They need a