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The sheet metal on that was bombproof. Much thicker than on a modern desktop. You could jump up and down on it.

for the Kaypro lovers: java clone of CP/M ladder game

God I loved that fucking game. Mostly because it was the only one in the house, but hey.

Anyway, if you didn't know allow me to point out that you can now play it free on modern computers:

http://ostermiller.org/ladder/

A webmaster hosts a contact form on his website that allows users to fill out a form to contact him. He allows the user to specify a subject and a message but the recipient is hard coded to webmaster@example.com.

The message ends up looking like this:

To: webmaster@example.com
From: thewebserver@example.com
Subject: $subject

$message

If the $subject is not properly sanitized, a bot could submit it with a new line in it and be able to start a new line in the headers of the email. That new line could be, for example, a large CC list of people to spam with his message:

Buy my weight loss pills!
CC: spammee1@example.com, spammee2@example.com

Which is why I would suggest using a contact form such as the one that I have written that has already thought about this sort of thing.

Check out this.

I bought my hybrid five years ago when they first came out. I was on the waiting list for the first of the Honda Insights. At the time gas was just over $1 per gallon. With the sticker shock over what I would pay for a simlar non-hybrid and with $5000 battery replacement, I calculated that gas would need to average about $5 a gallon while I owned the car for it to make sense. I bought the hybrid because:

• I wanted to be a good environmental citizen
• I wanted something different and cool to drive
• I was single, just out of college, and could spend the extra money because I had a programming job

Overall the car has worked out well. Especially in the first couple years, I would have strangers approach me in parking lots and ask questions. More people would be interested in my car than even some of my friends with fancy sports cars. The story of how I named my car "The FJM" is a funny story.

The insight has some of its own unique problems because it is a two seater: It makes it hard to take friends anywhere, and now that I'm expecting a daughter I can't put a car seat in it. Because it is so different, I have to take it to the dealership for almost all of the maintenence including oil changes. I'm also getting to the point where I will have to get the batteries replaced soon and I'm not looking forward to it.

Bottom line is that you should only get a hybrid if you think they are cool. They probably won't save you money. (But here is hoping that the gas price doubles soon :-)

It is also interesting to see the most popular web sites. Start by typing www. into google suggest. The top 10 are:

1. www.yahoo.com - Search/Directory
2. www.hotmail.com - Email
3. www.google.com - Search
4. www.ebay.com - Shopping
5. www.msn.com - Portal
6. www.aol.com - Portal
7. www.ebay.co.uk - Shopping
8. www.irs.gov - Government
9. www.mapquest.com - Maps
10. www.amazon.com - Shopping

Typing one more letter shows you the top sites for that letter. Here is the top for each letter:

• a is for www.aol.com - Portal
• b is for www.bbc.co.uk - News
• c is for www.cnn.com - News
• d is for www.dictionary.com - Reference
• e is for www.ebay.com - Shopping
• f is for www.food.gov.uk - Government
• g is for www.google.com - Search
• h is for www.hotmail.com - Email
• i is for www.irs.gov - Government
• j is for www.juno.com - Internet service provider
• k is for www.kbb.com - Consumer information
• l is for www.lyrics.com - Music
• m is for www.msn.com - Portal
• n is for www.nick.com - Kids
• o is for www.orbitz.com - Travel
• p is for www.pogo.com - Games
• q is for www.qvc.com - Shopping
• r is for www.rotten.com - Information
• s is for www.sears.com - Shopping (sorry slashdot)
• t is for www.target.com - Shopping
• u is for www.usps.com - Government
• v is for www.verizon.com - Telephone service
• w is for www.weather.com - Weather
• x is for www.xanga.com - Blogs
• y is for www.yahoo.com - Portal
• z is for www.zappos.com - Shopping

This is some random commentary to make sure that my post has enough characters per line on average to get by the lameness filter. Just a few more words should do it. Then I will be over the limit. Maybe you would like to hear a bit about my projects: Attesoro - A internationalization editor for Java programs. Coinmill - A currency conversion website with many currencies, and features such as abilty to parse English sentences asking for currency conversion. Java Utilities - Utilities for common task in the Java programming language such as parsing CSV files and string manipulation.

There are some good reasons to upgrade to the new TiVo software even if it does not let you record content with the broadcast flag. The biggest reason for me is that now you can do the complete setup process without a telephone line. The entire setup from system reset can be done with wireless internet.

I just bought a new TiVo and was upset that it shipped with the last software rather than the most recent. I had to take it to a neighbors house to have it use the phone line since I only have a cell phone.

In any case you can read my review of the Humax TiVo with DVD burner. I review it as a TiVo, as DVD player, and as a DVD burner.

In addition to knowing Java and having a CS degree, the ideal job candidate for my employer would know XSLT (xml transform language), m4 (braindead unix template language), and three scripting languages (csh, bash, and perl).

Incidentally, if you know this stuff and you are looking for a job in the Boston area, send me a note. We'd like to hire 7 to 10 of you.

I don't believe that this guy is the world's biggest hacker. Have you seen Cowboy Neal??? Now that's big!

This guy was looking for UFOs. In Soviet Russia, UFOs look for you!

We all know that if he was an uber-hacker he would have created a Beowulf cluster of all the computers he hacked.

One billion in damages? That number has to be inflated. (Actually the article says 570000 pounds which is only about 1 Million US dollars according to my currency calculator)

1. Get paranoid about UFOs
2. Hack into the US government
3. Get caught
4. ????
5. Profit!

Despite how useful it is, I have some concern with GreaseMonkey and your browsers security.

The basic problem I see is that user scripts are plug-ins to to a plug-in. User scripts could do things that would be bad for security such as:

• Grab user entered information such as user names, passwords, or emails.
• Be part of a DDOS attack by contacting some server repeatedly
• Insert unwanted content such as ads or tracking into every page visited

GreaseMonkey does not use the white list of sites allowed to install plugins and allows user scripts to be installed from just about anywhere.

I'm worried that somebody could set up a repository of user scripts that appear to do useful things but have spyware embedded in them. Users would install GreaseMonkey user scripts from the site thinking they were getting useful functionality but not realizing they were getting additional "goodies".

I don't install user scripts without knowing how they work and looking over the source myself. Preferably, I write my own. I don't see most users being able to do that sort of analysis. Hence the danger.

• Session IDs in urls
• Doorway pages
• Content that expires or changes urls
• Javascript navigation

Sometimes search engine optimization isn't about making a hack site rank well. Sometimes it is about getting the traffic that a really nifty site deserves.

In fact, I wish all the legit sites did everything they should morally do in terms of SEO. Then the spam sites wouldn't have such an easy time pushing them out of the way.

From a business perspective, money spent on making non-spammy search engine optimizations can be much more effective than money spent on marketing or public relations.

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Scientific calculator with hex, octal, decimal, and binary

On slashdot, you only get to see old content unless you are a subscriber. Only subscribers see stuff less than 15 minutes old. No reason why something like that couldn't work for the NYT. Be interesting so see at what cutoff they could hook the most subscribers. It would have to be somewhere between 15 minutes and 2 weeks.

Foreign Exchange Calculator

AOL blacklists by ip address of the server sending the mail whenever some number of aol users who subscribe to the mailing list hit the "report as spam" button on their email client.

For legit mailing lists you wouldn't think this would happen, but an unbelievable number of aol users treat the "report spam" button as if it were the "trash" button.

To get unblocked by AOL you have to set up an account at which you will receive a request to unsubscribe from each user that uses the "report as spam" button. You then have to parse AOL's format and remove the user from your mailing list. AOL won't even let you contact the user with another "are you sure" type of email.

The problem I have with this is that there are many problems with identifying trusted sites and maintaining the trustworthiness of such sites after they have been chosen.

From Google's point of view, a trusted site would have to have strict editorial standards and link to a lot of sites. I can think of a lot of sites with strict editorial content, but they generally do not link to a lot of sites. The open directory projects seems to me to be a candidate for a trusted site. It has editorial controls and links to a heck of a lot of sites.

The first question to ask is: "After the trusted sites is chosen, how much would it cost to buy one?". I suppose dmoz itself would be hard to buy outright, but how much would it take to buy one of the editors, or to buy an editorial position? Probably not much. Dmoz alread has a lot of editorial fraud and it would make the problem worse. I'm not sure that its fair to expect trusted sites not to degrade to some extent.

The second question to ask is: "How hard is it to buy links from trusted sites?". The answer has to be that it is pretty easy. Forget about corrupting the people as I discussed in the last point. Any trusted site that links to lots of pages is going to have a huge link management problem. Every day hundreds of domains that it links to may expire. You can snap those up and buy trust.

All this doesn't even include folks who make sites look trustworthy with the sole intention of turning them to the dark side later. All of this happens currently with pagerank, but it will be much worse once the trust power is put into the hands of a few.

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Exchange Rate Currency Calculator

• My computer too slow! (because of all the spyware)
• Can't I get rid of all these popups???
• I keep getting this blue screen

I don't have any of these problems on linux/firefox. Its hard for me to figure out what is wrong with software that I don't use and don't care about. Usually my solution is to upgrade them to the stuff I'm using.

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Currency Exchange Calculator

I just hope they serve the images from a different domain than the javascript used to generate the text ads. Otherwise it won't be easy for most people to block the images without blocking the text.

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Colored syntax highlighting libraries for Java

• Search Engine Low Down - Google Tests Cost-Per-Impression Pricing and Targeting for AdWords
• San Jose Mercury News - Google changing the way ads are created, priced
• Silicon.com, UK - Google steps into banner ad world
• Houston Chronicle - Google testing systems that place ads on specific Web sites

Unfortunately, I don't see anything about this on Google's press release page yet.

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Conversions of Currency Rates of Exchange

• Transparency on PNGs is rendered as white. It makes the logo of my Java translation editor look white.
• CSS does not support min-width and max-width properties. For example text areas on my contact form that have a max-width of six inches stretch the entire way across the page in Internet Explorer
• I've fallen in love with the border-radius CSS property in Mozilla that puts round corners on tables and divs without using images. I use that effect on my Attesoro Java translation editor pages. While it isn't part of the w3c recommendations, it would be a great one for IE to pick up.

Sounds like they are fixing the .pngs for sure. I hope the two css tweaks that I want make it in.

• Transparency on PNGs is rendered as white. It makes the logo of my Java translation editor look white.
• CSS does not support min-width and max-width properties. For example text areas on my contact form that have a max-width of six inches stretch the entire way across the page in Internet Explorer
• I've fallen in love with the border-radius CSS property in Mozilla that puts round corners on tables and divs without using images. I use that effect on my Attesoro Java translation editor pages. While it isn't part of the w3c recommendations, it would be a great one for IE to pick up.

Sounds like they are fixing the .pngs for sure. I hope the two css tweaks that I want make it in.

• Transparency on PNGs is rendered as white. It makes the logo of my Java translation editor look white.
• CSS does not support min-width and max-width properties. For example text areas on my contact form that have a max-width of six inches stretch the entire way across the page in Internet Explorer
• I've fallen in love with the border-radius CSS property in Mozilla that puts round corners on tables and divs without using images. I use that effect on my Attesoro Java translation editor pages. While it isn't part of the w3c recommendations, it would be a great one for IE to pick up.

Sounds like they are fixing the .pngs for sure. I hope the two css tweaks that I want make it in.

Is all the plugins, extensions, chrome, files, and settings that have to be configured after you have the Firefox browser up and running. It would be really nifty to be able to bundle all the things that I do when I install firefox into one mega "extension bundle" or some such that I could install with one click.

I wrote an article about customizing the firefox web browser. Not only can you block google text ads that are downloaded via javascript using adblock, you can also rewrite pages with google adwords on the fly using Greasemonkey.

In these tests they seem to stick the details in the middle of a bunch of other crap that I don't care about. There is just no good way to scan for the details. There are reasons that bullet lists with three items are so compelling as a presentation style.

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Currancy Calc

You probably see where I'm going with this: who in their right mind is actually awake at 5 AM to enjoy the daylight?????

Daylight savings time should move the day another five hours or so. Imagine if the sun were just coming up as I started thinking about getting out of bed by 10. At 11 or so it would have fully roused me and I could get up and enjoy the full day. At 2 or 3 in the morning the sun would be setting just as I was starting to grow weary of my hacking and start thinking about going to bed. I -- along with most other similarly minded geeks -- would be ever so much more productive.

Of course some of you might complain about the extra screen glare, claim that you don't get any natural light in your basement anyway, or state that you just plain dislike that burning yellow eye in the sky.

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Rate Exchange Calculator and Currency Convertor

Violation of trademark would make much more sense in this case.

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Rate Exchange Calculator and Currency Convertor

Google, remove the watermarks!!!!

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Contact Form allows web site visitors to send you email but will thwart spammers

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Programmer's Cheat Sheet

Even if you store every resolution you need, you are only increasing the storage requirements by a factor of 5 or so. The files get much smaller as you takes the resolution down. It does depend on how many resolutions you want, but something like google maps has plenty for my taste.

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Scientific Calculator with hex, decimal, binary and octal.

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Better Templates for Everybody - Templating system that can be used to create easily maintanable websites

Satelite photos have been available on the internet for some time, but this certainly makes them much more convenient.

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Open Source (GPL) Java Utilities (CSV, MD5, Open Browser)

I can imagine taking some very high resolution artwork and displaying it using this technology. I can zoom in to the max resolution or your can scroll around forever.

Anybody have any software that would take a large image file and apply a google-map-like interface to it? The software should be something as simple as:

1. Resize the image to various resolutions
2. Break the images into 200x200 pixel chunks at each resolution and save those chunks as individual image files
3. Put a javascript interface on

If you are smart about your image naming conventions you shouldn't even need a powerful webserver. The whole thing could be served up via static files from a webserver with enough disk space and a big enough pipe.

I'd like to see this for things like:

• Local maps such as for state parks
• Scanned artwork such as paintings - Like the Gigapixel Tapestries covered the other day.
• Circular panorama photos that could be scrolled only in one direction

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On-line Currency Exchange Rate Conversion Calculator

The real number to which your 911 call is forwarded is some sort of state secret. The 911 call centers don't want to be called except for when 911 is dialed to avoid pranks, mistakes, and confusion. If you dial 911 from Vonage they forward your call to the publicly listed police number for your area. If they could figure out what the call center for your area would be, they would foward the call there. But my understanding is the list is not available to them.

The 911 problems with VOIP are that like cell phones, you can take a VOIP phone with you. It is not tied to a location. Unlike cell phones, you can't pinpoint the location as being near a tower. You are just "on the internet" which is not nearly as helpful. VOIP does not have embedded GPS either.

Here is a list of things that I think need to happen. Lets sue until the do (I don't care who):

1. Make 911 call center numbers available to VOIP providers
2. Embed GPS chips in black box VOIP boxes and configure them to send location information when 911 is dialed
3. Require VOIP providers to ask customers the expected physical location of their VOIP phone so that 911 will work when there is no GPS data
4. Require that VOIP providers inform customers that 911 will go to this location if they move their phone
5. Require VOIP providers to allow users to change this location easily either through their phone, or a web interface
6. Require VOIP providers to ask the "where is your phone" question again if other customer information like billing address changes

I'm not sure how well the GPS thing would work indoors. You might have to have the box say "I can't get a GPS signal, I won't work until I have one. Go plug me in near a window until I can see a satelite, then you can put me in the basement."

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Rate Exchange Calculator and Currency Convertor

Script tags cannot be nested which makes that portion of html able to be matched by a regular expression.

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Currency conversion calculator

<script><scri</script>

But I acknowledge that it may be quadratic rather than exponenetial even with a correct regular expression.

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Exchange Rate Calculator

Regular expressions are great, but once you know them and you think you can conquer the world, I find they occasionally let you down. The text editor I was using had a rudementary regular expression search that did not support non-greedy matching. I found that writing a regular expression that finds C style /* comments */ to be quite tricky with only greeding matching. I wrote it up as an article where I build the expression piece by piece showing common things you might try that won't work.

If you want more of a challenge, try writing a regular expression that find any <script></script> tags along with anything in between using only greedy matching. You will find that the length of your regular expression goes up exponentially with the length of your ending condition.

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Calculator for Converting Currency

Regular expressions are great, but once you know them and you think you can conquer the world, I find they occasionally let you down. The text editor I was using had a rudementary regular expression search that did not support non-greedy matching. I found that writing a regular expression that finds C style /* comments */ to be quite tricky with only greeding matching. I wrote it up as an article where I build the expression piece by piece showing common things you might try that won't work.

If you want more of a challenge, try writing a regular expression that find any <script></script> tags along with anything in between using only greedy matching. You will find that the length of your regular expression goes up exponentially with the length of your ending condition.

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Calculator for Converting Currency

1. People hate typing. I would expect more people to enter "prescpt drugs CA" than "Where can I buy prescription drugs in Canada"
2. Entering "Where can I buy prescription drugs in Canada" into google returns very relevent results. As a user, you don't need to know that google ignores the words "where", "can", "I", and "in".

So maybe there is a place in the market for a search engine front end that specifically says "type in a question". But I really doubt that many people want to type that much. I certainly doubt that it should be based an shoddy results that Ask Jeeves seems to give.

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Online Currency Converter with Current Exchange Rates

1. Format the paper into PDF
2. Send it to about 200 peers for review
3. Get responses back from some of them
4. Ignore the responses from the ones that found something wrong
5. Put the paper on your website with notes that it was peer reviewed by the folks that found no problems with it

That way it costs nothing, takes a lot of your time, and gives you the incentive to corrupt the peer review process. What could be wrong with that?

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Currency conversion calculator

1. Woman trains for information technology because she hears the men are so good looking.
2. Woman gets job choosing purely based on the hunk to junk ratio.
3. Woman falls in love IT hunk
4. The IT hunk and the IT babe get married
5. They have kids - she stays home

Currency conversion calculator

Ok is he listing real USD, or is he doing some kind of comparison of what it would be if it compared to the average American salary?

If he's gonna use USD he needs to specify what the average korean makes in USD. According to about.com the average korean makes between 20,000,000 and 50,000,000 WON, which converts to about $20,000 to $50,000 USD (although xe.com has a more accurate conversion, but that's pretty close.

Here's a teacher's salary, about $2,200 a month. That site also claims taxes are only 5 to 10% which is much lower than what I'm currently paying in the US, I'm paying about 15% right now.

Considering that's probably what the average american salary is I'd have to say $19/mo DSL isn't a bad deal, but Yahoo/SBC offers "Up to 1.5 Mbps" DSL for $26.95/mo with a one year commitment so I don't see why his "I pay $30 myself, for a 1.5-megabits-per-second (mbps) connection" is so great, he's paying more for DSL than it is here!

Is this a great example of "move along folks, nothing to see here"?

That means that my link to my open source currency converter in my sig doesn't help my page rank and I am reduced to mentioning it in comments like this.

• http://ostermiller.org/utils/com.Ostermiller.util Java Utilities - nice CSV tools among others
• http://protomatter.sourceforge.net/Protomatter - misc tools - object pools etc. (I know, I am lazy)
• http://jedit.org/ JEdit - lightweight, with tons of plugins highly customizable Java IDE/Editor (for those who find the great Eclipse too heavy)
• http://jetty.mortbay.org/jetty/ Great 100% Java Web Server / Servlet /JSP Container with JMX etc. etc.
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/quartzEnterprise Job Scheduler
• http://mandarax.sourceforge.net/Great open source java class library for deduction rules
• http://alphaworks.ibm.com/Alphaworks as a whole are full of java goodies
• http://eclipse.org/aspectj/Did you ***** up your design ? Your project is a zombie that should be trashed and rewritten ages ago ? Aspects will save your day ;)

Some little JavaScript projects I have done:

• Tic-Tac-Toe - Responsive, looks good, has AI, works in a web browser. The alternatives would be CGI or Flash. I've played CGI tic-tac-toe and it is too slow. Flash seems like overkill
• Scientific Calculator - The bread and butter of Javascript, perform calculations in a web page. I tend to like this calculator better than the Windows calculator because of the free form text entry
• Currency Exchange Rate Conversion Calculator - Again the alternative is CGI but again it is slow. Plus, do you want to send your financial data (amounts you are converting) to some random website? This keeps all your data on the client side.
• At work we are working on page that shows new data as it is available. Sure you can refresh the page and see the latest, but a bit of javscript to pull new data off the server is both easier for most users and saves bandwidth because it can get just the stuff that is changed and put it into the page in the appropriate place.

Some little JavaScript projects I have done:

• Tic-Tac-Toe - Responsive, looks good, has AI, works in a web browser. The alternatives would be CGI or Flash. I've played CGI tic-tac-toe and it is too slow. Flash seems like overkill
• Scientific Calculator - The bread and butter of Javascript, perform calculations in a web page. I tend to like this calculator better than the Windows calculator because of the free form text entry
• Currency Exchange Rate Conversion Calculator - Again the alternative is CGI but again it is slow. Plus, do you want to send your financial data (amounts you are converting) to some random website? This keeps all your data on the client side.
• At work we are working on page that shows new data as it is available. Sure you can refresh the page and see the latest, but a bit of javscript to pull new data off the server is both easier for most users and saves bandwidth because it can get just the stuff that is changed and put it into the page in the appropriate place.

Some little JavaScript projects I have done:

• Tic-Tac-Toe - Responsive, looks good, has AI, works in a web browser. The alternatives would be CGI or Flash. I've played CGI tic-tac-toe and it is too slow. Flash seems like overkill
• Scientific Calculator - The bread and butter of Javascript, perform calculations in a web page. I tend to like this calculator better than the Windows calculator because of the free form text entry
• Currency Exchange Rate Conversion Calculator - Again the alternative is CGI but again it is slow. Plus, do you want to send your financial data (amounts you are converting) to some random website? This keeps all your data on the client side.
• At work we are working on page that shows new data as it is available. Sure you can refresh the page and see the latest, but a bit of javscript to pull new data off the server is both easier for most users and saves bandwidth because it can get just the stuff that is changed and put it into the page in the appropriate place.

I am sure this is becomming a standard slashdot comment now, but instead of posting torrents (although for large files, they should), they should use coral cache (append .nyud.net:8090 to the host name)

actually, I think there is even a bookmaklet to do this automatically. *googles* Yep, here it is:
Coral Cache Bookmarklet

I've never played the sequels theselves, but I have the levels for what somebody told me is Ladder 2. Is that the ladup to which you refer?

Not open source, but free flash games that I really like:

• Tontie - souped up whack-a-mole
• Miniputt 2 - Miniture Golf

googles commant on the new name: Did you mean: inspire ?

The google suggestion is:
Did you mean at tessoro?

When you make up a name, how many uses of it do you have out there on the net before google stops suggesting something else for it?

My boss copied them into the source tree, but claims that he never made the connection between using my code and then later hiring me.