Zone38 Presents...
Letters to the World

30-Jun-2004

Great moments in spamvertising

Filed under: Spam — codeman38 @ 10:58 pm

The full text of three spams, obviously part of the same campaign, that I received earlier today:

Subject: Your interests..
From: "Asgard Q. Scarify" <byzantine@worryguts.com>

What are the washing instructions?
Men now monopolize the upper levels… depriving women of their rightful share of opportunities for incompetence.
Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.Charm is the ability to make someone think that both of you are quite wonderful.
You have enjoyed VlaCra and wish for a longer effect? GIAIis can make it happen.
Enjoy It! civilian pasting unhome semioriental eburneoid
We take greater pains to persuade others we are happy than in trying to think so ourselves.
I may have faults, but being wrong ain't one of them.
Money is the most envied, but the least enjoyed. Health is the most enjoyed, but the least envied.

(more…)

More fuel for the browser wars…

Filed under: General — codeman38 @ 9:00 pm

Here’s still another article, this one from EWeek, claiming that Internet Explorer is too dangerous to keep using. Noticing a theme here lately?

29-Jun-2004

Forward this to 50 friends and win nothing!

Filed under: General — codeman38 @ 3:49 pm

Wired.com tracks down the origins of that annoying hoax about AOL, Microsoft, and Intel merging. Quite interesting: it started as a computer science student’s spoof of ‘get rich quick’ schemes.

And for the curious, here’s the history of the hoax that’s referred to in the article.

(via Fark.com)

Spy Vs. Spy

Filed under: General — codeman38 @ 11:48 am

Whoever came up with the ‘Only The Best’ variation of the CoolWebSearch spyware needs to be shot. (Here’s some info on it from PCHell.com, and here’s the SpywareInfo thread on it.) I’ve been trying to remove this monstrosity from a computer here at the office, and it’s been insanely difficult… partly because it regenerates itself and uses completely random names for its files, and partly because some of the files it generates have names which vaguely resemble those of Windows components.

Compared to this junk, Gator and its ilk seem like knights in shining armor. At least they make it possible to remove their software without going through hoops…

Do yourself a favor, everyone: if you haven’t already done so, please stop using Internet Explorer as your primary browser, and go grab Firefox or Netscape 7.1 instead. You won’t regret it.

27-Jun-2004

“I laughed my eyes out!”

Filed under: General — codeman38 @ 3:26 pm

ISMS: the Institute of Silly and Meaningless Sayings is a collection of malapropisms, spoonerisms, mixed metaphors, misuses of foreign phrases, and other such linguistic manglings that fans of wordplay should thoroughly enjoy. (via J-Walk Blog)

21-Jun-2004

E-mail viruses for dummies

Filed under: General — codeman38 @ 9:35 pm

To everyone who’s gotten infected with W32.Beagle.W and happens to have my e-mail address somewhere on your hard disk:

Will anything ever convince you to stop opening random e-mail attachments from strangers, no matter how enticing they may seem? I mean, this one doesn’t even spoof the e-mail addresses of actual friends, like some of the previous versions; I’d think this one would be easier to spot as a fake…

Really… you’d think people would have just an iota of sense after the last twenty-something incarnations of the virus, wouldn’t you?

19-Jun-2004

Still more on the Mozilla front

Filed under: General — codeman38 @ 1:47 am

Yet another columnist– this time, Scott Granneman, writing for SecurityFocus– claims that now is a good time to dump Internet Explorer. The alternatives just keep looking better and better…

17-Jun-2004

And still more Firefox-related stuff…

Filed under: General — codeman38 @ 6:18 pm

Firefox and Thunderbird users, go grab the Charamel theme. This may be one of the nicest, most elegant-looking user interfaces I’ve seen in a while.

Now if only there was a version for the Mozilla suite (and its close cousin Netscape 7)…

Yet another reason to drop IE…

Filed under: General — codeman38 @ 9:34 am

Grr! Another reason that more people need to stop using Internet Explorer: it can’t even interpret “width: 100%” right all the time.

I encountered this particular bug in one of my own web design projects today; in one of my pages, a table with the aforementioned width was contained within a fluidly-sized DIV that didn’t span the full window. Any sane browser would size the table to fill the DIV, but not Internet Explorer… no, it sizes the table to take up the full width of the window. Gah! And even worse, the fix suggested at the link above doesn’t work for all page layouts; I couldn’t get it to work with the particular way I had the sidebar set up on the site in question (which is still in the testing phase and hasn’t been rolled out, for the curious).

At least in the layout I was having difficulty with, the problem wasn’t unique to tables, either; even a paragraph with a style of “width: 100%” would flow over into the sidebar!

And people wonder why IE is such a headache for web designers these days…

Have you switched your browser yet?

Filed under: General — codeman38 @ 7:26 am

Why you should dump Internet Explorer. I did so several years back, and other than having to fire it up for the occasional site designed by a completely clueless designer, I honestly haven’t missed it… suffice it to say, there’s a reason I often refer to it by the nickname “Internet Exploiter”. Oh, and it doesn’t help that its support for web standards is the worst I’ve seen since Netscape 4.7.

The author of the article linked above is an MCSE, so he’s not your typical Microsoft-basher… honestly, it’s really worth reading and considering.

(via Lockergnome)

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