EMail Spam December 19, 2008
Posted by devdude in General.Tags: fight spam email, spam
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Occasionally I dissect spam emails that find their ways through the spamfilter. Very oftenis some kind of paypal or ebay info saying that the account expired or they suspect some problem information with the account and ask you to login and verify. The login link is always in the email. It always looks ok on the first sight but if you look at the spelling of sender, words and so on you can see the spam.
Todays dissection (original is german): Paypal Security
Wichtige Sicherheits-Hinweise Ihr Konto Zugriff hat nur begrenztem Umfang (Transl: Important security note, limited account access)
Sender: sicherheit_@_paypall_de (see, the double ll at the end) paypall.de is registred by (check here)
Text: PayPal arbeitet ständig an der Gewährleistung der Sicherheit durch regelmäßige Screening/Kontrollen der Konten in unserem System. Wir haben vor kurzem Ihr Konto überprüft, und wir brauchen mehr Informationen, die uns helfen sollen Sie mit sicheren Service anbieten. Bis wir diese Informationen sammeln, Ihren Zugang zu sensiblen Konto-Funktionen werden begrenzt oder beendet werden. Wir möchten Ihren Zugang Wiederherstellen so schnell wie möglich, und wir entschuldigen uns für die Unannehmlichkeiten.
The german text contains quite a number of errors.
Paypall.de points to merchntaccount.com which is a misspelled version (missing ‘a’) of merchantaccount.com (a creditcard/online commerce service provider). merchntaccount.com is registred by (check here), same person or organziation.
The fake login page is not accessible (anymore ?) at this bogus address (some characters removed to stop anyone from stumbling upon it)
http: / / smokylake. com/www. paypal .de/de/_xxxxxxxxxxx_ = _login-submit/webscr.php
Why does spam work ? Because someone sends out this email to 100.000 recipients. If only 1 falls into the trap it worth his effort to fake everything.
Mac and Windows Video War October 10, 2008
Posted by devdude in Humor.Tags: ad, mac, video, windows
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have some time to spare ? which is more funny and creative ?
Microsoft Ad
Apples Short Ads
Spam per Skype ? August 27, 2008
Posted by devdude in General, Humor.Tags: skype, spam
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I occasionally get skype-invitations or contact-attempts from totally strange people in all kind of languages, but Skype never before opened by itself with a chat from someone NOT on my contact list.
Randy Pausch passed away August 3, 2008
Posted by devdude in General.Tags: alice, cmu, randy pausch, the last lecture
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Some days late, I read Professor Randy Pausch passed away on July 25th. Even I was never able to meet him or to join his classes, he was a inspiring person. His famous last lecture “Really achieving your childhood dreams” at CMU (link) in September 2007 you can see here (link). I wont comment or try to summarize because it would never be close to his very own word. Please read more about him and also his work on Alice (link).
Slow file opening in Photoshop CS3 under Vista August 2, 2008
Posted by devdude in Software.Tags: cs3, photoshop, slow, vista
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You wonder why Photoshop CD3 takes forever to open a file of any size ? Make sure your default printer is local ! Seems very unrelated but works ! See link.
Virtual PC’s June 14, 2008
Posted by devdude in Software.Tags: box, emulation, os, solaris, virtual, virtual pc, vm ware
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The concept is not new, and various products exist since a number of years. Emulate an OS within a window for clean environment testing, saving on additional hardware, fooling around, installing software with tampering your system. I remember VM Ware earlier, it appeared a bit scientific to me to set it up. Now we have Microsoft Virtual PC, VM Ware and Virtual Box from SUN (sure some others as well). Just installed Solaris 11 in my Virtual PC, awesome ! Virtual Box supports a wide range of OS. I wish I still would have the OS2/Warp and Win 3.11 disks ! (Link to virtualbox.org)
Another way of loosing data June 13, 2008
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You dont want to stick postit notes on a CD to label the content ! Lucky this backup was redundant !
Free CD/DVD Burn June 11, 2008
Posted by devdude in Software.Tags: burn, cd, dvd, free, write
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Are you tired of Nero Express with its annoying popups and hiding in the tray ? The VISTA build-in burning not enough features (what features?) ? Check out CDBurnerXP (link) ! Enough features for the 95% of burning you do every other day !
Free Picture Viewer/Browser June 11, 2008
Posted by devdude in Software.Tags: browser, free, graphics, image, Software, viewer
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Looking for a way outside the standard explorer build-in viewer and dont want to pay for ACDSEE or Adobe Lightroom ? Check out xnview (link) !
Apple’s polite Bluescreen June 7, 2008
Posted by devdude in General.Tags: apple, blue screen, crash, mac os
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I use a 12″ powerbook for 4 years now, during that time it served me well and I replaced only a faulty harddisk and a battery. It hardly will crash in the Windows way. A blue screen staring at you right in the middle of doing something, but MAC OS also has a nice message in 4 languages that it needs to restarted due to an error. It dont bombard you with a memory dump that no one can read anyway.
And its gone June 6, 2008
Posted by devdude in General.add a comment
Seems as fast its “in” Google, as fast it disappears. Found after 6 hours, another 12 hours after removing the word it cant be found anymore.
Experiment closed. Maybe I am too paranoid.
You want to go back history lane ? Check out webpages at the WayBackMaschine (link) ! Look at early versions of some websites. “Where you want to go today ?” Remember the sloganby MS in 1996 (link).
Google found it again ! June 5, 2008
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6 hours after placing the non-existent word “XYZ” (replaced original word to virtually remove its existence) on the blog, google lists it already. Now I removed it, will see how fast it disappears again. To be honest I am pretty impressed how fast google crawls the web with trillions of pages !
Google on Google June 5, 2008
Posted by devdude in General, Humor.add a comment
Did you ever google for “google” ? You will find all activities and projects they do (images, news, groups, earth, map, lab,..). The first non-google source is from stanford.edu followed by finance.yahoo.com on page 4 !
The first not-so-google result is “Google Fight” (link) on page 7. You can compare which word out of 2 has more results in a cartoon style.
MS Office 2007 June 5, 2008
Posted by devdude in Software.add a comment
When installing MS Office 2007 I choosed to keep the old version, so I can continue to use MS ACCESS which is not in the Small Business Office version. Yes ! I excluded Outlook completely, I am not using it anyway.
And what happens the first time I want to use the old version…
Google found it ! June 5, 2008
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Yo remember my technology creation 2 days ago ? The Retraxiom Intrubator (link). No search engine could find the word or term. Now it is on, within 48 hours Google found it, even on a non-Google run platform.
Check it out at http://www.google.com.sg/search?q=Retraxiom+Intrubator
The next experiment would be: How long does it take to get rid of it ? Is that possible ?
OK, lets start with a new word: XYZ (no matches in google now)
Please note I will remove the word after they found it and will re-check its virtual existence.
Edit:
I replaced the original word with XYZ in order to find out how fast the word disappears from the search engine.
June 5, 2008
Posted by devdude in Humor, Software.add a comment
While copying 970MB..
Are you kidding ? Thats about 100 years ! How can I upgrade to the next 20 new Windows versions without rebooting the system while waiting for Vista to finish copying ?
MS Project alternative June 4, 2008
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You dont want to spend the extra cash on MS project after buying a standard version of Office 2007(2003) ? Maybe you want to drop by Open Workbench (link) as a free alternative !
Btw, I am not contra MS, but one should always look from all angles, a 360 degree view, so to say !
Windows XP lifespan extended until 2010 June 4, 2008
Posted by devdude in General, Software.add a comment
According to a Microsoft Press release (link) you still can buy XP until 2010 (first plan was to stop it in 2008!) because an increased demand in UMPC’s and low-budget desktop PC’s. They also say the hardware vendor are still running behind VISTA requirements.
a) Why does MS continues to deliver OS with ridiculous hardware requirements and resource greedy software ? XP is stable and can run on Intel Atom chipset. Why can Apple implement smooth screen features on an iPhone while Vista needs 2 GB to get Aero running ?
b) 2010 ? You can buy XP until Windows 7 is supposed to be out. Then skip Vista !?
Terminology Hype June 3, 2008
Posted by devdude in General, Humor.add a comment
Spending a couple of year in IT project management, I started again to get my hands dirty with sourcecode and I really enjoy this pioneer work. Since about one year I am refreshing my developing skills, specifically in Java, since in earlier times I was coding in Visual C++, Visual Basic, more or less in a Microsoft world. I try to keep an eye on frameworks, engines or any news about enterprise development. As a regular visitor of TheServerSide.com I am bombarded with truckloads of frameworks and tools.
Who is inventing all this ? Who creates this titles and names ? You know everything about …
- Apache Tuscany
- Atomikos
- JEXIN
- OSGi
- Terracota
- Allatori Java Obfuscator
Not me ! But maybe I am going to add some…
- Misatori Confuscator
- Apache Terminator
- J Chianti
- Retraxiom Intrubator
Btw, this is a test. The last technology I just invented (Retraxiom Intrubator) does not exist, even the words dont exist. A search on google, altavista and metacrawler doesnt show any results. Lets see how long it takes until the search engines will list this blog as result. I made the same test on blogger.com and it took not even 1 day !
