Author Archives: David

Email from an ‘IBM Business Consultant’

I received a rather interesting email from an IBM Business Consultant the other day.

Elizabeth said …

I wanted to touch base with someone in your organization who is responsible for your technology purchases for your end user needs (i.e. xSeries, Intel servers, Rational software, services etc.) I’m newly assigned to your account for your end user purposes, hoping to better explain my role and the value I can add to your account.

Now, the interesting thing about this is … I don’t have an IBM account … and I am certianly not an IBM partner (not in the official sense, anyway) … and I also do not use any of the systems or services mentioned (not from IBM at least). So I’m not sure where she would have gotten my contact information.

The even more interesting bit of information is this: Her title is “IBM Business Consultant, Metro New York/New Jersey”.

Now why would a business consulting in the NY/NJ area, be contacting me? I’m in the Chicago area. If you do a whois lookup on midrange.com, you will find that the zone contact listed is register.com … and they are in New York.

Could it be that some IBM’ers are farming the whois database’s for email addresses?

Globetechnology: Internet attacks can hit your pocketbook

Internet attacks can hit your pocketbook

Jim Carroll was stunned when Rogers Cable told him it had received a complaint that a hacker was using his Internet address.
Must be a mistake, he told Rogers, his Internet provider. Then a tech helper at the company walked him through his setup and discovered that indeed, he had inadvertently left his business Web server unprotected. It was what is called an “open relay. Someone found it, posted Mr. Carroll’s address on more than 100 Russian bulletin boards, and soon hundreds of people were using Mr. Carroll’s machine to surf anonymously.

Sorry, but I have no sympathy for so called ‘noted high-tech authority’ who leaves his mail server relay function open.

Ordinary users who inadvertatly get infected with spam bots I understand … but people who understand technology should know better.

My evil plan …

… at least for now.

Evil Plan ™!

My objective is simple: Soul Accumulation.

My motive is a little bit more complex: Madness

Stage One

To begin your plan, you must first seduce a famous actor/actress. This will cause the world to realize something is wrong, alarmed by your arrival. Who is this threat to our children? Where did they come from? And why do they look so good wearing the skin of another human?

Stage Two

Next, you must desecrate the Statue of Liberty. This will all be done from a abandoned church, a mysterious place of unrivaled dark glory. Upon seeing this, the world will die in a way you just don’t want to think about, as countless hordes of computer programmers hasten to do your every bidding.

Stage Three

Finally, you must activate your plague of doom, bringing about an unending cacophony of screams. Your name shall become synonymous with evil, and no man will ever again dare fire you. Everyone will bow before your dashing good looks, and the world will have no choice but to grant you three maidens of virtue true.

I found the Evil Plan Generator at Michael’s My Mundane Mid-Life blog.

gethostbyname pays attention to blanks?

I was working on my current project at work today and ran into an odd problem … a host name (that existed) could not be resolved.

The only different thing about the host name is that it was retrieved from an iSeries using JDBC.

I could ping the host without a problem … so I knew it was valid, but the “InetAddress.getByName()” method couldn’t resolve it.

After a while I noticed that the ending quote for the host name field wasn’t showing up in the variable debug window (of WDSC). So I added a “String.trim()” to the end of the “ResultSet.getString()” and getByName() was able to resolve the name.

I would have thought that getByName() would be able to deal with blanks on the end of a host name.

Yahoo! News – Coming Soon: A Cellphone Directory

Yahoo! News – Coming Soon: A Cellphone Directory

After years of anonymity, the numbers of most of the nation’s mobile phones will be compiled later this year in the first wireless directory.

Talk about a stupid idea! Now a phone solicitation will cost you money even if you don’t buy what they are selling.

Thankfully Verizon (my provider) will not be including their customers in the directory.

…Verizon Wireless vowed not to include its 39 million subscribers in the directory and chided the effort as “misguided.”

Slashdot | SCO Prides Itself on Inspiring FUD

Slashdot | SCO Prides Itself on Inspiring FUD

I just don’t get SCO … or maybe it’s just that SCO doesn’t get it?

As far as I know, they have yet to provide ANY evidence their IP was infringed upon. Right now all they are doing is wasting everyone’s time (let alone money).

When are they finally going to learn that they can’t win?

On a brighter note, MKS was mentioned in the same SD Times article.

Cellular Reception

While we were in Mesa Verde National Park … which is in the middle of nowhere … I was able to get a reasonably good cellular phone signal from Verizon.

The signal tried to be digital (which would have been nice) … but after spending about 30 seconds each call trying, it gave up and switched over to analog. Luckily it was still Verizon analog, so there were no roaming charges.

Needless to say I was quite impressed with the cell coverage.

MT vs. WordPress?

The licensing plan for Movabletype is changing … not that I can blame them. They need to make money, put food on the table, go on vacations, etc…. but for what I use a blog for (not much), it can’t be justified.

So I’m giving WordPress a try … it’s GPL’ed so there are no licensing issues.

So far it’s not too bad … although I’m a bit concerned about the performance. Even with a mysql database back end, and a P4 2ghz server, it seems to crawl.