Posts filed under 'Main'
Last weekend some friends and I were having a debate about corporate spyware. The question we asked is “what would you do if you found out your company monitors everything you do on your computer? Every website you visit, every key you press, and even look at your screen remotely from time to time.”
So where did this come from? Well on Friday I noticed my computer running slow, so like all geeks I did a ctrl alt del to see what was using so much memory. It turns out the problem was FireFox, but even more interesting I found a program called “swsys.exe” running. Since I’ve never heard of it, I Googled to see what it was.
Turns out, swsys.exe is part of an application called “Activity Tracker” that allows employers to log all websites, emails, and even keystrokes! It also lets them look at any employee’s screen in real time.
A quick “netstat” command showed my computer currently connected to my Boss’s. A couple setting tweaks, and that was no longer the case 🙂 That’s where the problem lies.
Over the weekend I talked to some fellow programmers at different companies, and even my old boss. All of them said “screw that, I’d walk out if I found out they were doing that.. that’s shady.”
Unfortunately, I didn’t get the chance to walk out. When I got home Friday I tried logging in to check my work email. (like I do every weekend – to check for any critical alerts or outages.) When my password wasn’t accepted, I knew what was coming.
I was fired this morning for “performance issues.”
I’m not going to bad talk a previous employer – it’s not something I do. I met some great people at Auto Credit Express and had some great opportunities. Altogether working at ACE helped me grow into a much better programmer than I was when I started almost 2 years ago.
On the flip side, I am glad to no longer be working for a company that engages in these practices. It’s one thing to protect your assets, it’s a totally different issue to not have trust in them to begin with.
Has anybody else experienced software like this at your job? Would you work for such a company? What would you do if you did?
April 9th, 2007
Last week, Jeremy posted about a little game called Desktop Tower Defense. (Warning: do NOT click that link if you want to get anything productive done today.)
Desktop Tower Defense is perhaps the most addicting flash game I’ve ever played in my life. I’m serious!! I even got my cousin addicted. I told him about it at 10pm, and then woke up to a message from him at 4:30am saying “you’re right, it is.”
Basically, it’s the reason I didn’t do anything productive at all this weekend. So you’ve been warned. Don’t click this link.
April 8th, 2007
If it seems like my spelling has improved that’s because, well, it has!
Before I moved dotCULT over to the new server I decided to mod it up a bit. I installed some less common options like pspell (the php spelling module) and mod_python (haven’t played with that yet) and some newer upgrades like PHP5 and MySQL5.
One of the benefits of having PHP5 and pspell is that I get to use cool AJAX wordpress plugins like Visual Spellcheck.
If you want to use it, you’ll have to use the more basic wordpress editor instead of the richtext (but I don’t like the richtext version anyway – it creates ugly code.)
Once activated, the plugin will put a little “check spelling” link above the textbox. Clicking it highlights any misspelled words like in the screenshot below:
It’s pretty cool – and easy to use. I really wish they’d make a spellchecker addon for ScribeFire. It’s so much easier to blog from FireFox than it is to open up my blog all the time. (especially when it’s having DNS issues… but don’t worry I think I have all fixed now.)
April 4th, 2007
Matt was kind enough to send me an invite to Joost today, so I figured the least I could do was check it out and write about it. (please don’t ask for invites, I don’t have any to give out)
If you aren’t familiar with Joost, it’s the new project of Niklas Zennstrøm and Janus Friis. If you think those names sound familiar it’s because they do. Niklas and Janus are the same guys who made Kazaa and Skype.
So what is Joost? Joost is like Internet TV. You download the client (it’s very small, mine used less memory than my currently open Fire Fox!) and then using a bit torrent like system you can can watch TV on your computer. It’s not live TV but it does offer some cool channels.
There’s a comedy central channel, a fight channel, and a soccer channel.
Best of all, it even has Moose and Squirrel!!
If you look at the above image, you’ll get a good idea at what the Joost interface is like. While I love the service, I feel that the interface could use some more work.
In my opinion, the interface is a little clumsy. Sure it’s neat the way it overlays, but it doesn’t respond like I’d like it too. I had to click pause about 3 times before it finally paused, and once I got stuck in full screen mode and was unable to make the controls come back up.
Another annoying feature is when the playback catches up to the download – it gets choppy. The first thing I could think of was realplayer. Of course, as more people get on Joost I expect that this should resolve itself.
The channel selection is another area that could use some work. Take a look:
It took me a while to realize that the middle element is always highlighted – not the one that I’m hovering over. Ordinarily that’s not a problem, but if I click on a non-highlighted channel it loads – without any real notifcation to me that it’s doing so.
Is it annoying enough to get me to stop using it? No! I’d just prefer a more windows media player feel to the application.
It’s definitely a neat concept though, and I’m going to waste lots of time exploring it over the coming weeks.
April 3rd, 2007
Some of you who regularly play the market may remember an allegedy shady character named Mario Pino and his company Mellon Research that traded under the symbol MLON.
Well about a year ago MLON changed it’s name to Paychest, and those of us who had the MLON penny stock recieved a ton of shares of PYCT and XMET instead.
Paychest is a company vying to compete with Paypal (their whole business strategy of “be as good as our competitor” is a topic for another post), and XMET is xxstream entertainment – an adult themed club. I’m actually sort of afraid to visit their website.
Anyway, the shares were worthless. Myself, I had 6500 shares of XMET valued at $0.0001
So imagine my shock today when I opened up my AIM stock ticker to see this:
6500 shares at almost $6 is almost $40,000 !!!
As soon as my heart started again, I headed over to Ameritrade and placed a sell order with a limit of $3 (part of me was skeptical and thought this could be some sort of error.)
I’m not sure what happened, the Ameritrade quotes kept saying $5.95 but my $3 sell order wasn’t executing. 10 minutes later the price was the same, the stock’s volume had jumped from 10,000 to 10 million, and my order was still sitting there.
10 minutes after that, the price was back down to $0.0001 (ok, so I didn’t really LOSE $40,000…. but that’s not the point)
I have no idea what’s going on, but I don’t think my heart can take something like that again.
April 3rd, 2007
I’m really glad that April Fools Day is overwith. As far as the web is concerned, it’s one of my least favorite holidays. Sure it’s fun to read about TiSP and Other April Fools jokes, but if you’re trying to look something up or get some work done it can be annoying.
Anyway, the end of April Fools Day brings about one of my favorite holidays: Opening Day! Yes, it’s officially baseball season!
Opening day in Detroit was a big deal this year – what with us having made it to the world series. Downtown Detroit was full of life and energy today and it felt great! There were booths everywhere, all kinds of things to do, and just a general awesome mood in the city.
Best of all, Asif and I managed to get out of work at noon and head down to Comerica Park just in time to see the Tigers bat in the bottom of the first inning.
It’s a shame we missed the banner raising and the flyover during the national anthem, (although the jets did fly over our heads walking down woodward) but it was great to be part of the electric opening day atmosphere.
Unfortunately the tigers lost in the 10th inning, but it didn’t seem to dampen the mood of the crowd any. There’s high hopes for the Tigers this season, and I hope they can live up to their expectations. It’s got to be a lot different going from a feel good story to the team everybody is gunning for.
I wish I’d have had time to get my camera, (or at least change out of my long sleeve black shirt and put on some sunglasses or a hat – my face is burnt!) but I did manage to snap a few pictures with my cell phone.
Check out the view from our seats. Row 10 right behind 3rd base.
April 2nd, 2007
Firstly, let me say welcome to the new server. If you’re seeing this, than you’re reading dotCULT on a newer, faster server that might actually load in under 5 mintues now.
Last night was poker night. That means there’s usually 5-10 drunken guys in in my basement telling lies and playing cards. When Matt and Jesus (pronounced “geez us” not “hey zeus”)…… yes I play poker with Jesus what’s wrong with that?
Anyway, Matt and Jesus got up to leave, then came back in a few seconds later and scared the hell out of my cat with this giant german shepard. Thankfully, he ended up being a nice calm dog (or maybe being around Jesus had something to do with it.) Apparantley he was just wandering around in my driveway.
Jesus said it came up to them when they were leaving, so they put it in my yard while they looked for the owner. Matt had already called the number on the tag and got a voicemail.
“What’s the number?” I said. “It’s warm out, the dog can stay in the yard tonite and I’ll try his owner tomorrow, at least he won’t get run over by a car.”
“it’s 386-,” he started.
Then it hit us, and we both announced “That’s a home phone number – let’s Google it.”
Sure enough, typing the number into Google gave back the guy’s name and address. It was just 2 blocks away. Imagine his suprise when he opened the door to Matt saying “Hey John, I found you dog.”
Thanks Google – without you John’s dog would probably be at the pound this morning.
March 30th, 2007
Just a heads up. I purchased a new server from 1and1.com and then promptly cancelled after them basically just saying “here’s a fresh linux install, ip and root password. have fun.” That’s great for some people, but not for me.
So instead I headed over to GoDaddy and got a dedicated box through them. This time I paid the extra $9/month for Cpanel – much better! (please don’t bother posting the Plesk > * comments here… it’s not!)
Anyway… I moved Feedbutton.com and NoSlang.com over to this newer faster server, so you should see a huge improvement in Feedbutton. Unfortunately, the feedbutton stats had grown to be well over 2 gigs of data, so I decided to make some database optimization changes. You’ll still get the exact same stats, but it won’t take up as much space on my server now.
Sadly though, it means that all the Feedbutton stats were reset. Sorry about that. I guess it gives everybody an equal chance to be on the most popular page though. Check it out.
Anyway.. I hope to move dotCULT over tonite, so this will be the last post until I can get it moved over and the DNS properly switches. (as a bonus, I now get to use jonesy.biz as my name servers)
That’s about it. See you on the new (faster) server…
March 29th, 2007
You may have noticed that many of my sites weren’t up this weekend. We had a hard drive fail in one of the boxes hosing dotCULT, NoSlang, Feedbutton, and some other smaller sites.
The hard drive has been replaced, and everything looks good now. I’d like to say I’m sorry about the outage, I’m doing my best to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
I’ve ordered a 2nd server, and will be slowly moving sites to this newer, faster, dedicated box. I’m going to keep the old box set up too, so that way if anything ever happens I can just flip the DNS switch and have another copy live.
Anyway, I’m sorry about the downtime – espeically to the loyal feedbutton users. I promise I’ll do my best to keep it from happening again. Thanks for understanding.
–Ryan
March 26th, 2007
I was looking at some of my MyBlogLog Stats for txt2day and I came across something that I just didn’t understand.
Take a look:
(note: I blocked out my actual visitor stats, as I don’t want to share them… sorry!)
What are these links? This isn’t a referrers list, it’s a “what readers viewed” list. Which means whatever these pages are had my mybloglog tracking code on them.
Of course, clicking them takes me to an error page. I’ve also noticed that that IP is an AOL IP.
Any idea what’s going on? Is this simply a cached version of my website, or a saved offline version?
If anybody knows exactly what these are, please do share.
Thanks.
March 23rd, 2007
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