Count Infinity

Image by Fleky_Lude

A lot has been said about the supposed immunity of Apple products to malware. If I had a nickle for every time I heard that “Macs can’t get viruses”, I’d be a rich man. Even Apple perpetuates this lie, but hidden inside the Apple Care agreement is the truth: officially, Apple disclaims any responsibility to help you remove any malware that infects your shiny new computer. This is boilerplate as far as computer care agreements go, but wait! What malware? Macs can’t get viruses! Can they? How about the recent epidemic.

Apple and the fanboys would like us to believe that all things Mac are somehow magically safe from attack. (more…)

1. Implicit Returns – Can you say “What the !@#$%”? This is just wrong on SOOOO many levels. This appears to be one of the many casualties of the never ending quest to eliminate commonly typed characters from the language.
2. Return isn’t allowed inside a loop – This just makes exactly no sense. I suspect it has something to do with internal stack implementation, and the impossibility of making it coexist with the absurd “do” blocks that ruby lets you include after a function as a parameter. That said, I don’t care why it isn’t allowed, disallowing it is unacceptable. The only way to work around it is to pollute your code with failure indicators and spam some if failed blocks after all your loops. (more…)

I have been well trained in the art of foo. I started at the innocent age of 8, learning some BASIC-foo. I first tinkered with some HTML-foo at 12. At 14 I stepped my BASIC-foo up a notch, and started to train extensively in TI-BASIC-foo. At 16 a new friend blew my mind with some TI-BASIC-foo of his own, and a year later I began learning the dark arts of Assembly-foo, in the arena of Z80. At 18, I applied my wisdom to develop a new set of C++-foo skills, and started fooing professionally. Since then, I’ve continued to expand my craft, and some of my foo skills are legendary.

But, there are no words foul enough to express the taste that Ruby-foo leaves in my mouth. As such, my Ruby skills have a whole lot of room for improvement. I look forward to continuing to avoid that improvement, just as soon as I finish the Puppet scripts I’m working on.

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Google's Instant Preview

UPDATE: It looks like Google just rolled out an update that breaks this fix. The good news is that Google has MOSTLY fixed the problem, in that clicks in blank space will clear the pane, and a second click on the button will toggle it off. The behavior is now inline with every aspect of the revised specification below, except that it is still too aggressive about which locations can open the preview pane (meaning that the panel can still appear unexpectedly.) I’ll post updated code as soon as possible.

I can’t like the search preview feature. I tried, I really did, but less than 72 hours after its release, I found that my sanity was already slipping away. I knew it was bad when I considered switching to Bing just to avoid the problem. In a fit of senility I used Google (again!) to search for a solution to my problem. Among the various obscenities directed at Google’s latest experiment, the words “can’t” and “impossible” seemed to appear more than occasionally, earning the solution a place on a blog of impossible things.

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NOTE: This article talks about a loophole that no longer exists in most major browsers. The information is still interesting, but don’t expect it to work anymore.

Your browser knows an amazing amount about your identity, where you go, and what you do. Every time you visit a page, the browser remembers it in the history. In theory, to protect your privacy, the sites you visit don’t have access to this history information. In practice, it is actually possible to get at part of it. To prove my point, let’s look at the sites you do and don’t visit:

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I ran across a new “your computer can’t do that” lie today.

Suppose you have a site example.com, and a subdomain dev.example.com. The dev site is just a clone of the main one, but you can make changes and test things before deploying to your live site. You might want to tell all robots to leave your dev site alone, and for good reason. The dev site could trigger Google’s duplicate content filters, or if not, Google might decide to show dev.example.com pages in it’s search results, resulting in visitors seeing things they shouldn’t.
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