I got held up recently by a particularly nasty Trojan infection that seemed to come from a flash vulnerability – or at least it installed itself in a Macromedia directory at a time when embedded flash would have been running on one of the web pages I had open.
No ordinary decent virus this one though. It cleverly disabled my default browser – Chrome – coercing me into a specific set of steps that would ultimately place a rootkit on my OS. As my browser seemingly inexplicably was rendered useless, even after multiple uninstall/reinstalls, something else was up. Internet Explorer was attempting to connect to a “tolule.net” which on lookup resolved to a Chinese IP. So a quick entry into my Sygate advanced rules and I had a large swathe of Chinese IPs blocked. So I was safe for the time being giving me a chance to think about what was going on. (The Trojan was quite busy – attempting to connect every 10 mins or so and to multiple domains – initially always tolule.net but also gusmon.net and somemon.net – each time resolving to an address in China).
Continue reading ‘Trojans. Not Stupid.’
I should probably open my commentary on the SO community with a more wide-ranging piece on the effectiveness of self-moderation and social badge collecting in rapidly scaling a web community but hopefully by dumping this the second opinion will be more insightful whenever that may be.
Ok so really I’m just a petty net troll who completely overreacts to criticism online. That aside, I still cannot understand how the answering army at stackoverflow come to the collective conclusion that every question on a close-to-the-bone programming issue requires some inane form of rephrasing or just outright blanking.
Continue reading ‘The StackOverflow Rant’
image courtesy johnson7
App Engine is generally a new paradigm for webapp developers; replacing sessions with memcache and a schemaless datastore just two elements requiring new thinking for old problems. Unfortunately there are a few more hidden nuisances which have the potential to waste programming time relatively early on. Here’s four of my personal head-bangers:
1. the datastore doesn’t always store Properties
I’ve had trouble with it refusing to store arbitrary entity props unless I assign them in the entity constructor itself (these fields were optional btw). Just setting prop values after initialisation then put() on the ds didn’t write them.
Continue reading ‘Google App Engine Datastore Gotchas’
This was sitting in draft form for a while now – I’m not sure why but probably until I fleshed it out a bit more. Here it is in unbridled terseness
Let me begin by saying I don’t want this blog infected with politics.
Notwithstanding this fact I wish to proceed momentarily by injecting a healthy dose of the political clap.
We want entrepreneurs vs we want more of the same.
Continue reading ‘Apparatchiks Vs Technocrats?’
So I attended my first two tech events over the past few days. One good one bad – here’s why:
First the good one. I didn’t really know what to expect from Barcamp Derry and from the spiel delivered online was hoping that was the correct way to approach it. Half hour sessions organised in 3 concurrent ’streams’ meant the first 5 minutes of each was largely spent loitering in the doorway of each until one grabbed enough attention take a pew.
Continue reading ‘The Cathedral and the Barcamp’
Back in 2005, I used to work for what was then DrKW in their Digital Markets division. DM was their investment banking answer to the web buzz of the early 2000s. Sean Park, the head of the division, had made a personal killing on several tech floatation deals and had drank the digital koolaid. Ably assisted by an IT chief with a penchant for grand visions, he set about giving Dresdner’s corporate clients an investment banking answer to the consumer behemoths Betfair, Ebay, etc who were seemingly granting supernatural powers to anyone with an internet connection.
You can still view the Googlezon-inspired vision here. I left the bank a year later, but kept an eye on the Revolution platform. It failed miserably. The trouble was they were providing a great integrated digital service that no one in the city knew they wanted yet. Banking is a notoriously fickle industry, and change only happens when trusted relationships introduce it. Revolution’s newly recruited marketing team was manned with former developers, admin staff & inexperienced hires from other banks.
Continue reading ‘Ecosystems and Cajoling Participants’
This post started off as a comparison of two of the most prominent methods of indy game distribution on the web today – app stores & social networks – but has morphed into something of a warning shot to platforms who allow their open networks to be ridden roughshot over by games ruthlessly seeking distribution above all else.
I had hoped to discuss some numbers taking both leading Facebook & App Store games as a jumping off point. But one look at my Twitter homepage this morning aroused some angst.
To their credit the realtime stream networks have opened up their far-reaching update networks to 3rd party developers without holding much back. Photos on facebook and throttling search on twitter are by and large minor holdups which would presumably have grave performance issues to overcome first anyway.
But this power in the hands of developers doesn’t come without responsibilities.
Continue reading ‘Indy Gaming & Destroying a Platform’
I’ve seen some how-to guides for getting started writing facebook apps on the web but none really cover everything from start to finish. Even Facebook’s own documentation is somewhat disappointing. So to help others find their way around Facebook markup and the life cycle of a Facebook application here is a simple tutorial.It is a very basic app which aims to display a web image of the user’s choice a) in miniature on their profile, and b) in full on the application’s own canvas page. What is a canvas page? Simply the main page of your application that the user sees each time they click on your app.
Prereqs:
What you’ll need – an account on Facebook and a web hosting provider who will run php scripts and allows you to set up a database. I use mysql in this guide, but you can safely leave out the db steps if all you want to learn is the facebook-specific work flow stuff.
Continue reading ‘Step by Step Guide to Creating a First Facebook App’
If you’ve ever tried to Google for a legit brute force password recovery tool, you’ll no doubt run into the same crappy seo’d to the max aggregate sites I did, before eventually finding the right tool.
I’m going to share the programs that have worked for me, so I’ll be updating this list (ok so it’s not yet a list) as and when.
First one up is rarcrack on Linux. I used it for a 7z file.
How-to is here and download is here.
I *love* not having to delete emails. Scanning my gmail is so much quicker than my old work’s outlook, with it’s puny single Gig of space and all those useless powerpoints flying around. That’s the work powerpoints that is. I quite enjoyed the viral ones.
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