Month: January 2006

Categories
Geek In the News

Watch Out for the Sober.Z Worm

(I posted this to The Farm and Tucows Developer — I also thought I’d post the warning on this blog as well — Joey)


“Nazis.

I hate these guys.” — Indiana Jones

The

Sober.Z

worm is a worm that runs on the Windows platform. It began

infecting computers worldwide back in November and goes by a number of

names:

  • W32.Sober.X@mm
  • W32/Sober@MM!M681
  • WORM_SOBER.AG
  • W32/Sober-X
  • W32/Sober-Y
  • W32/Sober-Z

The

source code for the Sober.Z worm suggests that it

will launch another

attack on January

5th and 6th to coincide with the 87th anniversary of the

founding of the Nazi Party. On these dates, PCs infected with the virus

will be instructed to connect to numerous servers to download malicious

code that will likely send out German and English language email hate

messages.

Tucows encourages network administrators to

protect themselves by blocking domains believed to host the malicious

code, which

are:

  • http://people.freenet.de/
  • http://scifi.pages.at/
  • http://home.pages.at/
  • http://free.pages.at/
  • http://home.arcor.de/

Be

sure to tell people you know — especially if they aren’t tech-savvy —

not to open suspicious email, even if it appears

to be from a sender they know.

For more details on

the Sober.Z worm, consult these

sites:

Categories
It Happened to Me

The Webcam Appears to be Operational


A still capture from the webcam.

Excellent. It’s all falling into place…

Categories
In the News

An Appeal to My Fellow Voters in the High Park/Parkdale Riding

I do so love it when I can repurpose a picture!

Yes, it’s time to unseat Sarmite “Sam” Bulte, who’s in the pocket of the entertainment industry, who think that it’s our duty to “gulp down products and crap out cash”, as Doc Searls puts it.

More on this later. In the meantime, I’ll let two different sites with pretty much diametrically-opposed politics — BoingBoing and The Western Standard’s Shotgun blog — and Michael Geist (lawyer and Canada Research Chair in Internet & E-commerce Law) do the ‘splaining.

Categories
In the News It Happened to Me

Oh, NOW He Promises to Drop the Fee

Barely hours after we paid the immigration processing fee of CDN$975 (US$847 at today’s rates), Prime Minister Paul Martin announces that if elected, the Liberals will drop the fee. Wendy and I had better get the full-on tasting menu dinner (with wine pairings, natch) for four at Susur’s if you win, Martin!

Some reality checks:

  • Oh, quit yer whinin’. If you’re going to immigrate here, the least you can do is cover the administrative costs of doing so. Perhaps some system can be put in place so that young-but-capable immigrants from countries with bad economies can defer the payment, but really, if you’re going to ride the Canadian Roller Coaster, you’ve got to pony up.
  • The fee was introduced as part of a 1995 budget (here’s the “Budget in Brief”, PDF version; here’s the HTML version) drawn up by the Finance Minister at the time, who just happened to be…Paul Martin.

But hey, I could throw a good party with that $975…

Categories
Music

Music for the Year of the Dog

Year of the Dog

January 29th marks the start of what is the Year of the Dog (if you want to get pedantic, it’s the year of the Yang Red Fire Dog) in the Chinese calendar. I ususally throw a Chinese New Year’s party, party because it’s fun, and partly because very few people do, and it means that there’s little risk for scheduling conflicts (unlike Valentine’s Day or Christmas). I was thinking of putting together an iTunes playlist of dog-related songs (the shizzled-up variants “dawg” and “dogg” are acceptable), and here’s what I came up with:

Did I miss any? Let me know in the comments!

Categories
Geek

"Year of the Developer"

2006: Year of the DeveloperFor the past couple of months, I’ve been engaged in the

annual Tucows tradition of drafting my portion of the strategic plan

for the department in which I work, Research and Innovation. This time,

we decided to go big and say that I’d make 2006 “The Year of the

Developer”. It may sound a little bit on the hokey side — perhaps it’s

a bit too much like those feel-good-but-do-nothing “mission statements”

that some companies are fond of posting in their waiting rooms — but I

think it’s a pretty good catch-all for all our plans for developers for

the coming year.

Developer

Resources

A development platform like ours is only

as good as the resources available for it. Without giving you what you

need to develop on our platform, it’s just a big lump of inert code.

Some of the new developer resources we’re working on

are:

  • Tucows

    Developer: The go-to site for

    developers who are writing code that either builds upon or integrates

    with the Tucows platform. You’ll be able to get documentation, client

    code, examples, how-tos, tips and tricks and news and announcements

    from this site.

    Tucows Developer is at developers.tucows.com.

  • Hacking: A developer

    wiki where developers can find and share information about developing

    for the Tucows platform and development in general. It is meant to

    supplement the documentation and allow people to share knowledge that

    would otherwise be lost. All sorts of people will be contributing to

    this wiki, from me to Tucows sales engineers to developers who build

    upon or integrate with the Tucows platform.

    Hacking is at hacking.developers.tucows.com.

  • API Helpdesk: We’re working to

    resurrect the old “API Helpdesk” site, which allowed developers to test

    calls to the Tucows API and see what the XML looked like. It was an

    independent project of one of our former sales engineers, and it was a

    useful tool for those trying to debug their client code or write new

    clients from scratch. We’ve got the old code now and we’re putting

    together an official version that we expect to have online in the next

    few days.

We’ll also be making fixes to

current resources, including:

  • Developer

    Documentation: I’ll be working with the

    documentation department to ensure that documentation is easily

    accessible, available in the formats that you want, complete and

    useful. We’re also working on ways to make it easy for you to know when

    the documentation has been updated.

    Developer

    documentation can be found at Tucows Developer’s

    “Documentation”

    page.

  • Discussion Forums: We’ll be working on

    a number of improvement to the Tucows Discuss forums, including better

    navigation, an improved RSS feed, a search function and keeping the

    discussions going.

    Tucows Discuss, our discussion forums site, is

    at

    discuss.tucows.com.

  • The

    Farm: The Farm is our blog devoted to software

    development in general. In addition to fixing up the layout, we’ll also

    have more book reviews, interviews with developers, downloadable

    goodies and new series on topics that you find interesting such as Ruby

    and Rails, JavaScript and AJAX, security and using web

    services.

    The Farm is at farm.tucows.com.

More

Outreach

We’ll be doing a lot more outreach this

year too. Among our plans:

  • Meeting You: You’re going to

    see me attending as many developer gathering as I can, such as the

    monthly BarCamp meetings

    in Toronto (where Tucows’ head office is). I’m also working on plans to

    hold developer meetups from local ones such as last

    year’s OPML meetup to out-of-town gatherings at various

    conferences such as the ISPcons in Baltimore (May)

    and Santa Clara (November), South by Southwest (March), the EDC Developer Relations

    Conference (February) and at least one of the upcoming Ruby

    on Rails conferences.

  • Promoting You: We’ll be

    posting interviews with developers doing interesting work — whether

    it’s on the Tucows platform, or something completely unrelated. Another

    idea we’re working on is providing free banner ads on The Farm to developers with

    weblogs or sites that link to us or who develop applications that build

    on or integrate with the Tucows

    platform.

  • Rewarding You: Last year, we

    started giving small gifts — not just Tucows merch, but Amazon.com

    gift certificates and such — to developers who went “above and beyond

    the call of duty” in developing applications or libraries or writing

    documentation or tips for the Tucows platform. We’ll be doing more of

    that this year, as well as sponsoring development contests with even

    bigger prizes.

When is All This Taking

Place?

We’re going to borrow some tricks from the

Agile Development crowd and start right now, implementing “Year of the

Developer” as an ongoing initiative. Over the next few weeks, you

should see the start of this year-long process and we hope you’ll like

the results.

If you have any comments or suggestions

for “Year of the Developer”, we’d love to hear them. Leave a note in

the comments, or send me

e-mail!

Categories
Uncategorized

"Achewood" on Hippie Food

This question is always burning in my mind whenever one of my hippie friends tries to feed me their latest meat-and-dairy-free organic creation or when I’ve been to the “Kind Kitchen” at the Om Festival:


Click the image to see the full comic.