Blaster Busted

If you were the FBI and were in charge of tracking down the source of the recent Blaster worm, where would you start? The obvious choice is to look at how the script kiddie renamed Blaster. In this case the culprit, a teenager from Minnesota who goes by the username "teekid" renamed one of his Blaster rewrites "TEEKID.EXE" Not very smart, but it just proves that this script kiddie cared more about his ego than he did getting caught.

This kid has left tracks all over the Web. Here's a cached version of a hacked Minnesota Government Finance Officers Association web site where he's written "Still hacked by Teekid".

CSS Catch-22

I have found myself in the inevitable position of coding a web site that I know will need to be maintained by someone who does not have the same level of skills as me. I badly want to code the site using CSS layout but I fear that as soon as I hand over that code someone is going to open it up in Dreamweaver or Homesite (or Front Page!) and I will start getting phone calls.

One solution is to comment the code in a professional manner, documenting what each DIV container is doing and in the stylesheet what each class does. However the kinds of people who use the tools I listed above aren't the kinds of people who read HTML source code. I know that soon after I've handed over the code I will look at the site and I will find FONT tags wrapped around the DIVs, tables stuck inside the DIVs indenting a paragraph, and all kinds of other tag-soup.

My choices are:

• Code it in tag-soup with tables and spacer GIFs for layout
• Hand over the code along with a rudimentary CMS so that the site editor (and their tools) never actually touch the layout code
• Hand over clean code and then spend far too much time editing a web site that I shouldn't have to deal with

It makes me wonder if anyone has written some Javascript (or DWMX API code?) that I can put into the HTML that can interact with Dreamweaver and warn the user not to add tag-soup code. I haven't used Dreamweaver in years but I've heard some things about it's flexible XML-based Extensions that make me think something like this might be possible.

I realize that Dreamweaver does support the visual layout of CSS-driven designs, but it's nowhere near the level it needs to be for a editor to treat it as a WYSIWYG tool. All of the sites I've coded using CSS layout display pretty bad inside of Dreamweaver; bad enough that a site editor trying to make changes to the site is going to think something is broken and then try to fix it -- using tables for layout, of course.

One analogy I've used to explain this problem is: A mechanic with thousands of dollars worth of tools doesn't necessarily mean that he's a good mechanic. You've got to know how to use those tools so as to not break anything. The same goes for WYSIWYG tools like Dreamweaver.

What to do? Tag soup or CSS?

Congratulations x2

Congratulations are in order. There are some weddings today.

East Coast: David Wertheimer and Amy Schachner, who met through a blind date setup by friends
West Coast: Nick Finck and Crystal Murphy, who met on Match.com

Pretty soon the parents are going to start asking for grandkids. May life smile upon both happy couples for better or for worse.

Elevator Conversations

Yesterday morning I was in the elevator going to work and there were three other people who clearly were coworkers at a company on a higher floor. The conversation went like this:

Woman 1: Oh, I like what you did with your hair.
Woman 2: Thanks. I decided to make it more curly.
Woman 1: I'll bet the recent humidity makes it difficult to manage.
    Man: I hate hair.
     *** Elevator arrives at my floor ***
     *** All three look at me as I move towards the doors ***
     *** Shrugging my shoulders I throw up my hands and gesture upwards ***
     Me: I don't have that problem.
     *** They then notice my lack of hair ***
Woman 2: That was funny....(heard while the doors closed behind me)

Walking home from work yesterday, I was in a hurry to get home and strip off my work clothes and change into something more comfortable. A man who hasn't shaved in about a week and who is wearing dirty clothes eyes me walking very fast up the hill in Park Slope. He says only one thing to me:

"Hey kid. You make a million today?"

Top Twenty Songs From iTunes

I have 2062 songs currently in my iTunes library on my Powerbook G4. Over the past six months I've been scoring the songs I liked the best - the ones that make me stop working, switch to iTunes and hit "Replay" so I can hear it again. Here are the top twenty songs from my iTines library:

Song Name - Artist (Album Name)

1. 4 - Jim O'Rourke (Bad Timing)
2. A Rush of Blood to the Head - Coldplay (A Rush of Blood to the Head)
3. American Pie - Don Mclean (American Pie & other Hits)
4. Fuzzy Sun - Jim O'Rourke ( Halfway to a Threeway)
5. Lazy Line Painter Jane - Belle and Sebastian (Lazy Line Painter Jane)
6. Looking For Space - John Denver (Greatest Country Hits)
7. Mary Jo - Belle and Sebastian (Tigermilk)
8. Prelude to 110 or 220/Women of the World - Jim O'Rourke (Eureka)
9. The Boy in the Arab Strap - Belle and Sebastian
10. The Workplace - Jim O'Rourke (Halfway to a Threeway)
11. Walt Whitman's Niece - Billy Bragg & Wilco (Mermaid Avenue)
12. Ring the Bells - James (Seven)
13. Kill the Clown - Jim Gaudet (Give Up the Ghost)
14. Till the End of the World - Nick Cave (Soundtrack: Until the End of the World)
15. Dance of the Bad Angels - Tim Booth & Angelo Badalamenti (Booth and the Bad Angel)
16. Te Namo - Te Vaka (Te Vaka)
17. Vaseline Machine Gun - Leo Kottke
18. Excitable Boy - Warren Zevon
19. Cows With Guns - Dana Lyons
20. Metamorphosis Five - Philip Glass (Solo Piano)

Note: I actually own (in bold) the CDs for about 70% of the MP3s I have. The rest of my MP3 collection is made up of ripping CDs borrowed from former coworkers and former roommates. While I don't condone the trading of MP3s -- nor do I use Kazaa or any of the file-trading networks -- I fully support "trying out" new music in MP3 format. Usually, if I become addicted to a new band or new style of music I follow that up with buying a couple of the CDs that are sometimes hard to find even in the collections of my friends and family. Support the artist, not the label.

If you know of more music similar to the songs above, I'm taking recommendations. It's time to weed out the crap and the average stuff and expand my listening.

Comments Spam

If you're running a MovableType blog, you might want to ban this IP number: 61.181.5.80. I spotted a comment over at 37Signals pointing to about 20 porn and casino web sites. Two minutes later I saw that the same guy (possibly a bot) had hit two of my posts as well. Interestingly enough, the posts that are being spammed are not recent but rather ones from several weeks ago (ranging from 11 to 14 posts back).

Dear Microsoft....

Please fix your fucking mail software. That is all.

Sincerely yours,

The World

P.S. Entourage for Mac OS X is a great mail client.

The Great Blackout of 2003

At approximately 4:20 PM EST on August 14, 2003 the power went out in New York City. Soon it was known that it was not just in Manhattan but in much of the northeastern United States, affecting an estimated population of 50 million people. The photos below were taken during my walk home from downtown Manhattan to the Park Slope district of Brooklyn, approximately 3.5 miles.

Broad Street in downtown Manhattan around 5:30 PM. Still hundreds of people coming out of their office buildings. Upon realizing the blackout isn't temporary, they start walking north to the Brooklyn Bridge and points beyond to get home. The subway trains are not running.

FDR highway on the east side of Manhattan. Logjam of cars going south to Brooklyn, very few going north.

Thousands upon thousands of people trudging back to their homes in Brooklyn, many of them soaked in sweat. At the bottom of the bridge, the police were passing out paper Dixie cups and had several pallets of 5-gallon water containers, which were quickly disappearing.

The pedestrian walkway on Brooklyn Bridge is completely bottlenecked so people are walking back to the start, climbing over the barrier that separates the road from the walkway and start walking towards Brooklyn between the standstill cars heading into Manhattan.	Brooklyn Bridge is completely taken over by pedestrians. No more cars are seen. On the Brooklyn side police cars and vans have finally blocked the car entrances.

I live in the Park Slope district of Brooklyn. Last night around 10:00 PM I could see lights on in parts of Manhattan and New Jersey. At 4:30 AM, after a restless night of sweating and sleeping, my power came back on.

As of 10:00 AM Reports from colleagues in Midtown are that he power is still out there and very few people are expected to go to work today.

Final Thought: New York City was flash-mobbed yesterday. The instructions were to "leave your office building between 4:10 and 4:20 PM and walk home. Await there for further instructions."

---------
More reports from New Yorkers:

» Grant Barrett has an excellent write-up and photos. And Part 2. (The shots above are the only ones I was able to take because my digital camera's battery died somewhere on Brooklyn Bridge. See links below for more photo galleries.)

» Paul Ford: As Brooklyn Slowly Drunkened.

» Zeldman: 29 Hours. "The whole world had left work and was wondering how it would get home and what was happening, anyway."

» Amy's scary account of being trapped on the Q train for two hours.

» Gabriel Hollombe was in the men's room taking a leak when the power went out.

» David Wertheimer also managed to blog by dial-up on the evening of the 14th. Old-skool!

» Careicthus played Monopoly by candlelight.

» lornagrl: The long walk home...

» Textamerica's moblie phone blog of the Great Blackout.

» My twin brother Damien walked home from Columbia University on West 168th Street in Manhattan to Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn, approximately 15 miles.

» Gina walked past Whoopi Goldberg talking on her cell phone. (How can Whoopi's cell phone work when everybody else's phones wouldn't? I was only able to get one call through the entire afternoon.)

» Gothamist: NYC Blackout Edition. (Great photos!)

» Jason Kottke's first-person report.

» TooMuchSexy: Electricity, Nectar of the Gods

» Metrocake: I'm hoooome....

» Mark Shewmaker: "The city had become a party."

» Chris notes that the Brooklyn Bridge was swaying six inches in the middle. (I noticed this too but chalked it up to possible heat-stroke. Glad to see I wasn't imagining things. It felt a litlte bit like being drunk but without the dullness of alcohol built in.)

» Uffish: What do you do when you're at a job interview and the power goes out?

» Patrick Nielsen Hayden: Chinese Food by Flashlight

» John Wehr's excellent photo gallery.

» Andrew Raff has some more photos.

» Cap'n Design has a photo gallery.

» Satan's Laundromat also has a great set of photos.

» Jesse Chan-Norris also has a photo gallery.

» Adam Fields has a large photo gallery.

» Robert Spychala's photo gallery.

» The Fray is collecting Blackout Stories. The first is "The Blackout" by Dori Mondon. Adding your own story is encouraged.

Linux File Server-to-MacOS X Client Troubleshooting

I've been trying to troubleshoot an issue with connecting to a Linux-based file server from my Powerbook G4 running MacOS X 10.2.6. The Linux server is running Samba (SMB).

Go » Connect to Server » smb://server.domain.com

...results in an error message of "An error has occurred (error = -5023)."

This happens even after OS X sees the SMB share mount and tries to connect to it. The server name successfully shows up in the list of computers available to connect to.

The research I've done results in a bunch of people getting this error when trying to connect to a Mac OS X server with Windows machines, but I've found nothing about trying to connect to a Linux server from MacOS X.

Got any ideas about how to solve this problem?

UPDATE: I double-checked the username/password in Samba's access control file and it matches. Additionally, I'm able to successfully connect to the share mount from a Windows PC running WinXP using this username/password.

Right now, I'm working on the assumption that SMB is misconfigured on the Linux file server thus preventing my Mac from connecting successfully. What I need is documentation regarding setting up a Linux file server running Samba so that MacOS X clients can share it.

Howard Dean Meetup

The last few weeks have been very busy. On top of a pile of freelance work, I accepted a contract job in lower Manhattan last week that has me back in the city every day. Additionally, I'm hard at work writing a business plan for a new company I'm forming, building the company web site and researching the potential revenue streams.

Tomorrow night I'll swing by the Dean Meetup in Manhattan (the one on Essex Street) to see how organized the grassroots campaign is. I like what Dean is doing and saying but I haven't declared a favorite candidate yet - I just know I will never support Bush. With over 300 people RSVP'd for that single Manhattan location (there are 3 locations), I wonder if it will resemble a Flash Mob. I wonder if the police will be called to handle crowd control - and if so, what their actions will be. The only thing that comes to mind is the planned war protest back in February that had the police restricting crowd movements (unconstitutionally?). That was political. This Meetup is political. How big does the crowd have to get before the police are called? And if they are called, who calls them? The Bush Meetup people?

If you'll be there, look for me in my CamWorld polo shirt and say "Hi".